Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Where were you when they crucified Georgia?

Poor Georgia thought she had friends. But the gang she'd been hanging out with were really in awe, and a bit afraid, of Vladimir, who lived next door to her.

When he started bullying her, her friends hardly ran to her aid.

George said it was wrong, but didn't do anything.

Gordon didn't say anything at all for days and then only blustered something about a "humanitarian catastrophe".

The little French boy, Nicolas, was nice, but it wasn't like one of the big hitters standing up to the bully.

Surely the Church would help her?

After all, she'd always been a faithful Christian, through all the hard times.

Yes, she could surely depend on the priests to stand by her in her hour of need.

Sadly, fellow Christians have been, if anything, even more timid than Georgia's political friends.

The gathering annexation of Georgia by Russia has been met with a cold shoulder from sister churches, whose leaders have in the past been only too keen to condemn illegal invasions of sovereign states, such as Iraq.

This is all the more surprising given that Georgia is a predominantly Christian country, second only to Armenia as the oldest official Christian state.

Some 82 per cent of the population are members of the Georgian Orthodox Church, with the next largest tranche of faith being the 10 per cent who count themselves Muslim.

Such a devout populace might have expected a unified condemnation of an attack on such a solid and venerable household of faith.

Pope Benedict XVI managed, from his holiday in the Italian Alps, to call for an "immediate" end to hostilities in South Ossetia and urged negotiations between Russia and Georgia over the contested province.

But it sounded like a rebuke to two squabbling children, not a plea for an end to a bloodbath, and carefully made no reference to the wider incursion into Georgia.

Elsewhere, there has been a resounding chorus of silence in the cloisters. Nothing from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the latter vociferous in his condemnation of Robert Mugabe's aggressions in Zimbabwe.

Nothing from the Anglican Communion, so keen of late to re-engage on the international stage with its march through London in solidarity with the world's poor.

Nothing even from the British Orthodox Church, from which one might expect a response, even if its affiliations are Coptic rather than Georgia's Eastern Orthodox tradition.

There are many possible explanations for this pastoral negligence. If you're looking for a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, look no further than the calendar. If you're going to organise an invasion, do it in August.

Not only will politicians, such as Gordon Brown and his foreign secretary, David Miliband, not break their holidays, but the Pope won't leave his ski chalet either.

But let's look for conspiracies too. There is the view that a Church that may have been founded in the first century by the Apostles Simon and Andrew and which survived the oppressions of the Soviet Union has emerged with too potent a sense of nationalism, burnished by its trials.

Orthodox churches are by nature highly autonomous. The Georgian one is strong and independent. Who knows where such demonstrably durable Churches might lead Christians disillusioned by western traditions that have been weakened by far lesser foes of secularism and dissent?

Western Christians do not feel like blood brothers and sisters for Orthodox congregations, which sometimes look like the real thing. And then there is what we might call the Pius Principle, which states that you may do more harm to victims by speaking out for them from a position of safety.

So Pope Pius XII, who presided over the Holy See during the Nazi years, wrung his hands while European Jewry perished in the Holocaust.

Who knows?

Perhaps there's a small element of all these factors, or none at all, in the apparent abandonment of an overwhelmingly Christian population.

But it's worth noting, for all the talk of unity between Christians when Anglicans bicker about their internal divisions, or Catholics talk of irreconcilable divisions over women priests, that when Christian unity really matters, an ecumenical Church is nowhere to be seen.
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