religious heritage

Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News

8 August 2026

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 News12 September 2026
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.
Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News5 September 2026
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.
Weekly Review of Orthodox Church News23 August 2026
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.