Ponderous and stiff with the incrustation of centuries of bickering and privilege is the Eastern Orthodox Communionan assortment of 15 national churches headed by patriarchs and loosely bound by a common tradition of liturgy, sacerdotalism, and suspicion of Rome. Last week, on the sun-drenched Greek island of Rhodes, representatives of 12 of the 15 main churches gathered for a Pan-Orthodox Conference.
They had been called together by Athenagoras, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who (by a tradition that dates back to the schism of Christendom between Rome and Constantinople in 1054) is the "first...
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