Constantinople Tomos Strikes at Christendom

By Elena Chudinova | Russian Correspondent

Editor's Note: The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has officially split from the Russian Orthodox Church in one of the largest schisms in Christian history. The situation is not easy to fully understand.

What follows is the opinion of an Orthodox Russian, and we're grateful to Remnant columnist Elena Chudinova for this effort to help our readers begin to grasp at least the sense of an exceedingly complex political and religious conflict.

MJM

The whole world of the Orthodox Christianity now stands under a horrible strike. Some observers compare this event even to the catastrophe of 1917. Is it an exaggeration?

One hundred years ago a vast empire, where Orthodox Christianity was confessed as the state religion and where the peaceful life of other confessions and religions was guaranteed by the law, turned into a country of official godlessness. Acts of antireligious bloodshed turned into years of terror and decades of suppression.

It was a metamorphosis terrible for all of Christendom. Not only Orthodox Christianity, but the Christian religion as a whole lost its global position. Remember that the Catholic Church in those years called the faithful to pray for the clerics and lay people of Russia assenting to martyrdom.

At first glance, the religious collision in Ukraine doesn’t look catastrophic.

Atheism doesn’t triumph, the faithful are not being condemned to torture.

However it is far more than breaking of the Eucharistic intercommunion between Russia and a relatively small Ukraine.

This crack shakes all of the Orthodox world. The politics have intervened into the sphere of faith. Constantinople has no political independence but possesses a great historical meaning for the Orthodox.

So we ask Philipp Grill, an Orthodox public activist, who initiated the building of the first Royal Martyrs* Church in Moscow (*The Romanov family, canonized by the Serbian Church, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and then by the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchy), to comment on the situation.

Ph. Grill: In 1589 the Moscow Metropolis was raised to a Patriarchy in conclusion with the Greek churches.

As a result of the Orthodox Councils in Constantinople in 1590 and 1593 the Patriarchy of Moscow and All

Continued on Page 10

Philipp Grill at a pro-life rally in Moscow

Tomos Strikes at Christendom

E. Chudinova/ Continued from Page 9

Russia was acknowledged by the three Patriarchies of the East, though de facto it had already been an inter-Orthodox diplomatic reality. So the signing of the tomos proclaiming the Autocephalous Ukrainian Church is an absolutely anti-canonical action taken by the Constantinople Patriarchy. No autocephalous church except the Russian one can rule church life, raise bishops and priests in what has been a canonical territory of the Russian Church for many centuries. Thus the Russian Orthodox Church was driven to interrupt the Eucharistic intercommunion with Constantinople until this dramatic collision comes to a comprehensive settlement. The creation of this absolutely unlawful Kiev Autocephaly by Constantinople was provoked by political ambitions and chauvinist motives, not for the reasons of the spiritual good of the people of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian nationalists dreamed about ‘a united national church’ since the late 19 c. They imagine it as one more tool of radical Ukrainian nationalism and hysterical Russophobia. That’s the point enthusiastically supported by the current Ukrainian regime striving for a total cultural and spiritual breakup between Ukraine and Russia.

No doubt, the consequences of the tomos signing led to a spiritual and public disaster. A massive attack has already started to capture the churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchy. Members of Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary organizations attack and beat priests and lay people. Extremists vandalize churches of the Moscow Patriarchy that have been used in Ukraine for a long time. Some acts of aggression still meet with resistance from the officials, but others take place under a real connivance.

These are just the recent events: On January 19 in Sumy two men exploded a ‘fireworks unit’ at the Holy Transfiguration cathedral’s door during the service and were arrested on the charge of hooliganism.

On February 1 in Bogorodchany village near Ivano-Frankovsk, the priest and lay people found out in the morning that the church door’s lock was changed by the local mayor’s order.

On the night of February 2-3, a fire started in the wooden church of St.

Vladimir in Lvov, but firemen saved the building. Before this, on January 28, a crowd of nationalists demanded to close the church, as they insisted, ‘built without official permission’, though it was built 15 years ago with all permits and formalities. The meeting leader, a deputy of the Lvov city council and a member of the Svoboda party, Andrei Karbovnik, proclaimed he would have the church destroyed. On February 3 in Gnezdychno village near Ternopol, the ultras of The Right Sector organization, led by the local school director and supported by the police, attacked the Holy Transfiguration church. The prior, Stephan Balan, got a fracture and many concussions, many of the lay people were also beaten, but the assault was repelled.

Ukrainian state officials are preparing acts of legal discrimination, making the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchy a real outlaw, driving its clergy and lay people into a ghetto or even underground. The style of such discrimination and suppression is very much like the Communist one.

The policy of Constantinople and the government of Ukraine has produced a disconnect among the global Orthodox commonwealth. The Patriarchy of Constantinople has for a long time been showing itself as a real Trojan horse in the Orthodox world, a puppet of transnational anti-Christian forces.

(There is nothing strange about the fact that radical nationalism is a tool of transnational forces – it is a common feature of our days). The Constantinople Patriarchy shows itself as their true aid in spreading of the modernism and the new anthropology with its whitewashing of vices. The Kiev crack should globally strengthen the anti-traditionalistic, anti-Christian tendency in the modern world.

It strikes heavily at Christendom. ■