LONDON -- "Not one word of apology has been heard from your lips about the Fourth Crusade," said Archbishop Christodoulos in a hectoring tone, as Pope John Paul II sat with the head of the Greek Orthodox Church last Friday just hours after his arrival in Athens. It is, after all, the age of apologizing for your ancestors, so why not your spiritual ancestors too?
The frail Catholic pontiff rose to the occasion, murmuring a one-size-fits-all apology for "all those cases in which Catholics sinned by commission or omission." It mollified Christodoulos, who rose and embraced him, and the moment passed. But the general Greek resentment at how history has treated them has certainly not passed. We think of the victim culture as an American invention, but Americans only privatized it: the Greeks were the true pioneers.
Non-Greeks may not understand why a Pole born in 1920 should have to apologize for the actions of Western European crusaders who, while pausing in Constantinople on their way to try to recapture Jerusalem in 1204, turned instead to sacking and pillaging the capital of the Greek-speaking Byzantine empire. But Greeks generally blame that calamity for the gradual decline of the city that caused it to fall to the Turks and get renamed Istanbul a mere 249 years later.