06 — Athenagoras, Bartholomew and the Patriarchs

Twice in his life, twenty-seven years apart, Clément was given extended access to an Ecumenical Patriarch and turned it into a book. Dialogues avec le patriarche Athénagoras (Fayard, 1969) came out of three weeks of conversation at the Phanar in the summer of 1968. La vérité vous rendra libres: entretiens avec le patriarche œcuménique Bartholomée Ier (1996), Englished as Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I (SVS Press, 1997), came from the early years of Bartholomew’s patriarchate.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

These two books are the reason Clément’s name is attached to the ecumenical history of the period. They are also, in genre, an extension of his anthological method: Clément setting down another man’s words and framing them (see The Method of the Anthology).

They should be read alongside the papal-primacy material in Section 07, because they are its precondition: Clément’s proposals about Rome grew directly out of the “dialogue of charity” that Athenagoras inaugurated with Paul VI, and the scholarly literature treats the two as one subject (Stefanie Hugh-Donovan, “An Eastern Orthodox Reflection on Papal Primacy: Olivier Clément’s Response to Ut Unum Sint and the Ecclesial Legacy of Patriarch Athenagoras I,” The Downside Review 134, no. 3 [2016]: 70–87).

File Focus
Dialogues with Patriarch Athenagoras The 1968 invitation to Istanbul; the book of 1969; Athenagoras, Paul VI, and the lifting of the anathemas of 1054; the “dialogue of charity”; the criticism the rapprochement drew
Conversations with Bartholomew I The 1996 Entretiens and the 1997 English translation; Bartholomew’s programme; ecology and the “Green Patriarch”; the later jurisdictional storms that these conversations predate

See Also