Constantinople Does Not Recognize the Transfer of the Canonical Kyiv Metropolis to the Moscow Patriarchate

Constantinople has never recognized Moscow’s church authority over Ukraine, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said during the 40th Day after death memorial service for Metropolitan Evangelos of Perga on 1 July.The head of the information department of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, Archbishop Yevstratiy (Zorya), published this message of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s press service on Facebook.

“Let us not forget, at any rate, that Constantinople never denounced the territory of Ukraine in any way but the right of ordination of the Metropolitan of Kyiv in Moscow on condition of being elected in Kyiv at the Clerical Assembly and mentioning the Ecumenical Patriarch. This is said in the Tomos on autocephaly that the Mother Church gave the Polish Church: our See has never recognized the secession of the Kyiv Metropolis and its dependent Orthodox Churches of Lithuania and Poland and their attachment to the Moscow Church, which was carried not in accordance with ordinances and without respecting the rights of the Kyiv Metropolitan who had the title of an Exarch of the Ecumenical See,” Patriarch Bartholomew said.

He said that the Ecumenical See was looking forward to “the restoration of the unity of the divided ecclesiastical body in Ukraine – dozens of millions of believers, baptized and enlightened by the direct care and missionary activities of the Ecumenical See.” Read More

Father John Whiteford

On June 28 Father John Whiteford published his latest fit of hysteria, entitled The Living Church 2.0. In it he takes shots at Public Orthodoxy, The Wheel, Orthodoxy in Dialogue, the unnamed general editor of The Wheel (whose name everyone knows), Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), Sister Vassa (Larin), and Dr. Aristotle Papanikolaou. 

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My response begins by exposing an outright lie by Father Whiteford when he writes, “The most recent issue of ‘The Wheel,’ a journal whose general editor is a lesbian….”*

Let me tell a story from my own admittedly short-lived priesthood (see my A Priest Forever? Reflections on a Bittersweet Anniversary):

On July 4, 1989, about three weeks before my 34th birthday, I landed with my wife and three small children in the speck-on-the-map town of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan. There I spent the second year of my priesthood in a parish of the Romanian Episcopate (OCA), which had two churches: one in town, beside which we lived; and the other—the original pioneer church—in the unfound-on-any-map Flintoft. The parish’s oral history disagrees on whether the iconostas in the “farm church” came from Mount Athos or Jerusalem. (I was amazed to hear my rough-and-tumble farmer-parishioners even speak of Mount Athos!) Suffice it to say that this iconostas stands out in astonishing contrast from the comic strip style of iconography found in most Canadian prairie churches of that era. From the small window beside the proskomedia table I could gaze from my spot before the altar table upon the graves of the parish’s forefathers and foremothers, a few cows grazing beyond the cemetery, and beyond them the endless prairies of southern Saskatchewan stretching into infinity like an undulating green sea.

I had not been in Assiniboia a month when a woman old enough to be my mother came to me: Read More

JUNE 2018

Since Orthodoxy in Dialogue launched in August 2017, June has been our highest month in the number of visitors and our second highest in the number of articles published. The month’s traffic has flowed mostly to our articles on the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border and the current issue of The Wheel. 

If you haven’t yet participated in the parish life survey which we publicized on June 25, you may do so here.

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This article is four years old and clocks in at a mere 533 words. We publish it as part of our commitment to ensure that all voices in the Church be heard on the complex questions of sexuality and gender that face us today.

Orthodoxy in Dialogue published Intersex vs. Transgender in October 2017. At that time a colleague in Orthodox theology wrote to us: “I would encourage you to keep reminding everyone of the science related to all these issues. I don’t want our science determining our theology, but we can’t do good theology without the right science.”

When an esteemed churchman of Metropolitan Hierotheos’ stature ignores the contributions that the empirical sciences have made to our understanding of sexual and gender variance in human nature—such as the unarguably observable phenomenon of bodies born intersex (re: the “biological infrastructure” of gender cited below)—he does a disservice to science, to theology, and to human persons who simply do not fit into a tidy binarial schema of gender.

Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos)

Until now we knew that there were two genders, the male and the female, or man and woman. There were also some who wavered from this for various reasons, primarily due to the passions. But recently there has arisen another person of the “third gender,” as it has been named by the courts, after many years of struggle made by such people of an “indeterminate gender” or “third gender.”

Someone named Norrie May-Welby, who was born in Scotland as a man, later went to Australia where he underwent gender reassignment surgery to become a woman, because he believed that he did not feel comfortable as an individual of the female gender, so he decided to discontinue hormone therapy to have an operation to avoid belonging to a “predetermined” gender. Then he began a long struggle to be legally recognized as a person of an “indeterminate” gender.

On Wednesday 2 April 2014 “the Supreme Court of Australia ruled that the State of New South Wales should recognize the existence of this third ‘indeterminate’ gender to which Norrie May-Welby belongs” (Ta Nea, 04/04/2014). Thus was born a person of an “indeterminate gender” (non-specific sex), who is neither a man nor a woman.

One is struck by the point to which a person can reach, who is frustrated by all things and wants to taste new experiences and situations. There are many who, claiming human rights for all people, are ready to accept and adopt such a mindset. But if we start accepting human rights without any necessary restrictions, then we will arrive at a social catastrophe. Read More