Conversations with Bartholomew I

La vérité vous rendra libres: entretiens avec le patriarche œcuménique Bartholomée Ier (J.-C. Lattès / Desclée de Brouwer, 1996) is Clément’s second book of conversations with an Ecumenical Patriarch, made in the early years of Bartholomew I’s reign. It appeared in English the following year as Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, translated by Paul Meyendorff (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), and remains the fullest early presentation of Bartholomew’s programme to a Western readership.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

The book

French. La vérité vous rendra libres: entretiens avec le patriarche œcuménique Bartholomée Ier (Paris: J.-C. Lattès and Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), 358 pp.; reissued in the Marabout paperback series in 1999 (French Wikipedia, “Olivier Clément,” bibliography). [Corrected: the French title is given in some catalogue records with the adjective in the singular — "La vérité vous rendra libre." The plural form, "libres," follows the French of John 8:32, and is the form used in the scholarly literature and by the English publisher. Both forms appear in library records.]

English. Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, trans. Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997), ISBN 9780881411782 (svspress.com, publisher’s listing; Amazon and Fishpond records crediting Paul Meyendorff as translator).

The form is the same as the Athenagoras book: extended interviews, the Patriarch speaking at length, with Clément’s framing. Twenty-seven years separate the two volumes, and the difference in the world they describe is considerable — the first was made in the year of the Prague Spring, the second five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Bartholomew in 1996

Bartholomew I (Dimitrios Archondonis, b. 1940) was elected Ecumenical Patriarch in October 1991. When Clément spoke with him he was in his early fifties and had been on the throne about four years. The book therefore catches the programme of the patriarchate at its outset, before most of what has since defined it.

The themes that emerge are the ones Bartholomew has pursued for thirty-five years:

The pan-Orthodox project. The convening of the Local Churches, the long preparation for a Holy and Great Council, and the coordination of an Orthodoxy scattered across new political conditions after 1991. The Council eventually met in Crete in June 2016, without four of the fourteen autocephalous Churches present (see The Crete Council 2016).

Ecumenical engagement. Continuity with the line running from the 1920 encyclical Unto the Churches of Christ Everywhere, through the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s founding membership of the World Council of Churches in 1948, to Athenagoras and after (see The Ecumenism Debate).

Ecology. Bartholomew’s environmental initiatives — the annual day of prayer for the creation, the shipboard symposia, the language of ecological damage as sin — began in the earliest years of his patriarchate and earned him the sobriquet “the Green Patriarch.” Clément shared the underlying theology and had arrived at it from the patristic side: the human person as the priest of creation, the world as gift and eucharist. The repository notes the convergence, listing Evdokimov’s and Clément’s “cosmic sacramentalism” alongside Stăniloae’s theology of the world as gift and Zizioulas’s priest-of-creation as parallel routes to the Orthodox ecological consensus that formed around Bartholomew’s initiatives (see The Priest of Creation and Environmental Ethics).

The position of the Phanar. The peculiar circumstances of an Ecumenical Patriarchate seated in a country where the Orthodox community had been reduced to a few thousand, with the Halki theological school closed since 1971.

Freedom. The title — “the truth shall make you free” — is Bartholomew’s theme and Clément’s alike. It is worth registering that a book of conversations between an Orthodox hierarch and an Orthodox layman, in 1996, took its title from freedom rather than from tradition or authority. That was a choice.

What the book is for

Three functions, and they are worth separating.

Introduction. For a Western reader in 1996–97, this was the accessible door into contemporary Orthodoxy’s public face. It performs for Bartholomew what the 1969 book performed for Athenagoras.

Advocacy. Clément was not a neutral interviewer. He believed in the programme he was presenting, and the framing is sympathetic throughout. Readers should treat the book as a friendly presentation, not as an independent assessment.

Ecclesiological argument. Underneath the interviews runs the position that Clément would state in his own name a year later in Rome, autrement: that primacy is real, is exercised at three levels — local, regional, universal — and is a service of communion rather than a jurisdiction over it (Stefanie Hugh-Donovan, “An Eastern Orthodox Reflection on Papal Primacy,” The Downside Review 134, no. 3 [2016]: 70–87, describing Clément’s “Orthodox interpretation of the three-fold structure of local, regional and universal primacy”). The Ecumenical Patriarch’s own primacy within Orthodoxy is the working model from which Clément reasons toward what a renewed Roman primacy might look like (see Rome, autrement and You Are Peter).

What the book predates

A guide written in 2026 has to say plainly what a book of 1996 could not know. The conversations belong to a moment of considerable optimism, and much of what has since defined Bartholomew’s patriarchate lay ahead:

the Ravenna document of 2007 and the Chieti document of 2016 in the Catholic–Orthodox theological dialogue (see Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism);
the Holy and Great Council at Crete in June 2016, and the absence from it of Antioch, Georgia, Bulgaria and Moscow (see The Crete Council 2016);
the grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in January 2019 and the rupture of communion between Moscow and Constantinople that followed (see Ukraine Autocephaly and the 2018 Schism);
and, closer to Clément’s own life, the 2018–2019 upheaval in the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox Churches in Western Europe — the jurisdiction with which he had long been associated — which occurred a decade after his death.

Clément died on 15 January 2009, and so lived to see none of the last three. Whether the ecclesiological optimism of these conversations survives the events that followed is a question the reader must put to the book; this guide does not answer it.

References

Clément, Olivier. La vérité vous rendra libres: entretiens avec le patriarche œcuménique Bartholomée Ier. Paris: J.-C. Lattès and Desclée de Brouwer, 1996, 358 pp.; repr. Marabout, 1999.
Clément, Olivier. Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. Trans. Paul Meyendorff. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997. ISBN 9780881411782. (Publisher’s listing, svspress.com; translator credit confirmed in bookseller records.)
Hugh-Donovan, Stefanie. “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.
“Olivier Clément.” French Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org), bibliography.
Orthodox Church in America. “In Memoriam: Olivier Clément.” oca.org, January 2009. (Clément’s dialogue with Athenagoras, John Paul II, Brother Roger of Taizé and Bartholomew.)