Folia Canonica 8. (2005)
STUDIES - Grigorios D. Papathomas: An Open Ecclesial Communitarism: Dispar-Mixed Marriages and Adult Converions
156 GRIGORIOS D. PAPATHOMAS posed not only that they should not divorce one another, but also should not “seek a separation” (1 Cor. 7:10, 16). Even more so-this has escaped our attention - the Church did not celebrate a new marriage, as it is done nowadays... This means that it acknowledged the marriage already contracted in the idolatrous religious community as a marriage-mystery of love. This precisely proves quite clearly that the Early Church was in harmony with its proclaimed Theology of marriage (1 Cor. 7:1-40). Without going into details as to what happened after the 10th century and the 4th marriage of Emperor Leo VI the Wise, when marriage was given legal significance, thus also becoming a State-related issue, it is interesting to take a look at what happened after the Fall of Constantinople in order to better understand the stance of the Orthodox Church towards the Muslim Community today. The Fall brought about a complete change of established order, the Empire became a theocratic Muslim one, numerous efforts were made in order to convert Christians to Islam, and the law prohibited any conversion of Muslims to the Christian religion on penalty of execution. Thus the change of established order, with mainly hostile intentions, and the need of survival of the “Millet of Christians” led the Ecumenical Patriarchate, for pure self-protection reasons, to stop celebrating marriages between Christians and Muslims, thus abolishing dispar marriage de facto. This canonical practice was also followed, for the same reasons, by the early Patriarchates of the East that lived under the same established order, and later, by the recently founded Autocephalous and Patriarchal Churches of the Balkans, which are all (with the exception of the Church of Cyprus) a pre-jurisdictional territory of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. They all adopted the same canonical stance and practice as part of tradition and legacy. This canonical practice also created an ecclesiastical common law that prohibits the contraction of marriage between a Christian and a Muslim today. As for the Ecumenical Patriarchate, specifically due to this stance and to the fact that the aforementioned reasons are still valid in one way or another, one would not expect it to take an initiative for reintroducing dispar marriage at this very moment. This issue could be raised after Turkey is integrated into the European Union, which will improve the institutional relations between Christians and Muslims. However, it could take place in other free countries, as well as in the European Union member-states, where Christians and Muslims coexist and live together in harmony, in a European climate of juridical and civil equality. In any case, dispar marriage freely accepts the religious otherness and does not require a change of religion, following the example of the Early Christian Communities ( 1 Cor. 7:1 -40), and the Church blesses its members in their choice of the mystery of life, which is what marriage intrinsically is.
