More than five months after the decision of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to grant legitimacy and then autocephaly to two schismatic groups in Ukraine, the situation is mostly unchanged. The new church structure, known now as the “Orthodox Church in / of Ukraine” is reportedly continuing its efforts to forcefully seize control of parish communities and churches all over Ukraine.
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):
Two local jurisdictions within the Eastern Orthodox Church announced their refusal to accept the legitimization of two schismatic groups in Ukraine, a move authorized by the Ecumenical Patriarch, but spurred by powers in the United States and Petro Poroshenko’s secularist-oriented Ukraine.
The attack on the Eastern Orthodox Church, brought about by the US State Department and its proxies in Constantinople and Ukraine, is continuing. On October 20, 2018, the illegitimate “Kyiv (Kiev) Patriarchate”, led by Filaret Denisenko who is calling himself “Patriarch Filaret”, had a synodal meeting in which it changed the commemoration title of the leader of the church to include the Kyiv Caves and Pochaev Lavras.
The biggest news in the Eastern Orthodox world in recent times occurred on Thursday, October 11, 2018. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, lifted the anathemas against two schismatic Ukrainian Churches and their leaders, paving the way to the creation of a fully independent Ukrainian national Orthodox Church.
CLICK HERE to Support The Duran >>
This announcement was given in English and is shown here in video with the textual transcript following:
RT’s “Worlds Apart” interview program recently interviewed Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), a hierarch who heads the Department of External Church Relations for the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. The Duran has covered the crisis in Ukraine surrounding the activity of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, of Constantinople, intended to create a fully independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
A high-level delegation of Metropolitans/Bishops from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has met in Constantinople, at the Phanar, to discuss the Ukrainian crisis, specifically, the major issues of the Church in Ukraine, with the Patriarch of Constantinople.
In a tit for tat move, the Ukrainian government has added the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church to its doxing website “Mirotvorets” (“Peacemaker”), labeling him an “enemy of Ukraine.”
It seems Ukrainian nationalistic politicians and religious schismatics didn’t appreciate that he referred to them as enemies of all Slavic peoples, as The Duran previously reported.
For us there are no dialectics: creation is not set against divine energy and presence, but is in fact its intended telos. God thus manifests His uncreated glory in time and space and in multitudes of created forms: upon this hangs the reality of the Gospel and the reality of the Incarnation as a deification of Christ’s humanity, and by extension, us who participate in His deified flesh. Anything else is Arian heresy. Like His humanity or the sacraments, created forms really and truly thus become vehicles of uncreated reality and not ‘created grace.’ The light of Mt.
