The silent halls and empty classrooms tended by elderly priests at a former Greek Orthodox seminary on an island off the Istanbul coast belie the crucible the school has become in Muslim Turkey’s quest to join the European Union.

The EU has said re-opening Halki seminary, a centre of Orthodox scholarship for more than a century until Turkey closed it down in 1971, is crucial if Ankara is to prove a commitment to human rights and pluralism and advance its membership bid.

(Photo: Halki seminary classroom, 18 Sept 2006/Tom Heneghan)

The pro-Islamist government, despite introducing other sweeping reforms to bring Turkey closer to EU membership, has thus far refused to re-open the 165-year-old school located on a pretty wooded isle called Heybeliada in the Sea of Marmara.

Now, senior Turkish officials have signalled a change in the government’s stance. Last week, Culture Minister Ertugrul Günay said he believed the seminary would re-open. Deputy Prime Minister Egemen Bagis, the chief EU negotiator, told the Greek newspaper Kathimerini in late June that the seminary should be opened to meet the needs of the country’s non-Muslim citizens.

Then on Monday, after holding talks with Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill said he had received information the seminary would open. The renewed debate follows U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey in April, when he called on the government to re-open Halki to “send a important signal” that it upholds freedom of religion and expression.

The reports have cheered Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians. He told reporters on Saturday he believed the government was close to resolving the issue. For Bartholomew and the Greek Orthodox faithful, the school is key to the survival of their church in its historical seat of Constantinople, now Istanbul, a city of some 15 million mostly Muslim residents.

(Photo: Vice-abbot Dorotheos in the seminary library, 18 Sept 2006/Tom Heneghan)

The patriarchate is a vestige of the Greek Byzantine Empire’s 1,000-year reign from the banks of the Bosphorus Strait. Today, it has no means to train clergy, making it difficult to find a successor for Bartholomew, 69, himself a graduate of the school. Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a citizen of Turkey, but only about 2,500 ethnic Greeks remain in Istanbul, compared with some 125,000 a half-century ago.

Opponents of the seminary say it violates the secular constitution and reopening it would prompt radical Islamists to demand their own schools. All of Turkey’s Islamic theology faculties are located at strictly regulated state universities. Some Turks also fear it would legitimise Bartholomew’s ecumenical, or universal, title. Unlike most countries, Turkey doesn’t recognise that designation, arguing Bartholomew is only the head of the country’s tiny flock of Greek Orthodox.

Re-establishing a seminary would create an Orthodox “Vatican City” in Istanbul that could serve as a Fifth Column of Greece, the country’s historical foe, they argue. After all, Turkey closed Halki during a period of tension with Greece over Cyprus.

Constitutional scholars argue there’s little legal basis to keep the college closed, just a lack of political will, according to a May report from the Turkish think tank Tesev (see image at right)

The last serious attempt to re-open Halki was in 2006, when the secularist opposition blocked a government motion in parliament that would have allowed the seminary to operate.

“We have not lost hope, despite the broken promises, because a person only lives as long as he has hope. Even on his deathbed, he resists the end,” Metropolitan Apostolos Daniilidis, Halki’s abbot, said at the time from his office atop the Hill of Hope on Heybeliada.

And so each autumn, the priests of Halki sweep the halls and ready the classrooms for what they pray will be the imminent return of their first class of students in 38 years.

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How much fun — really — can you make of religion?  A U.S. marketer of board games may find out with ”Playing Gods” which it calls “the world’s first satirical board game of religious warfare.” It had its European premier this week at the London Toy Fair and will make a U.S. debut at the New York Toy Fair in February.

Ben Radford, head of the company that put the game together, said in a news release it is designed for two to five players who act as “gods” and …

“Try try to take over the world and make everyone on Earth worship him or her. As a god, you can try to convert other gods’ followers, promising them things like Afterlife, Prosperity, and Miracles. Or you can kill them off with plagues, locusts, earthquakes, floods, and other Acts of Gods.

“Watch out, though, because bad things can happen to good gods—one of your vicars is caught with a prostitute? Too bad, you lose a sect!

“Players can pit Christians against Muslims and Hindus against Jews, or be the mascot, a machine-gun-toting Buddha. Players may choose to be any god from Jesus to Moses, from Cthulu to Zeus, from the Cult of Oprah to the Almighty Dollar. (And yes, there is a Muslim figure.) Though the theme includes religious battles, it is really a satire with an underlying message of peace, encouraging people to think about the tragedy of killing others just because they have different beliefs.”

It costs about $40, and German, French, Spanish and Portuguese versions are available in preparation for the European launch. Information is available at http://www.PlayingGods.com. Radford says the gods seem to be smiling anyway — he’s selling about 10 games a day.

The Russian Orthodox Church election of a new patriarch next week is shaping up as a vote for or against Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad.  Already the acting head of the Church since the death of Patriarch Alexiy II last month, Kirill is the clear frontrunner and the man who other churches — especially the Roman Catholic Church — would like to see take the top post. Those two factors, though, could work against him when the Council of Bishops and the Local Council — the two bodies that conduct the election — meet.

(Photo: Metropolitan Kirill, 6 Jan 2009/Alexander Natruskin)

Dmitry Solovyov in our Moscow bureau has provided a rundown of the leading candidates in the election, which begins with the meeting of the Council of Bishops on Jan. 25-26, and a rundown of the leading candidates. The bishops will propose three candidates, who will then be voted on by the Local Council of 711 representatives of clergy and laity during its Jan. 27-29 session. The new patriarch will be installed on Feb. 1.

This will be the first patriarchal election since the end of the Soviet Union (the last one was in 1990, a year before communism collapsed there) and since the spectacular revival of the Russian Orthodox Church. One effect very visible abroad was the higher profile the Church has taken in ecumenical exchanges. Less visible to those outside Russia are the different currents in the Church, such as nationalists, anti-westerners, critics of ecumenism and others, who oppose that new openness and activism. If they can close ranks, they could block Kirill’s ascension.

“The vote will largely be for or against Kirill,” Antoine Nivière, editor of the Service orthodoxe de presse in Paris, told a meeting of religion journalists in the French capital this week. “If he cannot impose himself, a third man may emerge from among the older metropolitans with long experience.”

If Kirill is the candidate for a more modern and outward-looking Church, Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk is the conservative standard bearer. “Kliment is the candidate of the Russian state,” Jean-François Colossimo, a theologian at the Saint Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, told the same meeting. “Kliment gives the impression of being conservative and dependable. Kliment represents continuity in the tradition of an Russian Orthodox Church subservient to the state.”

(Photo: Funeral of Patriarch Alexiy II in Moscow, 9 Dec 2008/Sergei Karpukhin)

Colossimo’s conclusion was clear: “This is a critical choice. If the choice is between Kirill and Kliment, it’s about meeting these challenges or hibernating.

“Kirill is aware of these challenges,” he added, turning to ecumenical questions. “It will be good news for Rome to have a patriarch who knows there is a whole world out there… Rome focuses on Moscow. It’s more than half of the Orthodox world. They think, if they don’t have Moscow, they only have bits and pieces. The rest of the Orthodox world has great people, such as Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, and vibrant churches like Romania. But none of them have the numbers or the resources of the Moscow Patriarchate. So this election is decisive for the Orthodox world and decisive for Orthodox relations with the West. The personality of the next patriarch, the margins of manoeuvre he has, the way he deals with Orthodox liturgy or relations with the diaspora, the links he can make with the outside world and the way he deals with questions of order within the Church will determine how the Orthodox world deals with Rome and with the Protestants. It will determine the place of the Orthodox in interreligious relations and in the globalised world.“

The separistist movements at the heart of the Georgian crisis have split the Georgian Orthodox Church as well. As our correspondent Oliver Bullough reports from Abkhazia, the monks at the Novy Afon monastery have declared independence from the Georgian church and now work more closely with fellow Orthodox from Russia.

“Are we supposed to be Georgians? We have nothing in common with them,” Father Vissarion, the head of the rebel state’s church, told him.

Read the full feature here.

Recognising when religion plays a part in a military conflict can be a tricky business. Its role can easily be overemphasized, underplayed or misunderstood. Having covered several such conflicts myself, I was curious when I saw Ted Olsen’s post at Christianty Today about how John McCain stresses Georgia’s Christian heritage when talking about its conflict with Russia. When Russian forces rolled into Georgia in support of pro-Moscow separatists there,  McCain’s reaction statement noted that Georgia was “one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion.” In his televised discussion with leading evangelical pastor Rick Warren on Saturday, he said “the king of then Georgia in the third century converted to Christianity. You go to Georgia and you see these old churches that go back to the fourth and fifth century.”

History is fascinating but McCain’s use of it here begs the question whether there is an actual faith factor in this conflict or just in his presentation of it. Russia, after all, is also a traditionally Christian nation, but he made no mention of that. After the fall of communism there, the Russian Orthodox Church has resumed its traditional role there — as has the Georgian Orthodox Church in the Caucasian republic after state-sponsored atheism lost out there too. There are no obvious doctrinal disputes that divide them.

Church-to-church relations also seem reasonable. According to the Russian news agency Interfax, senior officials of the two churches spoke by telephone last week and “declared their common peacemaking position and readiness to cooperate in this field.” Patriarchs of both churches have called for a ceasefire and condemned the violence among fellow Christians. “Orthodox Christians are among those who have raised their hands against each other. Orthodox peoples called by the Lord to live in fraternity and love confront each other,” Russia’s Primate Alexiy II said. “What is most important (is that) we (are) united with Christian faith and must live peacefully without blood,” Georgian Catholicos Patriarch Ilia II said.

Since Orthodox churches are organised nationally, each side naturally reflects in some way its own country’s political view of the crisis. But even in his protest letter to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Ilia’s only reference to religion was his lament that Orthodox were killing each other.

Other religious authorities — Pope Benedict after an Angelus prayer and the World Council of Churches and Conference of European Churches in a joint statement — have also mentioned the two countries’ common Christian heritage in their calls for a ceasefire but not implied it played any role in the conflict.

On his Crunchy Con blog, Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher — a convert to Orthodoxy — branded McCain’s comments as “total and shameless pandering to Evangelicals. As if Russia isn’t a Christian nation. As if Russia hasn’t been Christian for over a thousand years. As if Christianity had anything to do with this conflict.”

Beliefnet editor-in-chief Steven Waldman saw McCain signalling three possible messages to evangelical voters: (1) I think having Christianity as an official religion is a fine idea in general, (2) This is just like the Cold War when the forces of Christianity are at war with the forces of Atheism or (3) I view the protection of Christians from attack worldwide as an important goal.”

What do you think? Does McCain’s selective mention of religion have any relevance to this conflict?

Blogging takes time, which I didn’t have on Friday after finishing an analysis for the Reuters wire about religion in Turkey posted here. I went to Istanbul to research several religion stories. The main impression I left with was that the prospect for religious policy changes raised by the “post- Islamist” AK Party government in recent years has mostly evaporated. The current political crisis that could end up banning the party and barring Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan from belonging to a political party means the end of any liberalisation. In fact, the steam went out of the reform drive a few years ago after Ankara got the green light to negotiate Turkish membership in the European Union.

Turkey has been a test case for what Islam experts call “post-Islamism,” a trend among Muslim political groups that have given up dreams of some kind of Islamic state in favour of more democracy and human rights that include greater religious freedom (here’s a useful summary of the concept). The idea that Islamists could turn into “Muslim democrats” (or “latte Islamists“!) without a hidden agenda to introduce Sharia law once in power met with considerable scepticism. But the Erdogan government, which promoted greater freedoms in Turkey as a means to join the European Union rather than to break down secularist controls on religion in the public sphere, seemed to be prove this view. His cautious approach seemed to reflect a long-term policy to make changes gradually. It’s too much to say this could be a “model” for other Muslim countries because there are too many aspects specific to Turkey and the limits its powerful secularist elite places on religion in the public sphere. But it could be an important test case for reconciling democracy and religious rights.

The political analysts I spoke to were unanimous in rejecting the idea that Erdogan’s AK Party had a long-term “hidden agenda” to “islamise” Turkey. The real goal of Erdogan’s policy was to establish his bloc of business interests from the more religious countryside as partners in the national power structure dominated by the secularist urban elite. Part of this process was to appeal to the religious sentiments of the masses, but religion was never the core of its program. They dropped this caution after their election victory in 2007 by pressing for an end to the ban on headscarves at universities — and paid the price by provoking the legal challenge to their legitimacy.

“They are the victims of their own limitations,” Ankara University sociologist Dogu Ergil told me. “They wanted a place in the power system and once they go it, they stopped… They have depleted their reformist arsenal. This is as far as they can go. This was the end of their liberalism and understanding of freedoms.”

Cengiz Aktar, a professor of European studies at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, said the process of loosening restrictions on religion was not over, but it was now on hold for what he called a “period of restoration” that would reassert control by the secularist elite. “It’s put on ice. It’s not at its end. They will freeze it for some time. This ‘Turkish best practice’ needs to be rethought during this period of restoration. They will have to come back with a new idea.”

Rusen Cakir, a journalist who has written extensively on faith and politics in Turkey, agreed that efforts to reconcile democracy and Islam would continue but they were not the central issue for Turkish politics. The real issue was political power in Turkey, where the large state role in the economy means “if you control the government, you can control lots of money,” he said. Fears of a “hidden agenda” were unfounded, he said, but the secularist parties used them to mobilise their urban middle class base. “It’s kind of a class struggle. Each side has its own ideological tool — secularism or religion.” Or as Ergil put it, “religion here is a political instrument used by both sides.”

In a country where 99 percent of the population is Muslim, the remaining one percent is not politically significant. But the government’s attitude towards the religious minorities is a good barometer of how it feels about religious liberty. During my stay, I spoke with Catholic and Orthodox churchmen who reported little progress and some backsliding on the question of religious freedom. Their impression was also that Ankara had lost interest in any liberalisation after it got the green light for EU accession talks.

“The minorities were a hot issues for a while, but in the past two years, there has been no movement at all,” said an official at the Istanbul headquarters of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of all Orthodox Christians. A Catholic churchman said senior Church officials traveled under guard “and that tells you something.”

“We have to be very careful,” he said. “Some newspapers talk as if there were thousands of (Christian) missionaries in Turkey. We Catholics don’t evangelise. The Orthodox don’t either. Only some Protestant groups do, but they have also become very careful.” Turkish nationalists whippped up the spectre of Christian missionaries trying to “destroy Turkish identity,” he said. “The nationalists are in retreat, and this is a kind of parting shot from them.”

That said, the Roman Catholic Church in Turkey is quite hopeful that the commemorative year for Saint Paul, who was born 2,000 years ago in Tarsus in today’s southern Turkey, will bring some small gestures of flexibility. The Church wants officials to allow a former church in Tarsus, now used as a museum, to be returned to its original state as a house of worship. The “Pauline Year” starting on June 29 would be the occasion to hand over the building to the Church for the use of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims expected there during the following 12 months. Local officials have been quite helpful with preparations for the visitors, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar for Anatolia, told me. But it’s still a big leap from being cooperative to actually handing over the church. Padovese is waiting for a final decision from the government.

In Tarsus, local business people clearly see the interest in the Pauline Year. The Tarsus Chamber of Commerce and Industry has set up the most interesting website about the commemoration that I’ve found. Among the gems are 360° panoramic views of the Tarsus church, both its interior and its exterior, the story of St. Paul’s life and a detailed account of his missionary travels.

After my quick initial post on this story, an American reader asked what greater religious freedom meant for the average Turk — a very difficult question that I tried to answer in the comments section here. A Turkish reader sent me an email calling my analysis “a piece of scrap,” saying that “latest developments in Turkey” were not a reform and disputing “that people were under pressure on religious matters during the pre-AKP period.” But he declined to elaborate his criticisms when I asked for more detail, so I can’t say more than that this sounds like a critique from a very secularist Turkish point of view, one I do not agree with.

I notice from other blogs that the idea of “post-Islamism” is either new or dubious to many readers out there. What do you think about the idea that “Muslim democrats” are working to reconcile Islam and modern political systems?

I’m in Istanbul this week for a few stories. The first one, about how Turkey’s political crisis has put a trend towards a more liberal stand on religious freedom on hold, has just run on the Reuters wire (click here for full text).

I’ll get back to this issue in a later post.

In the meantime, feel free to post questions in the comments box and I’ll try to answer them.

The gloves are off in the election campaign for a new primate of the Greek Orthodox Church following the death of Archbishop Christodoulos last week. At least four metropolitan bishops are openly vying for the powerful Greek Church’s top post, some of them making their intentions known literally minutes after Christodoulos was buried last Thursday. The election is set for Feb. 7 and mud-slinging and accusations of blackmail are on the daily agenda.

A total of 78 members of the Holy Synod, the majority of whom were appointed by the late Archbishop Serafim (died 1998), are entitled to vote. Metropolitan Bishop Chrisostomos from the Peloponnese said in an open letter at the weekend he was a victim of “blackmail and mud-throwing” from supporters of Efstathios, Metropolitan Bishop of Sparta. Efstathios, one of two front-runners in the race, said: “I cannot believe any one of my supporters could be involved in something like that.”

What is at stake is the powerful influence of the Church over about 95 percent of Orthodox Greeks among the 10 million population, the Church’s extensive financial interests including major real estate developments and a mending of ties with the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. The Church of Greece’s relations with the spiritual head of the world’s Orthodox Christians were damaged to the brink of collapse during Christodoulos’s tenure. While Christodoulos deftly used the media to raise his own profile, this exposure turned some supporters away in the later years of his 10-year reign. Critics said he used the media to interfere in government policy-making, accuse homosexuals of having a “handicap,” call Turks “barbarians” and attack the patriarchate. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, an ethnic Greek from Turkey, runs a tiny Orthodox community in what was once the Byzantine capital of Constantinople and needs outside support for his delicate balancing act with the Turkish government.

Many Greek Orthodox say it is time for the Church to move away from such a public profile and revert to its strictly religious role, minimising the loss of supporters. Efstathios and Metropolitan Bishop of Thebes Hieronymos are the two front-runners. Hieronymos had repeatedly clashed with Christodoulos and refused to back the Church in crucial large rallies to oppose the then Socialist government’s plans to remove a reference to religion from EU-approved IDs. He is considered a more progressive choice than Efstathios, a strict follower of religious protocol and an aide to the late archbishop. Efstathios was also in charge of the Church’s finances for the past six years.

The two other candidates seem to have weaker support from members of the Holy Synod. One is Anthimos, the Metropolitan Bishop of Thessaloniki, who is known for his fiery comments regarding Greek ethnicity and the alleged threat to its national identity from Balkan neighbours. The other is Ignatios, Metropolitan Bishop of Dimitriada, who is seen as the candidate most like Christodoulos.

The Roman Catholic Church statement about evangelisation last Friday was one of those classic Vatican documents that are short on news but long on content. We covered it in a news story from Vatican City, but it was not top news that day (”Christians should spread the faith” is not exactly a new message). The document also avoided the blunt tone that sometimes comes out of the Vatican — an angle journalists were watching out for — and dealt with a sensitive issue “softly, softly,” as one theologian put it.

The impact of this document should unfold slowly in the context of the Vatican’s relations with Orthodox churches and with Muslims. It proclaims a duty to spread the Gospel without respect to geographical boundaries. That sounds like a rebuff to the Russian Orthodox argument that Rome should not seek or accept converts in traditionally Orthodox countries. It’s also a challenge to Muslim countries that forbid conversion, to the point of declaring apostasy — i.e. leaving Islam — a crime worthy of the death penalty. Since the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) says it issued the text because of “a certain confusion about whether Catholics should give testimony about their faith in Christ,” this document amounts to a practical guide for dealing with these situations. That’s not news now, but it can well become news at some point ahead if this leads to tensions.

Relations with the Russian Orthodox are sensitive and difficult to read. Metropolitan Kirill, the “foreign minister” of the Russian Church, met Pope Benedict on December 7 and said the session was proof of improving ties. A quick look at the Interfax Religion service seems to hint at a more critical view in Moscow. Kirill seems to take a tougher line back home. The Moscow Patriarchate is also concerned that Opus Dei, which just opened an office in the Russian capital, might proselytise in Russia.

Another question is whether this means the Catholic Church will become more active in its missionary work. The Church is already facing competition from evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries who are winning converts in developing countries, especially in traditionally Catholic countries in Latin America. In Muslim countries like Iraq , it says assertive evangelical missionaries arriving in recent years have upset a long-standing balance the Christian minority had found with the majority population.

Do you think the Catholic Church is right to claim a right and duty to convert people everywhere? Will it become more assertive about it now?

You’ve probably seen on TV how reporters swarm around leaders coming out of closed-door meetings and the politicians step up to deliver their soundbites for the cameras. The Vatican held a big closed-door meeting on Friday and a wave of cardinals — the “princes of the Church” who rank among the most prominent leaders of Roman Catholicism — emerged at their lunch break to find a pack of journalists eager to pounce on them with questions. I’m in Rome for a few days and was out there waiting for them in a parking lot between St. Peter’s Basilica and the Pope Paul VI Hall where they were meeting. The scene was quite different from those “normal” media scrums.

The session was a rare meeting of cardinals from around the world who are here at the Vatican for a ceremony on Saturday when 23 men “get their red hats,” i.e. join the College of Cardinals whose members under 80 years old elect the next pope. They were discussing the Catholic Church’s sensitive relations with other Christians — Orthodox they want to get closer to, Anglicans who are drifting further away, Protestants who are increasingly divided and Pentecostals who are encroaching on their flocks. These sessions presided over by Pope Benedict are supposed to remain confidential. So the men who emerged from the meeting looked and acted like anything but a bunch of politicians hoping to make it on to the evening news.

Some strode past the waiting journalists flashing half a smile and a quarter of a wave. Others found polite variations of the old “no comment”, like one who offered the (weak) joke: “If anything important had happened, you reporters would know it already.” Another walked straight up to a reporter from his home town, said he knew there was no way he could leave without talking to him, and then confessed with a smile: “But actually, I have nothing to say.”

Time passed and more silent cardinals glided by. There were dozens and dozens of them, all identically dressed in black robes with bright red buttons, sashes and skullcaps. One tall one sported a dashing cape. A shy one was nearly hidden under a kind of wide- brimmed hat that nobody outside Vatican City has worn in at least a century or three. We heard bits of talk in Polish and another language we couldn’t identify. When a gust of wind blew the skullcap off one cardinal, he cried “Halleluja!” and went scampering after it. I dutifully noted this down, not knowing if I’d get any other quotes for the day’s story.

Journalists scoured the crowd hoping to spot a familiar chatterbox. One slipped into a waiting car before any of us could reach him. The news spread quickly about the one who got away. Others just didn’t seem to be there. If the reporter was a devout Catholic, this was the time to start praying for news.

Finally, Cardinal Walter Kasper appeared and the pack converged around him. Kaspar is head of the Vatican department dealing with other Christians and had just delivered a speech on that issue, so he could speak with authority. As for confidentiality, well, we were only asking him to quote himself. Being the friendly, open man that he is, Kasper was sure to say something.

As the cardinal spoke, another ritual of Vatican reporting unfolded. The first journalist to buttonhole him started out in Kasper’s native German and he responded. But as soon as more journalists crowded around, Kasper switched to English, assuming that was the language all would understand. He outlined his speech in English, chuckling when he had to ask for a translation of an Italian term he had used in his speech. Once he got his message out in English, he fielded questions from radio and TV correspondents in French, Italian and then German again.

Speaking Italian is almost a prerequisite for the job as cardinal — this is, after all, the Roman Catholic Church. Most official documents and a lot of unofficial schmoozing among cardinals (such as before a papal election) goes on in the language of Dante. Many of them picked it up during graduate studies in Rome or an earlier stint working in the Vatican bureaucracy. Some of them, including Pope Benedict, can switch effortlessly among four or five tongues.

As for his comments, Kasper added one more piece to the puzzle about how Catholics and Orthodox Christians can work more closely in future. The Orthodox agreed in Ravenna last month — for the first time — to recognise that the Church was universal and the Bishop of Rome, i.e. the pope, is the highest-ranking figure in it. According to the hierarchy of the ancient Church, the patriarch of Constantinople (Istanbul) is the second-highest. This is causing problems for the Russian Orthodox Church, which accounts for more than half the world’s 220 million Orthodox Christians and has become more active on the Christian world scene since communism collapsed in its homeland. The Patriarchate of Moscow and All Russia cannot see why it should be ranked behind the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has only a few thousand members in its church in Turkey. The Moscow Patriarchate was centuries away from its founding when the ancient Church ranked the five top patriarchates. If the agreement about the pope being the highest-ranking figure means that the Ecumenical Patriarch is automatically the second-highest, Moscow is likely to say nyet.

This is where Kasper made an interesting comment. There wasn’t enough space in the news story for the whole comment, but here it is in full: “Of course we cannot restore the system of the five patriachates of the ancient Church. We have to take seriously the Russian Orthodox Church. But what Ravenna said was that there is a universal level of the Church. That’s the first time they’ve said this. There are not only regional churches and patriarchates, but the Church on the universal level. And if one church is not in full communion on the universal level, the Church is wounded … Then Ravenna says that also, on the universal level, there is need (for) a protos , a primate, and according to the old taxis of the ancient Church, this can only be the Bishop of Rome. There is no other candidate. They recognise this. We did not say what the perogatives are, what we can and can’t do. That will be the issue of the dialogue. This is a very important step we have reached, but the way is still long.”

Hmmm. No mention of any number two slot here. Are they hoping to solve the Moscow-Istanbul rivalry by declaring that the standard by which any “victory” would be measured no longer applies in the modern world? I hestitate to write “watch this space” because progress on this will probably take years — if it comes at all. However, something’s moving there and a deal, if ever reached, could make Church history. I’ll tell you all about it if I don’t retire in the meantime.

Kasper’s comments on the Anglicans, Pentecostals and Protestants in general are in the main story.

After all this, let me ask if reporting about the Vatican confuses you. An institution like the Roman Catholic Church has so many traditions and quirks that it can take ages to get a good grasp of its complex ways. The Vatican is not undeciferible. Send in your questions and our Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella and I will do our best to answer.