Talk:Ravenna Document

Wrong article title

Google: "Declaration of Ravenna" (21) and "Ravenna Document" (4,730)

Google scholar

"Declaration of Ravenna" (2) and "Ravenna Document" (55)

—BoBoMisiu (talk) 21:54, 13 June 2015 (UTC)

Russian Orthodox delegate walk out

This paragraph oversimplifies the Russian controversies:

The signing of the declaration highlighted the internal tensions between the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Moscow Patriarchate, on account of whether the Church of Estonia had a right to be represented in Ravenna, which eventually led the Moscow delegation to walk out of the talks. It was an internal dispute within orthodoxy, however, and had no relation to the issues actually addressed at Ravenna.
— User:ADM 2009-02-03T13:15:12

The cited source describes that "Delegates from the Russian Orthodox Church walked out [...] over a territorial dispute with another Orthodox church, [...]" "The Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church was registered in 1993, two years after the country regained independence from Moscow, and became the legal successor of the pre-World War II Estonian Orthodox Church." But "[...] the Russian Orthodox Church [...] claims the whole of the former Soviet Union as its territory [...]". Also, De Mey outlined the sequence of events.

In 2008, several months after the Russian delegates abandoned the conference, Russian Orthodox Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev criticized the document as part of a rebuttal of Roman Catholic Cardinal Walter Kasper. According to Alfeyev, the Ravenna Document "is an agreement between representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and representatives of some, but by no means all Orthodox Churches." But since the three largest Orthodox Churches: the Russian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and the Orthodox Church in America, "were absent in Ravenna," the "document cannot be regarded as an agreement between the Catholics and the Orthodox" and "it is unlikely that the Ravenna statements about the universal primacy will be accepted by the Orthodox conscience, [...]"

The Russian delegates abandoned the conference as part of an ongoing protest over the restoration of the civilly legal and ecclesiastically autonomous Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church. The source cited in the article, as User:ADM wrote, does not imply that the Russian delegates abandoned the conference to protest the content of the conference. It was about the dissociation from Russian hegemony in Estonia, a country that is now a member of the European Union and NATO but has a Russian minority.

According to Alfeyev in 2008, Kasper's interview comments "offered a possibility of accepting a Uniate view of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. [... This] will not inspire the Orthodox, who regard Uniatism as contradicting their ecclesiological self-understanding and as betrayal of Orthodoxy. In Balamand in 1993 both the Catholics and the Orthodox concluded that Uniatism is not a model of church unity. [...] now 15 years later [... Kasper] invites the Orthodox to accept the Uniate understanding of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome."

Alfeyev said, "we do not need another Union. We need strategic partnership which will exclude all forms of proselytism. We [...] need to continue theological dialogue, not [...] to transform the Orthodox into Uniates, but [...] to clarify the [...] disagreement between the Catholic and the Orthodox ecclesiology." Alfeyev's desire for a "strategic partnership" to "exclude all forms of proselytism" seems to imply conspiring to restrict freedom of religious expression. I wonder if this was more than a comment about Kasper's interview since it does appear on a Russian Orthodox Church website.

This Russian Orthodox difference seems to be more than a "territorial dispute" or "an internal dispute within orthodoxy" and not specific to the Ravenna Document and maybe better expanded in some other article.

References

—BoBoMisiu (talk) 03:46, 21 August 2015 (UTC)