Your Eminence, Archbishop Spyridon,
Our brother and co-celebrant in the Lord,
Your Eminences, Your Graces,
Your Excellencies, Distinguished guests and
Fellow members of the United Nations family,

Thank you for this opportunity to address you. We also wish to thank Mr. Alex Papamarkou, a friend and son of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for his support in making this luncheon possible. We thank you all for being here.

As leaders of the international community, you have an awesome responsibility to insure peace throughout the world. As the successor to the Apostle Andrew, the First-Called disciple of Jesus Christ, we also have a similar responsibility. Our Modesty is charged by Christ to preach the message of peace, hope, and love. We do this, recognizing that our message must be set within the realistic setting of people’s lives. We are committed to the universal cause of freedom, religious and political self-determination, and justice.

We have this day, spoken with the Secretary General of the UN, Mr. Kofi Anan. We thank him for his warm welcome. We look forward to working with him on any and all issues that touch upon the fundamental message of our Lord’s commandment to love one another. We represent the 300 million communicants of the world’s Orthodox Christians who span the planet’s many continents.
Certainly, the United Nations has recognized the increasing importance of  religious communities, as partners in the conflicts which have  marked the post-Cold War world.  It is a tragic fact that religion has contributed to cycles of violence and fragmentation between and within nation states, before and since the end of the bipolar international order.  However, it is also true that the end of bipolarity has produced new social and political circumstances. Recently, religious entities have directly cooperated with temporal powers in developing principles, language, and concrete policies premised on the rejection of categories of power which lead to separation, exclusion, disintegration and conflict.

During the mounting chaos that was part of the implosion of Albania during much of 1997, the Orthodox Church of Albania was the first voice in civil society to call on all citizens to refrain from acts of violence. Since 1991, the country’s Orthodox leadership has worked steadily with its Muslim  counterparts.

In Turkey, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has led the way in its efforts to promote interfaith tolerance, by convening the  Conference on Peace and Tolerance amongst Christians, Jews and Muslims.  This forum produced the Bosphorus Declaration, whose signatories proclaimed that crimes in the name of religion are crimes against all religion. The Bosphorus Declaration condemned all religious violence.

Similarly, only a short week ago, the Greek Orthodox Church in America inaugurated an official dialogue with Muslim leaders in America.

On a global scale, the International  Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) is a transnational NGO. This organization, very dear to our hearts, is vigorously opposed to proselytism. It is committed to interfaith cooperation, via  philanthropic and welfare projects for improving literacy and life expectancy, and for combating infant mortality and disease.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate has worked to promote an awareness of the global ramifications of Environmental issues. We see this God inspired work as integral to the goal of world peace. We shall continue our yearly seminars on environmental issue on Halki and elsewhere.

We mention these positive examples of the Orthodox Church’s involvement in worldly affairs, to underscore the fact that our faith offers a rich set of resources useful in promoting the U.N.’s noble agenda of conflict transformation and peace building. 

Unfortunately, the unique resources of the Holy Orthodox Church remain relatively unknown to, and therefore, underutilized by the U.N. This situation has led to some situations where Orthodoxy has not had the support it might have had, support that would have assisted the Church’s message of love to prevail in the face of historical animosities.

As the Mother Church of Orthodoxy, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople is ready to expand any and all efforts to rebuild the moral and ethical well being of long-suffering peoples everywhere. We say this without any intention of transgressing the fundamental rights of spiritual self-determination. However, we would hope that the West would make an effort to understand the unique hardships that the Orthodox Christian East has suffered during the long decades of persecution. We ask that non-coercive aid programs be extended to Orthodox Christians in areas where they are recovering from decades of repression and persecution.

We believe that Orthodoxy’s rich creation theology rests on the  assumption that the entire cosmos is an integrated whole.  The Orthodox Church’s theological and existential goal of the integrity of all creation is consonant with the U.N.’s goal of peace building.

Orthodoxy’s understanding of the human being as person, as a microcosm of the cosmos, assumes that our humanity is existentially meaningful only through the free and conscious engagement in relation with others.  The Ecumenical Patriarchate is committed to transforming the human condition. Our vision of freedom and relationality is consistent with U.N. efforts at transforming post-conflict situations, by restoring the torn fabric of individual and community life.

The Orthodox Church transcends linguistic, ethnic and national divisions.  Our  Holy Orthodox Church is modeled on the Trinitarian principle of unity in diversity, whereby heterogeneity and uniqueness are fundamental aspects of our humanity. The Church’s experience is comparable to the U.N. itself, an entity whose unity is the result of the diversity of its membership.

Dear co-workers in the vineyard of peace, our presence here today is meant to reaffirm the commitment of the Holy Orthodox Church to the U.N. agenda. We humbly serve notice that our Church is capable of offering much to better the health of the U.N.  family.

We exhort you, to take up the responsibility which has been given to us by God, our Creator, to collectively renew our commitment to restoring the peace, justice and integrity of all creation.  We ask you to consider the creative gifts of the Orthodox Christian community as a resource for change. We respectfully offer you the spiritual resources of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

We pray that Almighty God will grant us all enlightenment and His Holy Peace. Thank you and may God Bless you.