Ecumenical Patriarch: Orthodoxy is the ‘green Church par excellence’

February 20, 2015

As he received an honorary degree at a Turkish university, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople reflected on peacemaking, ecology, and the economy.

“Orthodoxy is committed to ecology; it is the ‘green’ Church par excellence,” said Patriarch Bartholomew, who holds a primacy of honor among the Eastern Orthodox churches. “We believe that the roots of the environmental crisis are not primarily economic or political, nor technological, but profoundly and essentially religious, spiritual and moral.”

“The most serious contemporary threat of the culture of solidarity is economism, the fundamentalism of market and profit,” he continued, adding:

We resist the transformation of society in a gigantic market, the subordination of the human person to the tyranny of the needs, of consumerism, the identification of “being” with “having,” of dignity with property. We demand the respect of social parameters in economy, which are the basis for a life in freedom and dignity; we work for the protection of fundamental human rights and for the establishment of justice and peace.

 

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Further information:

• Address By His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew At the Conferral of an Honorary Doctorate in Sociology From the Izmir University of Economics (Ecumenical Patriarchate)