To me it seems like this “the Orthodox Church is tied to the government” thing is a canard employed by people who don’t know (enough) about Orthodoxy, and hence can’t approach it on its own merits. To read it from Roman Catholics is especially funny. I’m not meaning to insinuate anything about the current relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the government of Italy, but reading up about the history of Church-State relations in the West should put to bed any idea that the Western Church has any higher ground to stand on, just because it is not connected to any particular national polity…nevermind the fact that it totally is: the French direct order of protection over the Maronites in Lebanon, for instance, or the traditional privileges of the RCC in Mexico leading to things like the War of Reform (as some felt the RCC had too much direct control over politics and education in the country, as well as being angered by the Church’s massive landholdings in a country in which so many were impoverished, landless peasants). And just as there are plenty of cases wherein the stereotypical Roman Catholic criticism of the Orthodox Church would actually also apply quite readily to the RCC itself, there are also plenty of cases wherein the stereotypical RC criticism of the Orthodox Church absolutely does not apply: Egypt, for instance, was never terribly kind to the native (Egyptian) Orthodox Church, save perhaps for a bit of time in which an OO-sympathetic empress, Empress Theodora, was able to exercise influence on Byzantine policy, and some relatively random (and ultimately quite inconsequential) charm offensives undertaken by Muslim rulers generally as part of pursuing some other policy generally quite unrelated to actually bettering the lives of Christians in particular, like when Nasser witnessed the apparition of St. Mary in Zeitoun in the 1960s and was moved to treat the Copts a little better
in the context of building a pan-Arabist state that the Copts would otherwise be seen as a very real obstacle to (their numbers may be small and they may be marginalized, but their mere existence is a thorn in the side of both pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, as they are neither). Similar stories could be told of the Orthodox Church in Syria (either varieties; the Islamists currently fighting to establish an Islamic state there certainly don’t discriminate, and more importantly, neither did past non-secular governments), or in the Orthodox Church in Albania (how do you think they fared as subjects of an officially atheistic state, or earlier as one tributary of the Ottoman Empire?), etc. It is certainly a mistake to think that because a church is organized along geographic lines (which has always been the case, by the way; note that St. Paul’s epistles are by and large written to the Church at a particular place: Corinth, Rome, Galatia, etc.) and may have a name that reflects that historical fact, then that means that the Church and the State are particularly close. This is true whether we’re talking about national/native Catholic
or Orthodox churches…it’s probably just as terrible to be a Chaldean Catholic in Iraq right now as it is to be a Syriac Catholic or a Syriac Orthodox…or a Nestorian, for that matter…
Let’s stop all this silliness.
That would leave me with one more question - for the Catholic Church to answer.
