Public Rift Pains Greek Church

Chicago Tribune - December 6, 1998

By Steve Kloehn, Tribune Religion Writer

A year ago at Navy Pier, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople stood side by side with the hierarchs of the Greek Orthodox Church in the United States, their crowns and robes reflecting the ancient traditions of Eastern Christianity.

For 12,000 worshipers who knelt before them on the pier's concrete floor, and tens of thousands more who caught a glimpse of the pageantry on television, these churchmen stood at the head of a parade that stretched back, unbroken, over two millennia.

But the history of the church also features 2,000 years of fallible humanity underneath those bejeweled crowns. And today, in the Greek Orthodox church in America, age-old disputes over personality and power are mixing with distinctly modern assumptions about democracy and the instantaneous catalyst of the Internet. The result is a volatile reaction that is rattling the church to its highest levels.

That was kept offstage when the patriarch visited Chicago last fall. To the degree that it acknowledged them at all, the church dismissed its controversies as familial matters, the squabbles of intemperate children and eccentric uncles.

This fall, however, rising tensions over church authority have erupted in a series of embarrassingly public confrontations, from here to Constantinople. In the thick of it are Chicago's usually reticent bishop and several factions of prominent Chicago laypeople. And even the church's public relations machinery has begun to acknowledge that it is more than a few fringe players acting up.

"Is this a decisive time for the church in America? Absolutely. It's a critical time in the church. It's a decisive time for Orthodox identity," said Rev. Mark Arey, spokesman in New York for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

In September, Archbishop Spyridon, the ranking hierarch in the United States, sued a well-heeled group of church dissidents over the use of a church mailing list.

In October, local bishops sparred with Spyridon by fax, accusing him of violating church law, in an exchange that quickly leaked onto the Internet.

In late November, a group of 100 priests signed another Internet letter obliquely criticizing Spyridon, while just last week, a different group of 75 priests signed a letter backing the archbishop in a subsequent lawsuit.

Delegations from America have taken the dispute to the church's highest authority, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, on at least two occasions, most recently when a group of lay leaders loyal to Spyridon shuttled to Turkey to bring the patriarch up to date.

The struggles have focused on the personality of Spyridon, the sometimes-imperious archbishop appointed by Bartholomew two years ago, and a more fundamental question of how church authority should be exercised in what is still--in church time--the new territory of the United States.

From unaligned parish priests to hierarchs, all insist that the controversies have had a negligible effect on people in the pews and the church's central function of worship.

"If you read the (Greek-language) newspapers, you have a crisis," said Metropolitan Iakovos, bishop of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Chicago. "If you go to the church and you see the people venerating the icons and receiving the Eucharist . . . everything is bright."

But when addressing one another, the rhetoric of those involved takes on more drama.
"`We are losing the Church!' His All Holiness cried out during our recent meeting at the Phanar," Iakovos and his four fellow metropolitans in the United States wrote to Spyridon, quoting the remarks Bartholomew made when the American hierarchs visited him in Constantinople in September. "The agony of His All Holiness concerns us greatly and becomes our personal agony.

"After many unfruitful attempts to come to an understanding with Your Eminence, your brother bishops decided to sound the alarm."

Spyridon has declined to give interviews to the secular press on any of the controversies. But his spokesman suggested that the letter of the metropolitans is part of the normal--and normally private--give-and-take of church life.

"The content is not extraordinary, but the fact that the dialogue was taken into the public sphere was extraordinary," Arey said. "Maybe it's good that this has come to a head, so that we can get some definition."

What brought it to a head was the lawsuit filed in the name of the archdiocese against the unofficial lay organization Greek Orthodox American Leaders.

GOAL, which counts among its members some of the church's wealthier donors on the East Coast and in Chicago, has been critical of Spyridon's style almost from the day he was appointed in 1996. The group has railed against the archbishop's decision to fire several priests at the nation's only Greek Orthodox seminary, in Brookline, Mass.; the reassignment of other priests; and the reduced role of laypeople in the management of the archdiocese.

This spring, 400 GOAL members met in Chicago to call for Spyridon's ouster, which they followed with a mailing to 122,000 church members. That was done, the archdiocese alleges, with an illegally obtained mailing list that belongs to the church.

On Sept. 11, without officially consulting his bishops or the official lay body known as the Archdiocesan Council, Spyridon filed a civil suit against GOAL, demanding that the group return its list.

Whatever clergy and bishops had said about their archbishop in private, public dissent previously been limited to GOAL and other small factions of laypeople. But with the lawsuit, emotions began to boil.

"No Retaliations! No Litigations!" began a short message faxed to the archbishop by the five metropolitans, with the name of Iakovos of Chicago, the most senior diocesan bishop in America, at the top of the list.

Spyridon fired back a fax demanding to know whether the metropolitans stood by their letter. They responded the next day with a letter that chided Spyridon for suing GOAL without consulting them first.

Iakovos said in an interview this week that the metropolitans' letter, including the quotation of Bartholomew, is really just a rallying cry for unity and cooperation in the church.

"We are not against anyone, we just say, `Let us not have lawsuits,' " the metropolitan said. "We must cultivate better relationships. But the problems will never all go away, because we are humans, with egos and different philosophies."

The metropolitans' letter was followed by a letter posted on the Internet that bears the names of more than 100 priests from across the country, including five from greater Chicago.

The letter identifies a "spiritual crisis" that threatens the unity of the church, blaming it on "autocratic and abusive treatment of people of all ranks" and "authoritarianism, intimidation and refusal of responsible discussion." The letter does not name Spyridon, but introduces itself as supporting the metropolitans.

The archbishop's loyalists point out that, if 100 signed the letter, at least 550 priests did not sign it.

Rev. Chris Kerhulas, pastor of St. Basil Greek Orthodox Church in Chicago and president of the official archdiocesan priests' council, said that he, like most priests, does not identify with either of the Internet letters.

"Whether I agree or not is irrelevant because I am loyal to Metropolitan Iakovos, just as I am loyal to Archbishop Spyridon. They are my spiritual fathers," Kerhulas said. "I'm trying to keep priests from having to choose sides."

As for parishioners, he said, "the further you get away from the Hudson River, the less people care. I don't think 20 percent of our people in Chicago even know about this."

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