The following Statement on Academic Freedom was emailed to the IOTA membership yesterday, November 10. We share it with our global readership to express our agreement with the Statement and our support for Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun.

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun

As a scholarly society serving the Church, the International Orthodox Theological Association (IOTA) champions academic freedom. IOTA also promotes the healing of divisions within the Church and stands against the spirit of alienation.

On September 25, 2023, the Patriarch of Moscow suspended Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun from his priestly duties. The reason cited for this disciplinary action was Hovorun’s co-serving with the hierarchs and clergy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate with which the Moscow Patriarchate unilaterally broke communion in December 2018. The unilateral breaking of communion runs against the spirit of Orthodox unity. When the communion is broken without serious theological reasons, the whole church suffers.
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For context see the extensive Metropolitan Joseph (Al-Zehlaoui): The Scandal section in our Archives 2020-23 linked at the top of this page.

Joseph Al-Zehlaoui (L) and Patriarch John X of Antioch (R)

On November 7, reporter Justin Rohrlich from The Daily Beast reached out to editor Giacomo Sanfilippo at Orthodoxy in Dialogue for comment on Joseph Al-Zehlaoui’s pending civil lawsuit against the Antiochian Archdiocese and individual members of the Board of Trustees. This was the first we heard of the lawsuit. Several hours after their telephone interview, Rohrlich’s Archbishop Accused of Lengthy Affair Sues Over His Stingy Severance (Unholy War) went live at The Daily Beast. Sanfilippo and Orthodoxy in Dialogue are cited a number of times. Our analytics show that other outlets around the globe picked up the story within the first few hours. 

You can read the summons and notice here. Although Sanfilippo is not named as a defendant, his and Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s role in Al-Zehlaoui’s downfall is summarized on pp. 2-3.

We offer the following highlights from, and commentary on, the contents of the summons and notice: Read More

This will be brief.

By now, everyone knows about the Moscow Patriarchate’s flagrantly uncanonical ecclesiastical invasion of the Patriarchate of Alexandria.

For context, Alexandria has sole canonical jurisdiction over the African continent. This hasn’t prevented Moscow from recently attempting to establish a presence in Africa in open competition with Alexandria, clearly hand-in-glove with the Kremlin’s geopolitical agenda there. Given that Orthodoxy in Africa is primarily a village phenomenon, one wonders how many Russian immigrants have settled in the villages of Africa. 

Seldom do we get the opportunity to see how Moscow’s shenanigans look on the ground. Read More

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