The First, Second, and Third Rome – in Paris
The Cardinals attending the extraordinary consistory in Rome will depart today, just as the customary delegation from the Patriarchate of Constantinople arrives for the solemn feast of Peter and Paul.
It’s an annual fraternal custom. A delegation from Rome visits Constantinople for the feast of St. Andrew on November 30th. Last year, Pope Leo XIV led the delegation personally in the context of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. On June 29th, the Successor of Andrew sends representatives to the Successor of Peter.
The Year of Our Lord 2026 included a unique moment in the warm relations between Rome and Constantinople under Patriarch Bartholomew, now the longest-serving Patriarch of Constantinople in history. His thirty-fifth anniversary falls this October.
Visits of Andrew to Peter are now routine. But three months ago, something unique took place. Bartholomew took the seat of Benedict.
The Institut de France is itself a unique entity, intended to be something of a repository and custodian of French culture. It houses five prestigious academies for scholars, scientists, writers, and artists, analogous to the Royal Societies found in Commonwealth countries, or the pontifical academies in Rome. It is more central to the intellectual culture of France than those analogues, though.
One of the academies is that of Moral and Political Sciences, which includes foreign associate members.
When invited to join, a new member is assigned a specific “seat,” which is held for life. Upon admission, the new academician is invited to give an address that, by custom, includes a eulogy for the previous holder of that seat. This year, Patriarch Bartholomew was admitted to the seat previously occupied by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger since 1992 and held until his death on the final day of 2022.
“It reveals not only the continuity of an academic tradition, but also the spiritual bond between Rome and Constantinople – between Old and New Rome,” Bartholomew noted.
The seat that passed from Benedict to Bartholomew is a noble one; Ratzinger’s predecessor was the great Russian scientist, dissident, and witness of conscience, Andrei Sakharov.
There is more than some sadness in that sequence today. The seat occupied by the bishop of the First Rome and now the Second Rome was held before them by a Russian. Today, the bishop of the Third Rome – Patriarch Kirill of Moscow – is no longer in communion with Bartholomew. In blessing the war of Vladimir Putin against Ukraine, in which Orthodox Christians are killing each other within the very same flock over which Kirill presides, the Patriarch of Moscow has become a counter-witness to the Gospel. It is a long way down from Sakharov, the conscience of Russia, to Kirill, the corrupter of the Russian conscience.
In his 1992 address eulogizing Sakharov, Ratzinger noted that after 1968 the Soviet regime excluded the physicist from work related to state secrets. Thus marginalized, “from that time onward his mind focused on the question of human rights, on the moral renewal of the country and of humanity, and more generally on universal human values and the demands of conscience.”
“He who so loved his country had to become the accuser of a regime that was pushing people into apathy, weariness, indifference, that was causing them to fall prey to external and internal misery.” Ratzinger continued:
One could say, of course, that with the fall of the communist system Sakharov’s mission has been fulfilled; that it was an important chapter of history which is now part of the past. I think that reasoning in this way would be a grave and dangerous error. First of all, it is clear that the general orientation of Sakharov’s thinking regards human dignity and human rights. Obedience to conscience, even at the cost of suffering, is a message which loses nothing of its relevance even when the political context in which this message had acquired its special relevance no longer exists.
Today in Russia, officials in both church and state face a struggle of conscience under the leadership of Putin and Kirill.
Consider that Kirill would not even be welcome in France, let alone at the Institut de France. The European Union attempted to sanction Kirill, but the restrictions were vetoed by Putin’s ally, Viktor Orban of Hungary. With Orban’s recent defeat, Hungary has removed its veto, and the restrictions were proposed again this month in Brussels.
It may be of interest to readers that when Canada banned Kirill and other Russian leaders from entry in July 2022, Russia retaliated by banning 28 Canadians from entry to Russia. This writer headed the list.
Bartholomew’s assignment was to eulogize Ratzinger, which he did at length with genuine admiration and evident affection. He summarized Ratzinger/Benedict’s long career as a search for truth, without which “liberty becomes arbitrary.”
That search for truth prompted Ratzinger to look to the shared riches of Christian history.
“He arrived at an intuition already prepared by the great figures of the ‘New Theology’ and of Orthodox thought,” Bartholomew said. “A return to the Fathers was not a flight into the past, but a rediscovery of the living sources of the faith – attested to, on the Catholic side, by Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar, and on the Orthodox side, by the Russian theologians in exile, Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky, who found refuge in the West and opposed – through both their words and their lives – the totalitarian system of Soviet Communism and its interference in the life of the Church.”
Bartholomew showed himself the steward who brings out treasures new and old, speaking about the challenges of artificial intelligence in words that would be echoed shortly after by Pope Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas. “In today’s world, where technology and artificial intelligence increasingly shape our lives, there is a risk of reducing truth to calculation or functionality,” Bartholomew said. “The truth of the human person transcends any algorithm: it is relationship, revelation, and meaning. Reason without truth loses its direction, and freedom without truth ultimately destroys itself.”
Bartholomew in the seat of Benedict is fitting, even as his words are in harmony with the current occupant of the Chair of Peter.
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