The most serious schism within the Eastern Orthodox Church since the Great Schism of 1054 continues this year, with the excommunication of the Constantinople Patriarch, Bartholomew I, following his “rehabilitation” of two schismatic hierarchs on October 11th of this year. The local Orthodox Churches already had a reaction before this ever happened, and that response has largely deepened now.
A recent announcement in the press says an ancient ring found in Bethlehem ‘belonged to the man who crucified Jesus’. The man they refer to is actually the Prefect or Governor, Pontius Pilate – so, strictly speaking, not ‘the man crucified Jesus’, but the man who okayed the crucifixion. The article also added the caveat […]
A December 13 report in The Wall Street Journal shone light on a notion that has been afoot in the Russian Federation since the fall of Communism in 1991 – the restoration of the Monarchy as the form of government, complete with a new Tsar of all the Russias.
Of course, some of these monarchists have a top contender in mind for that post, none other than President Vladimir Putin himself.
The pressure in Ukraine kept ratcheting up over the last few days, with a big revelation today that Patriarch Bartholomew now considers Metropolitan Onuphy “uncanonical.” This news was published on 6 December by a hierarch of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (running under the Moscow Patriarchate).
This assessment marks a complete 180-degree turn by the leader of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, and it further embitters the split that has developed to quite a major row between this church’s leadership and the Moscow Patriarchate.
TASS News Agency reported on December 3rd that the Ukrainian SBU (the SBU, analogous to the FSB in Russia) is presently questioning about twenty priests from two eparchies of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate).
This report comes from the leader of the opposition party in Ukraine’s own Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), a man by the name of Vadim Novinsky. (emphasis added):
President Trump canceled the scheduled G20 on-the-sidelines meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin with only hours to go before the G20 meeting was slated to begin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday afternoon. TASS reported that the reaction from Moscow was simple: Disappointment:
Ukraine is the location of some of the greatest attempts at generating Russian paranoia anywhere. According to the press, since 2014, Ukraine has been invaded probably 25 times by Russia. We all saw the nation on TV, invaded by empty box trucks and food supply trucks.
We were told repeatedly of massing activities of Russian troops in locations relatively near to the Ukrainian border, and lied to about the presence of Russian military hardware on Ukrainian soil through the use of various faked press photographic evidence and repetition.
The effort spawned by globalists and Ukrainian atheists to spawn a fake Church continues apace, and despite the Ecumenical Patriarch’s October 11th call to the Ukrainian civil and church authorities not to harass or steal Russian Orthodox Church properties, the efforts to do precisely this are magnifying almost by the day. TASS reported on 29 November that Metropolitan Pavel, leader of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra is getting pressure from Ukrainian authorities to comply with their plan (edits and emphases added).
When Patriarch Bartholomew lifted the anathemas on Filaret Denisenko and Makary and pledged his efforts to create an autocephalous (independent) Orthodox Church in Ukraine, he boldly proclaimed that everyone would go along with his decision.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is imposing martial law after his country’s ships faced off with Russian ships near Crimea. The Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovnaya Rada, has at this time not yet signed off on this order, but they are expected to do so.
The martial law status will be in effect from November 26 to January 26, about sixty days.
