Bartholomew I of Constantinople (1940-)

From Imbros to the Phanar: the making of a patriarch

Bartholomew was born Dimítrios Arkhontónis on 29 February 1940 in a village on the island of Imbros (Gökçeada), in the Aegean Sea, then populated by a Greek Orthodox majority under Turkish sovereignty^[1][2]. The son of a coffeehouse owner and barber, he grew up in the twilight world of Asia Minor Hellenism, gradually emptied of its Christians by population exchanges, the Istanbul pogrom of 1955 and emigration.

A brilliant student, he attended the Zographeion Lyceum in Istanbul and in 1958 entered the Halki Theological School (Chalki), the great seminary of the patriarchate, graduating in 1961 with the highest honors^[3]. Ordained a deacon that same year under the monastic name Bartholomew, he completed his military service as an officer in the Turkish army (1961-1963), then went to the West for further studies: postgraduate work in Rome — at the Pontifical Oriental Institute — at the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey in Switzerland and at the University of Munich, crowned by a doctorate in canon law^[4][5]. This detail is not incidental: the future patriarch was formed, in part, in the academic institutions of the Catholic Church, which he knows from within.

Ordained priest in 1969, he became a collaborator of Patriarch Dimitrios I, directed the patriarchal office, then was elected Metropolitan of Philadelphia in 1973 and Metropolitan of Chalcedon in 1990^[6]. After Dimitrios died, on 22 October 1991, the Holy Synod elected him Ecumenical Patriarch; he was enthroned on 2 November 1991^[7][8]. He would become the longest-reigning Ecumenical Patriarch in history.

"New Rome" reduced to a district of Istanbul

To understand Bartholomew, one must grasp the contrast between the grandeur of his title and the smallness of his means. From the fourth to the fifteenth century, the see of Constantinople was the center of Eastern Christianity. The Second Ecumenical Council (381) gave it the place of honor immediately after Rome, "because Constantinople is New Rome"^[9]. After the schism of 1054 and especially after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the patriarch became, under Ottoman and then Turkish domination, the head of an ever smaller community.

Today, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has only a few thousand faithful in Turkey itself, concentrated in the Phanar (Fener) district on the Golden Horn, around the cathedral of Saint George. Its spiritual authority, however, reaches far beyond that: it exercises direct jurisdiction over Greek dioceses in the diaspora (America, Western Europe, Australia), over Mount Athos, Crete and several Churches. This disproportion — a worldwide radiance carried by a depleted local community — gives his office its character, both heroic and fragile.

Halki, the closed seminary

Nothing expresses the patriarchate's fragility better than Halki. The theological school where Bartholomew was formed was closed by the Turkish authorities in 1971, following a law nationalizing private higher education which the patriarchate refused to apply on those terms^[10]. For half a century, the Orthodox Church of Constantinople has been unable to train its priests on its own soil: candidates must be formed abroad, which threatens the very survival of the patriarchate, since Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a Turkish citizen.

The reopening of Halki has become an international symbol of religious freedom, requested by the United States, the European Parliament and many religious leaders. Turkey, moreover, recognizes the patriarch only as head of the small local Greek Orthodox minority: in 2007, its Court of Cassation explicitly contested Bartholomew's right to call himself "ecumenical"^[11][12]. The patriarch therefore exercises his worldwide office without legal recognition of its universal dimension, under permanent pressure.

This institutional poverty has never prevented Bartholomew from presenting the fidelity of his Church as a spiritual witness in itself: a community reduced to almost nothing, yet refusing to disappear, at the heart of a world that most often ignores it^[13].

"First among equals"

Bartholomew's title can be misunderstood. In Orthodox vocabulary, "ecumenical" does not mean that he governs all Orthodox Christians as the pope governs Catholics. It denotes a primacy of honor: Bartholomew is first among Orthodox bishops in dignity and precedence, the one who presides over pan-Orthodox meetings, convokes great assemblies and speaks for the whole in external relations — but without direct jurisdiction over the other autocephalous Churches (Moscow, Bucharest, Belgrade, Athens, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and so on), which govern themselves^[14].

The classic formula is "first among equals" (primus inter pares). It expresses the heart of Orthodox ecclesiology: a communion of sister Churches united by the same faith, the same sacraments and the same councils, but without a universal head endowed with governing authority. Primacy exists, but it is honorary and diaconal, not monarchical.

A title contested by Turkey and by Moscow

Bartholomew's singularity is that his title is contested on two opposite fronts. Turkey denies it any universal scope and sees in him only the head of a local minority. But within Orthodoxy itself, the Patriarchate of Moscow — by far the most numerous, with the great majority of the world's Orthodox — increasingly contests Constantinople's pre-eminence.

Where Bartholomew claims for his see an active primacy — the right to convoke, arbitrate and grant autocephaly — Moscow tends to reduce that primacy to mere protocol without real power. This disagreement is not procedural only: it touches the very nature of Orthodox unity. Who, within Orthodoxy, can decide in the last resort when Churches divide? The classical Orthodox answer — "an ecumenical council" — runs into the fact that no council recognized as ecumenical has been able to take place since the Second Council of Nicaea (787).

The contrast with Roman primacy

Here the Catholic reader touches the heart of the debate. The Catholic Church holds that Christ willed, for his Church, a visible and permanent principle of unity: the ministry of Peter and his successors, the bishop of Rome. This is not arbitrary domination, but a service of communion capable, in times of crisis, of confirming the brethren in the faith (Lk 22:32) and maintaining unity.

Orthodoxy precisely refused this principle, in favor of a communion without a juridical center. The result, before our eyes, is that Bartholomew exercises a real but always disputed primacy, unable to impose itself when a great autocephalous Church decides to break communion. Catholicism draws from this no reason to despise Orthodoxy — whose dogmatic fidelity and liturgical depth it admires — but it reads there the confirmation of an ancient intuition: without Peter, communion tends to fragment. The Ukrainian crisis, as we shall see, has offered the clearest demonstration.

The legacy of Athenagoras and Paul VI

Bartholomew is the direct heir of a historic turning point. On 7 December 1965, the eve of the close of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, by a solemn common declaration, lifted the anathemas which Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius had exchanged in 1054^[15]. This gesture did not restore communion, but it erased a symbol of rupture and reopened the path of theological dialogue.

"[The two Churches] regret the offensive words, the reproaches without foundation, and the reprehensible gestures which, on both sides, marked or accompanied the sad events of that period." — Common Declaration of Paul VI and Athenagoras I, 7 December 1965^[16]

Since then, Rome and Constantinople have exchanged delegations every year for their patronal feasts: Catholics to the Phanar for Saint Andrew (30 November), patron of Constantinople; Orthodox to Rome for Saints Peter and Paul (29 June). Bartholomew inherited and cultivated this diplomacy of fraternity.

John Paul II and Benedict XVI

Under John Paul II, gestures multiplied. In November 2004, the pope returned to the patriarchate the relics of Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Gregory Nazianzen, carried to Rome centuries earlier — a much-noted act of reparation^[17]. In November 2006, Benedict XVI went to the Phanar, prayed with Bartholomew during the divine liturgy of Saint Andrew and signed a common declaration on the journey toward unity^[18]. As a first-rate theologian, Benedict XVI found in Bartholomew an interlocutor of similar intellectual seriousness.

A friendship with Pope Francis

With Francis, the relationship became almost personal. On 19 March 2013, Bartholomew attended the inaugural Mass of Francis' pontificate — the first time since the schism of 1054 that a patriarch of Constantinople took part in the enthronement of a bishop of Rome^[19][20]. The gesture was charged with meaning: it placed the relationship in a new proximity.

Then came emblematic meetings: the common pilgrimage to Jerusalem in May 2014, for the fiftieth anniversary of the meeting between Paul VI and Athenagoras; Francis' visit to the Phanar in November 2014; and above all, in April 2016, the joint visit to refugees on the island of Lesbos, where pope and patriarch together defended the cause of migrants^[21]. In June 2019, Francis offered the patriarchate a reliquary containing nine bone fragments attributed to Saint Peter^[22].

The common declarations signed across these meetings express both hope and lucidity: they recognize that full communion has not yet been attained, while affirming the common will to "walk together" toward it.

Leo XIV and the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea (2025)

The rapprochement continued with Leo XIV. In November 2025, for the 1700th anniversary of the first Council of Nicaea (325), the pope traveled to Turkey and, with Bartholomew, prayed on the archaeological site of Iznik (ancient Nicaea), by the lake where the conciliar Fathers condemned the heresy of Arius and forged the Creed which Catholics and Orthodox still recite^[23]. On 29 November, the two men signed a new common declaration calling Christians to overcome "the scandal of the divisions"^[24].

"We are all invited to overcome the scandal of the divisions that unfortunately still exist, and to nurture the desire for the unity for which the Lord Jesus prayed and gave his life." — Leo XIV, commemoration of Nicaea, Iznik, 28 November 2025^[25]

The choice of Nicaea was not accidental: it is the first ecumenical council, held before any division between East and West, the common root from which Catholics and Orthodox draw their profession of faith. To return there together is to return to the source of lost unity.

"A crime against Creation is a sin"

Bartholomew owes his worldwide fame, as much as to ecumenism, to his commitment to the environment, which earned him the nickname "Green Patriarch". As early as 1997, at a symposium in Santa Barbara, California, he was the first major religious leader to call the destruction of nature a sin:

"To commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation; for humans to degrade the integrity of the Earth by causing changes in its climate; for humans to contaminate the Earth's waters, its land, its air, and its life with poisonous substances — these are sins." — Bartholomew I, Santa Barbara symposium, 8 November 1997^[26]

This statement, radically new in 1997, set a pattern. For Bartholomew, the ecological crisis is not first technical but spiritual: it proceeds from greed (pleonexia) and from an idolatrous relation to matter, contrary to man's vocation to be priest of Creation, offering the world to God in thanksgiving (eucharistia). He multiplied floating symposia on threatened rivers and seas and received numerous international distinctions for this work.

From Laudato Si' to the Day of Prayer for Creation

This witness met, on the Catholic side, Pope Francis' sensitivity. In 2015, the encyclical Laudato Si' explicitly quoted Bartholomew — the first time an Orthodox patriarch was cited in a papal encyclical — taking up his call to recognize our part, "small or great, in the disfigurement and destruction of creation"^[27]. Francis also instituted for the Catholic Church the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation on 1 September, a day already adopted by the Orthodox patriarchate since 1989: a rare example of a liturgical practice adopted by Rome from Constantinople.

What a Catholic can receive, what he must discern

In substance, Catholic doctrine largely joins Bartholomew: Creation is a gift of God (Gen 1), entrusted to man not to ravage but to cultivate and keep (Gen 2:15); to damage it through greed is truly a moral disorder. The Catechism speaks of respect for the integrity of Creation (nos. 2415-2418). There is therefore an authentic common ground here, not a fashion.

Catholic discernment concerns only the possible deviations of any ecological discourse: one must not slide into a pantheism that divinizes nature, nor into a "deep ecology" that places man and animal on the same level, nor make the planet an idol that eclipses God and the salvation of souls. Bartholomew himself, rooted in the theology of the Fathers, escapes these errors: his "cosmic theology" remains ordered to God the Creator and to man as priest of Creation. It is that version — Christocentric, not idolatrous — which Catholics can receive fruitfully.

The rupture with Moscow

Moscow's reaction to Constantinople's autumn 2018 decisions on Ukraine was immediate and severe: as early as 15 October 2018, the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow, meeting in Minsk, broke Eucharistic communion with Constantinople — even before the tomos —, refusing to recognize Bartholomew's right to intervene in what it considers its "canonical territory"^[28]. The largest Orthodox Church in the world therefore ceased to concelebrate with the first by honor. The Orthodox world found itself divided: some Churches recognized the new Ukrainian Church, others did not.

The tomos of 2019

The great act, and the great trial, of Bartholomew's patriarchate was the Ukrainian question. For centuries, Ukrainian Orthodoxy had canonically depended on Moscow. After Ukrainian independence (1991) and especially after Russian aggression in 2014, a large part of Ukrainian Orthodoxy requested an autocephalous Church, independent of Moscow. Invoking Constantinople's historical prerogative to grant autocephaly, Bartholomew decided in their favor: on 15 December 2018, a unification council meeting in Kyiv founded the autonomous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and on 5 January 2019 he delivered to it the tomos of autocephaly^[29].

"The tomos of autocephaly was an act of responsibility of the Mother Church towards millions of our Ukrainian Orthodox brethren." — Bartholomew I, on the Ukrainian tomos^[30]

What the crisis reveals

For a Catholic observer, this crisis is rich in lessons — provided it is read without triumphalism. It shows that, in the absence of a recognized principle of supreme authority, Orthodoxy has no institutional means of resolving a major conflict between two of its great Churches. Constantinople claims primacy; Moscow contests it; and no instance can decide, for lack of a possible ecumenical council and for lack of a see endowed with accepted universal authority.

This is exactly the difficulty that the Council of Florence (1439) tried to resolve, and which the Catholic Church holds to be dogmatically decided: the ministry of Peter exists precisely for such moments, as rock of unity. The Ukrainian drama does not prove that Orthodoxy is wrong about everything — its fidelity to the seven councils and to the patristic Tradition remains admirable — but it illustrates, in fact, the structural weakness of a communion without a visible head. Bartholomew, first among the Orthodox, experiences it painfully himself: his primacy of honor does not suffice to prevent fracture.

One of Bartholomew's great projects was to gather a pan-Orthodox council, prepared for more than fifty years, in order to manifest the unity of world Orthodoxy. This "Holy and Great Council" took place in Crete, from 19 to 26 June 2016 — the first large assembly of this kind in more than a millennium^[31].

The council was a half-success: it showed that Orthodoxy could gather, but the withdrawal of four Churches — including Moscow — limited its authority and foreshadowed the Ukrainian crisis. Here again, the difficulty of gathering all Orthodoxy under one decision appeared in broad daylight.

To portray Bartholomew honestly requires naming precisely the state of relations between his Church and Rome. The essentials of the faith are common; the points of division are real but circumscribed.

On the spiritual level, Catholics and Orthodox share the same vision of Christian life as divinization (theosis): man called, by grace, to participate in divine life — a theme dear to Gregory Palamas and the entire Eastern tradition, and fully received by Catholic theology of grace. What Catholic spirituality calls holiness, transforming union, life in the will of God, the East calls theosis. There is here a deep consonance: on both sides, Christianity is not first a morality, but the transfiguration of man by the God who became man "that we might be made God", according to the formula of Saint Athanasius cited by Catholics and Orthodox alike^[32].

What should a Catholic retain from the figure of Bartholomew I? First, sincere respect. This man embodies, in extremely difficult conditions, the fidelity of a Church reduced to almost nothing but refusing to disappear. His courage under Turkish pressure, his dignity, his theological culture, his constant friendship toward four successive popes and his witness on Creation command admiration. He is not an adversary of the Catholic Church: he is its closest partner in the search for unity.

Second, a measured hope. The lifting of the anathemas in 1965, the gestures of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis and Leo XIV, the common prayer at Nicaea in 2025 are real signs that the Spirit is working to heal the wound. A Catholic must desire and pray for full communion — not the absorption of East by West, but reconciliation in the whole truth.

Finally, truth without complacency. To love Orthodoxy does not mean pretending that nothing remains to be resolved. Real dogmatic divergences remain, especially on the primacy of Peter, which the Catholic Church cannot abandon without denying itself, because it holds them to come from the will of Christ himself. The very paradox of Bartholomew's patriarchate — a primacy of honor unable, before Moscow, to make itself heard — discreetly recalls why Catholicism believes a visible rock of unity is necessary. For a systematic refutation of Eastern objections, see Answers to Orthodox objections and What does the Church say about Orthodox Christians?.

Bartholomew I will remain in history as the patriarch who held the see of New Rome at the hour of its greatest poverty, and who brought Constantinople closer to Rome than anyone else in a thousand years. The day East and West are fully reunited — if it pleases God — his name will likely have counted for much.

The figure of Bartholomew is illuminated by the long history of the separation between East and West and by the attempts to overcome it.

• On the founding rupture: The Great Schism of the East (1054) and, upstream, the Photian schism.
• On the fall of "New Rome": The fall of Constantinople (1453).
• On the attempts at union: the Council of Florence (1439), and the common root of faith at the First Council of Nicaea (325).
• On the Catholic answer to Eastern objections: Answers to Orthodox objections and What does the Church say about Orthodox Christians?.
• On Eastern spirituality of divinization: Gregory Palamas and hesychasm.