Weekly News

Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

War has returned to Tigray, heartland of Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Meskel was celebrated under renewed fighting. This edition adds a background briefing on the Tigrayan Orthodox Church, separated from Addis Ababa since 2021. In Armenia, Parliament opens an inquiry into the “crisis” in the Church, while the Prime Minister promises legislation to end its “occupation”. Putin speaks at Valdai about the UOC as the count of damaged religious buildings in Ukraine passes 800. Moscow and Constantinople visit Georgia’s new Patriarch on consecutive days, and Bulgaria’s Synod upholds the case against Archimandrite Nikanor, with one dissent. A feature examines Alexei Krindatch’s new data on US Orthodox parishes: growth and younger, more male congregations, along with the limits of the evidence.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

Some 90,000 people walked down Nevsky Prospekt on 12 September behind the Kazan Icon and a particle of the newly uncovered relics of St Dimitry Donskoy, relics taken to the Donbas front only days earlier. This fortnight’s review takes the St Petersburg procession as a way into a larger question: how Orthodox is Russia, really? Levada, FOM, VTsIOM and the Church’s own university all describe the same pattern: a shrinking nominal majority around a growing core of regular churchgoers. That core is concentrated in Moscow and among the educated, while Easter “attendance” figures have quietly changed what they count. In Armenia, the Prime Minister’s office published a report declaring that the Catholicos “must vacate” his throne; Etchmiadzin called it unconstitutional and uncanonical. Also in this issue: the Supreme Court takes up the Kyiv Metropolia case, a quiet crisis between Crete and the Phanar, stalled talks over Sinai, Patriarch John X with Pope Leo XIV, and Patriarch Daniil of Bulgaria on his first official visit to Jerusalem.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

Four ancient Thrones may meet at the Phanar on 30 November: Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has invited Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem to a Synaxis, invoking the Pentarchy and the “five-stringed lyre” of a Church still missing Rome. In Belgrade, Patriarch Porfirije served the funeral rite for Ratko Mladić and told the mourners that the man convicted of genocide at Srebrenica had “laid down his life for the freedom, defence and survival of his people” — words the Islamic Community in Bosnia called scandalous. In Kyiv, a court began reading ten thousand petitions from believers seeking to defend the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s Kyiv Metropolia, breaking off for air-raid alarms, and adjourned to 30 October. Moscow sent a fragment of a fourteenth-century prince’s sword hand to the front “to strengthen the soldiers’ spirits.” And with 107 days to Estonia’s deadline, a new Erfurt study anatomises that country’s Orthodox split in six dimensions.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

Egypt’s Court of Cassation was expected to rule on Saint Catherine’s Monastery on 23 August. It issued nothing, and a third postponement has opened what may be the last window for a negotiated settlement — one built on a formula Greek reporting calls “dual ownership,” but which on its reported terms leaves Egypt the owner and the Sinaitic Brotherhood a conditional user. In Ukraine, the Pochaiv Lavra won sixty further days to sever its ties with Moscow, its application disclosing that its superior cannot decide alone; four days earlier the state had gone to court to dissolve the Rovenky eparchy on quite different grounds. At the Phanar the Holy Synod was reconstituted and six Athonite fathers canonised, four of them Romanians. In Armenia a third judge withdrew from the case against Catholicos Karekin II. And a European documentation project has assembled the sourced record of attacks on the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church: forty incidents, more than 980 dead, at least 97 of them clergy.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

A short news week — four days — given over to a question: the reported surge of conversions to Orthodox Christianity across the Western world, and how little of it has actually been measured. Tracing the much-quoted claim that American Orthodox conversions rose 80% in 2022 leads to twenty parishes in fifteen states, and to authors who state plainly that their sample cannot be generalised.
Finland’s growth, the best-documented in Europe, turns out to be driven by Ukrainian refugees and catechumen classes rather than by young men. In France, the priest holding the best dataset says nobody has studied why converts convert.
Also this week: Egypt’s highest court rules on Saint Catherine’s Monastery on 23 August; a million and a half pilgrims at Durunka; and the demographic frame that closes the feature — the West’s Orthodox growth is substantially the heartlands’ loss, re-registered elsewhere.

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