Crux

Pope Leo XIV spoke to leaders of Christianity’s divided Churches and communities on Friday afternoon in Nicaea – modern-day Iznik, Turkey – telling them, “We must strongly reject the use of religion for justifying war, violence, or any form of fundamentalism or fanaticism.”

No one from the Patriarchate of Moscow was there to hear it.

That was because, “The Catholics have invited Catholics, and the Orthodox invite[d] Orthodox,” as the head of the Vatican’s ecumenical dicastery, Cardinal Kurt Koch, told Crux on Friday.

“I respect the decision of the Orthodox,” Koch said.

The absence of representatives from the Russian Orthodox Church was nevertheless conspicuous, and a sign of the persistent chill both in the internal relations of the great Churches of global Orthodoxy and in relations between Rome and Moscow.

The chill came after long-simmering tensions between the Patriarchates of Moscow and Constantinople came to a boil in 2018, when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople granted self-governing status to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine certainly did not help matters – whether Constantinople-Moscow relations or Rome-Moscow relations – while the hapless roll-out of Fiducia supplicans, with its daring take on the possibility of blessing persons in irregular unions including same-sex relationships, saw Moscow freeze efforts to arrange a second meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill after their historic 2016 meeting in Havana.

That’s a quick-and-tidy rehearsal of some very intricate and very messy business. It all points to Christianity’s perduring geopolitical importance. The sociological realities of Christianity in the present day, however, are almost a photonegative of what they were at the close of the first quarter of the 4^th, at least in the areas that first received the Gospel.

Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Turkey was historic for a host of reasons, chief among them its occasion: The 1700th anniversary of the watershed First Council of Nicaea in the year 325, famous for its production of the first systematic statement of common Christian faith in response to the Arian heresy (and less well-known for its resolution of another significant controversy in the early Church, the date of Easter).

In 325, it had been legal to practice Christianity in the Roman Empire for only a dozen years. Even so, the Arian controversy – so-called because it was occasioned by the popularity of a North African priest-theologian called Arius, who taught that the Son was created and therefore not fully divine – had spread throughout the Empire and threatened imperial peace as well as ecclesiastical unity.

In fact, it was the Roman emperor, Constantine, who summoned the bishops of the whole world to Nicaea – essentially a resort town southeast of the emperor’s new eastern capital, so they could settle the matter before it sundered not only the Church but the peace of his empire.

Christianity, in other words, was already “big” enough to cause the world’s most powerful empire serious grief, even without significant institutional clout.

Constantine’s chief concern was with quietude and order, and to that end he propended for a muddling compromise: Just say the Father and the Son are “similar in being” – homoiousios in Greek – and leave the uncertainty over just how similar they were to theological opinion. Churchmen, however, understood the importance of settling – and saying clearly – what the Christian faith is.

That is how we got “of the same being” or “consubstantial” – homoousios in Greek – in the Creed.

It is also, incidentally, the origin of the expression, “[I will not change it] by one iota,” since the difference between homoiousios and homoousios is, in orthographic terms, precisely one iota (the Greek letter i).

Unity and credibility were functions of one another, in other words, as was the independence of the bishops in their exercise of teaching authority.

A great deal of water has passed under the bridge in the 17 centuries since the First Council of Nicaea, and one of the lessons may well be that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Today, the Moscow patriarchate may stand at the head of what is nominally the largest Orthodox Church, but the number of practicing Russian Orthodox within Russia is miniscule even by comparison with dwindling numbers in traditionally Catholic areas of western Europe, and the institutional Russian Church is as much a wing of Vladimir Putin’s presidential palace as it was under the Czars.

“A Patriarch can’t lower himself to become Putin’s altar boy,” Leo’s predecessor, Francis, said of Kirill in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della sera in 2022, after Kirill made Francis sit through a 20-minute rehearsal of Kremlin talking points purporting to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Francis, however, also made statements – in the Corriere interview and elsewhere – taken by observers as sympathetic to Russia’s purported reasons for invading their neighbor.

“I have no way of telling whether [Putin’s] rage has been provoked,” Francis also said in his 2022 Corriere interview, but wondered – aloud and on the record – whether it wasn’t owing at least in part to “NATO barking at Russia’s door,” and said he suspected “it was maybe facilitated by the West’s attitude.”

Nearly two years later, in an interview recorded in February and aired in March of 2024, with Russia advancing, Francis told Swiss broadcaster RSI he thought Ukraine should “have the courage of the white flag.”

Those sympathetic statements did not offset the damage to Rome-Moscow relations done by the “altar boy” quip, while Ukrainians including the leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv, did not appreciate Francis’s sympathy for Russia’s invasion rationale.

Pope Leo XIV appears almost instinctively to understand this. He has spoken generally of nations’ and peoples’ right to self-defense. On November 16 – in the wake of Russian attacks on the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv – Leo called for a “just and stable peace for the martyred Ukraine.”

En route to Lebanon from Turkey on Sunday, as a high-level Ukrainian delegation was slated to meet with US officials in Florida to continue discussions of a much-controverted peace proposal from US president Donald Trump, Leo said, “Unfortunately, we’ve not yet seen a solution, but today there are concrete proposals for peace.”

“[W]e hope that President Erdogan, with his relationship with the presidents of Ukraine, Russia and the United States, can help in this sense to promote dialogue, a ceasefire,” Leo said, “and see how to resolve this conflict, this war in Ukraine.”

Peace and unity are the core themes of the new Leonine era. Really, they are a single, twofold theme. Leo has not only been vocal in his calls for both, he has articulated how they are functions of one another. It is important to remember, however, that we are still learning the grammar and syntax of peace-and-unity in the Leonine era.

The case of Leo’s approach to Russia and the Russian Orthodox may well be a case-in-point.

He has not gone out of his way to include the Moscow patriarchate, nor has he courted Russian political leadership. He has turned away from Russia, however quietly, mostly by respecting intra-Orthodox space and refusing to chase Russian secular power. This may be one of the most significant – and underreported – turns of his still-young pontificate.

Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri