We urge the readers of Orthodoxy in Dialogue to study the following statement carefully and thoroughly. Note that even the laity are forbidden to commune in parishes and monasteries (including Mount Athos) of the Ecumenical Patriarchate anywhere in the world. In the US this means, among other things, ROCOR’s withdrawal from the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—whose goal of canonical Orthodox unity in the United States ROCOR has never supported anyway.
This statement’s repeated use of the offensive “the” Ukraine should not go unnoticed. It implies that Ukraine is no more than a region belonging to something larger, i.e., Russia.
One wonders where the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia finds canonical justification for its own existence as a global, non-territorial church.
The Moscow Patriarchate has also threatened to break communion with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Will Moscow make the same threat to its daughter church, the Orthodox Church in America (OCA)?
Hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia
Statement of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia
[On the Autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church]
The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia communicates to the plenitude of her clergy and faithful, and to her fellow Orthodox Christians throughout the world, her profound sorrow at the uncanonical undertakings perpetrated by the Church of Constantinople over the past days; in particular with regard to its Message of 11th October 2018. Simultaneously we express our complete support of the position taken by the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow, following its meeting of 15th October 2018 and announced in its statement of the same date.
The illicit actions of the Church of Constantinople are able to suffer no canonical defence and constitute a grave and dangerous injustice against the traditions of Orthodoxy, as well as a shocking disregard for the spiritual welfare of the sheep of Christ (cf. John 10.3, 11). Having expressed its intention to establish stravropegia of its Church in the Ukraine, Constantinople thus solidifies its intrusion into another Local Church’s canonical territory, an anti-canonical violation of the highest order which the Synod of Constantinople has no power or right to undertake. We make explicit that under no circumstances will we consider such institutions to have any legal substance, nor will we acknowledge any legitimacy whatsoever to those who, deeming themselves shepherds, submit to these non-Church establishments. Read More
● Poetic inspiration has its origins in the archetypal images hidden in the subtle sensibility of the inner, spiritual, subconscious, and unconscious depths, in the surreptitious chambers of the heart, in the streams of awakened consciousness, where the divine encounters the human. Without emotional intelligence, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility, there would be neither poetry, nor religion, nor saints or mystics endowed spiritually with the gift to understand and bear witness to the perplexity of that meta-reality, the reality beyond reality—to the existence of that dream world and those celestial visions of which the rational mind is neither aware nor cognizant. When mankind can no longer dream and no longer create authentic poetry, when it will only know how to calculate and consume, that radiant glory of the divine image imprinted from the beginning inside the ground of being and in the depths of man’s heart will collapse under its own shadow, under the penumbra of man’s true identity, and man will no longer be human.
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 