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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

A patriarch stood at the shrine of St Seraphim of Sarov and called the Soviet atomic bomb an act of divine providence. Days later a fellow Orthodox primate — from Helsinki — told him publicly that the Church may not be used to bless weapons of mass destruction. That exchange, rare in a communion whose hierarchs usually quarrel over jurisdiction rather than doctrine, opens this edition.

It is not the only place where something shifted. In Ukraine, pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church acquired a third instrument: not the religious-organisations law, not property litigation, but military commissars, who held a metropolitan for twelve hours and kept his passport. A Serbian metropolitan spent a week with that same Church and said aloud what his synod has not. On Mount Athos, a Macedonian bishop presided at a vigil for the first time since communion was restored — reconciliation arriving not by decree but skete by skete.

Also: three primates on Imbros, a relic flying from Corfu to Chuvashia, a Coptic bishop buried in Minnesota, the first Orthodox Bible in German, and 350 pilgrims walking to Grabarka carrying crosses.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

Fourteen worshippers were killed on 3 August when a landslide buried part of the Debre Metmik Tsadkane Mariam monastery in Ethiopia’s Amhara region — the deadliest event to strike an Orthodox community this week, and one that raises hard questions about mass pilgrimage to cliff-cut sanctuaries. In Armenia, the criminal trial of Catholicos Karekin II and six hierarchs opened behind closed doors at Vagharshapat on 7 August, then collapsed within minutes when the presiding judge recused himself. In Ukraine, more than two thousand pilgrims walked to the Pochaiv Lavra for its patronal feast as the state pressed the monastery to document its break with Moscow, and a Russian drone destroyed a 1726 oak Cossack church at Beryslav. Constantinople marked 1,400 years since the Akathist Hymn was first chanted; Crete mourned five dead from the wildfires. Inside as well: Russian canonists ask whether parish fees amount to simony, and Tallinn argues once more over its Alexander Nevsky Cathedral.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

Three Churches spent the last week of July in courtrooms and ministries rather than in synods. In Ukraine, the state gave the Pochaiv Lavra thirty days not merely to break with Moscow but to withdraw from its own Ukrainian metropolitanate. In Bulgaria, an archimandrite demanded Patriarch Daniil’s resignation, was banned from serving within twenty-four hours, and replied by inviting the faithful to boycott the churches of Sofia — prompting the Holy Synod to warn, in its own word, of schism. In Armenia, Catholicos Karekin II and five bishops were sent for criminal trial, a first in the country’s modern history.
Elsewhere: Patriarch Bartholomew named the Moscow Patriarchate’s “holy war” rhetoric from the ambo; two Churches kept the Baptism of Rus’ in mutually exclusive keys; the abbot of Esphigmenou, speaking in Kyiv, held up his own occupied monastery as a warning to the Ukrainian lavras; and as Greece burned and Romania sweltered, both Churches were instructed to open their doors.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine quietly reformed its marriage discipline. Meeting in Kyiv on 13 July, its Holy Synod codified the days on which weddings may not be celebrated — the fasts, the memorial Saturdays and the greatest feasts — while abolishing the inherited prohibition on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday weddings, deliberately aligning Ukrainian practice with the Greek-tradition Churches. A day later a Council of 52 bishops endorsed the Synod and its Primate, even as independent media questioned a circular concentrating authority in Metropolitan Epifaniy’s hands. Beyond Ukraine: Patriarch Theophilos of Jerusalem visited the Phanar, Constantinople elected a new Archbishop of Canada, Georgia’s new Patriarch opened a church-restoration body — and a Russian strike burned a church in Sumy region as the state moved to sever the Pochaiv Lavra’s ties to Moscow.

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Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

The Moscow Patriarchate’s Holy Synod met on 16 July and adopted the first Orthodox institutional document on gene therapy and genetic diagnostics, approved five new liturgical offices and reshuffled much of its episcopal map. On Mount Athos, the abbot of Esphigmenou returned from Kyiv — where he had served in the Lavra’s caves at Metropolitan Epifaniy’s invitation — to reject the reading of Russia’s strikes as divine chastisement: “these strikes are not the will of God.” Brussels dropped Patriarch Kirill from its sanctions list, then postponed the package anyway; Estonia’s six-month ultimatum began to run. Metropolitan Antonie was enthroned in Chișinău with a frank appeal to Romanian identity, and Belgrade’s Synod asked Patriarch Porfirije not to appeal his Slovenian conviction. Also: Moscow building parishes in Egypt on Alexandria’s canonical territory, a 101-metre statue Armenia’s Church does not want, and new scholarship from Brill, Routledge and Niš.

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