LECTURE By Ecumenical Patriarch: University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford (17 September 2026)

“RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN CONTESTED ECOSYSTEMS 

Law, Religion and Foreign Policy in a New International Order”

* * *

Orthodoxy and Human Rights – Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (Oxford Law School, 17 September 2026)

***

Introduction

Eminent Professors,

Distinguished participants,

It is a great joy and honour for us to be this morning together with you at this prestigious Law School of the University of Oxford. We take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Oxford Centre for Law and Religion and to its Director Professor Peter Petkoff for organising this esteemed Round Table of experts to discuss matters of concern related to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and its sacred mission in the contemporary world. As an introduction to stimulate your deliberations, we would like to share with you the official position of the Church of Constantinople on the question of the relation between human rights and the Eastern Orthodox Church, one of the most timely issues in the field of law and religion studies and one of the most pressing matters for the encounter of Christianity with modernity. 

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on the occasion of his conferral as Honorary Doctor of the University of Chichester

Address of His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on the occasion of his conferral as Honorary Doctor of the University of Chichester, 16 September 2026

***

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the Participants of the 27th International Congress of the Society for the Law of the Eastern Churches

Address by His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the Participants of the 27th International Congress of the Society for the Law of the Eastern Churches at the “FANARION” Orthodox Christian Dialogue Centre 

(Budapest, September 4th, 2026)

* * *

The “Green Patriarch” and the Sin Against Creation

Reflections on this year’s Message of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew for the Protection of the Natural Environment

By Protopresbyter of the Ecumenical Throne PANAGIOTIS KAPODISTRIAS

Every September 1st, as we mark the beginning of the Indiction and the opening of a new ecclesiastical year, the Great Church of Christ calls us to look at the world around us: the earth beneath our feet, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the trees, the animals, the seas — the whole of that creation which God saw as “very good” and entrusted to humankind both as a blessing and as a responsibility. Since 1989, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has dedicated this day to prayer for the protection of the natural environment, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has served this cause with such remarkable consistency that the title “Green Patriarch” has become internationally associated with his ecological witness.