Earlier today, the Kyiv Post published a chilling if unsurprising report entitled Russian Orthodox Church Funding Private Military Company. Below we reprint the section most relevant to an Orthodox readership. You may read the whole article at the source.

Today’s exposé provides context to a). Ukrainian Parliament’s move to outlaw the UOC-MP on Ukrainian soil, as we reported yesterday, and b). the Foreign Affairs article entitled Putin’s Useful Priests, about the complicity of Russian and Russian-affiliated hierarchs and clergy around the world. (We intend to respond to the US bishops’ laughable objections to the Foreign Affairs piece very soon.)

A final word: unremarked by the secular author of today’s report, the Kronstadt Naval Cathedral is the parish church where the beloved St. John of Kronstadt exercised his entire priestly ministry.

Kronstadt Naval Cathedral

Mercenaries are trained for the Ukrainian genocide within the walls of the cathedral.

Ukrainian intel has revealed that amid the recent growth of private military companies, even the Russian Orthodox Church is getting in on the act, recruiting believers to fight against Ukraine.

In its 2020 report, “Moscow’s Mercenary Wars: The Expansion of Russian Private Military Companies” (PMCs), the US think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies detailed the growth in the use of PMCs to fight the Kremlin’s wars and highlighted the links between these companies and Russia’s military and intelligence apparatus. Read More

This brief report appeared earlier today at the Kyiv Post under a different title. Orthodoxy in Dialogue reprints it without commentary to generate discussion. It likely goes without saying where our pro-Russia readers stand. Do our pro-Ukraine readers think this is the way to go? Why or why not? Send us a letter to the editors or a well-written article of your own (about 1000 words) to join in the conversation.

Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky)

Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate

A draft law that would ban the Kremlin-backed branch of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine moved forward on Thursday.

Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, passed the first reading of a bill banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP), Yaroslav Zheleznyak, the People’s Deputy of Ukraine reported via Telegram. Read More

The following is an unedited post from my Facebook timeline and the Orthodoxy in Dialogue Facebook group. Defenders of True Orthodoxy™ will consider this a triumph.

I will continue to advocate for LGBTQ Orthodox Christians in my academic work (my PhD thesis on Father Pavel Florensky’s theology of same-sex love is delayed, but still in process), on the pages of Orthodoxy in Dialogue, in person, in video productions, and in books waiting on the back burner for the completion of my thesis. The most important of these will be entitled Our Life in Christ: Orthodox Spirituality for Gay Men.

Giacomo Sanfilippo

Giacomo Sanfilippo

by Deborah Ahee (Toronto, Ontario)

In 1995, I was suspended from the priesthood when my wife, for unknown reasons, separated from me three months before the birth of our last child, even though there’s no canonical requirement to suspend a priest guilty of no wrongdoing when his wife leaves him.

In April 2002, also for reasons never disclosed to me, at the recommendation of my bishop now convicted of and deposed for child sex abuse, I was deposed (defrocked) by the Holy Synod of the OCA. This was, and remains to this day, the second most catastrophic spiritual event of my life. (I’ll get to the most catastrophic one below.) Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s readers will recall that Father John Whiteford of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) and we have disputed on numerous occasions on both our pages and those of his blog. Enter his name in our internal search engine in the lower right column of this page to peruse our posts in response to him. Whiteford is known throughout internet Orthodoxy for his predictably extremist, inflexible views on virtually every topic of concern to the contemporary Church.

We have also reported on Father Peter Heers on a number of occasions, such as in our Father Peter Heers: Priest of Nowhere? of November 19, 2022. We were compelled to write this piece by ROCOR’s letter of the previous day to the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America (ACOBUSA), in which ROCOR disavows any formal, canonical relationship with Heers. This letter can be seen at the end of the report linked in this paragraph. Read More