Pope Benedict XVI’s journey to Istanbul is a historic mission, in more ways than you might think. I was talking on Sunday to an Orthodox priest about Benedict’s trip, where he will meet Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of the world’s 220 million Orthodox Christians. ~Rod Dreher

This will seem pedantic to a lot of people and possibly quite annoying to others, since it is not really on the topic of the article, but I think something does need to be said on this point.  It is just these sorts of misunderstandings that help to muddle discussion about reconciliation and cooperation between Catholics and Orthodox. 

This article is generally very good and hits just about all the right notes about Turkish mistreatment of its small Christian population and the gradual weakening of the Church in Turkey.  The call to rally together is most welcome.  But for some significant number of Orthodox readers, this opening line about the Ecumenical Patriarch is distracting, mainly because it is not really correct.  In the present lamentable state of Orthodoxy today, many local Orthodox Churches are not in communion with one another, which makes this claim about the Ecumenical Patriarch somewhat misleading in one way.  But, even if all the local Churches were in full communion with one another, this statement would still not be precisely accurate.  It is the case that, according to the old order of precedence, the Patriarch of Constantinople is the first among equals of all Orthodox bishops, and there has been a conventional habit of describing(mostly one of journalists reporting about the Orthodox Church, rather than the Orthodox saying this themselves) the Ecumenical Patriarch as being in some sense the representative of all Orthodox around the world. 

But being a representative of all Orthodox, much less our “spiritual head,” is not really the Ecumenical Patriarch’s position, and it is not really part of the ecclesiology of the Orthodox Church to conceive of any one bishop as “the spiritual head” of the Orthodox.  Arguments over just this sort of thing are the reason for continued disunity between Catholics and Orthodox.  Any patriarch would be a most holy, venerable, respected, and most honourable authority and successor of the Apostles, yes.  A spiritual guide, one might say, and a spiritual pastor, he certainly would be.  But not a “spiritual head” of all the Orthodox.  It has been in no small part because of the relatively weak positions of the two other ancient patriarchates in Antioch and Alexandria, and the effects of the Communist Yoke on the local Churches of Russia and eastern Europe, that the Ecumenical Patriarch had become a sort of spokesman for world Orthodoxy for much of the twentieth century.  But in all of this the Ecumenical Patriarch has not claimed, and no other Churches have granted, any role as “the spiritual head” of all Orthodox Christians.