I thought Bartholomew might back out due to whatever mutation we’re up to now with COVID, but no, Bartholomew is a trouper! He’s there and is looking quite well for a change. Excited even.
The following people accompanied him: “Elder Metropolitan Emmanouel of Chalcedon, Metropolitans Amfilochios of Adrianople and Stephanos of Filippoi, Neapolis and Thasos, Archim. Gregory, Chief Secretary of the Holy Synod, and Grand Syncellus Iakovos, and Patriarchal Deacon Ieronymos Sotirelis . . . Nikolaos-Georgios Papachristou, Director of the Press and Communication Office, and Panagiotis Grafiadellis and Damianos Bardaktsis, Secretaries of the Patriarchate.”
Patriarch Theodore of Alexandria wasn’t there nor was Chrysostomos II of Cyprus. Come to think of it, we didn’t see any high-ranking prelates from anywhere, even from the Church of Greece. It goes without saying, the true Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and all Ukraine, as well as any presence from any of the other autocephalous Orthodox Churches, were missing, as well.
The article reminds us, however, that not too lonng ago Ephiphony Dumenko concelebrated the Divine Liturgy with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Patriarch Theodore of Alexandria on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the priesthood of the Ecumenical Patriarch and Archbishop Chrysostomos of Cyprus made a liturgical mention of Epiphany in secret from the Holy Synod, (and later through an official letter and announcement) that he joined them, as well.
Perhaps they were all there in spirit.
Collectively, they have saddled the rest of us with a schism which I understand may soon be said out loud. A schism is an open sore that just won’t heal.
Before he left, Bartholomew elevated Metropolitan of Kallioupolis & Madytos (Stephanos), as the Patriarchal Commissioner in his absence. I have no idea what a Patriarchal Commissioner is but I don’t know what a Patriarchal Court is either, so maybe one of you can enlighten me. It’s like musical chairs over there.
Only a handful of citizens of Kiev gathered to see Bartholomew, but that didn’t stop him from vying for their attention by poking a cat with his crosier.
There were few masks but many kisses.
The purpose of the visit depends on who you ask. Officially, it’s about celebrating the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. Unofficially, it is rumored that Bartholomew will announce all Orthodox parishes in Ukraine belong to the schismatic OCU, as he stated in a recent interview regarding his upcoming trip: “And we have no doubt that the Orthodox Church of Ukraine will constitute the central point of reference on the way toward ecclesiastical unity in your country.” This mirrors something Epiphany said, as well: “. . . all Orthodox parishes in Ukraine belong to the OCU.”
So we’ll have to see whether he attempts to kick the Russian “presence,” i.e. the canonical Church, out of Ukraine.
Sure, they’ll be a war between Russia and Ukraine with NATO trying to sneak in there to help them out but what’s another war, right? It’s no big deal to “His Holier Than Thou of New Rome” or whatever he is calling himself these days.
President Biden, or his handlers, also announced that he was sending a presidential delegation to Ukraine to attend the Crimea Platform Summit and the 30th Anniversary of Independence. The Honorable Jennifer M. Granholm, Secretary of Energy, will lead the delegation. Members also include Ms. Kristina Kvien, Chargé d’Affaires ad interim, U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Dr. Andrew Light, and Assistant Secretary for International Affairs U.S. Department of Energy.
Biden was a busy bee taking care of some last-minute details so he could finish packing for his vacation. Afghanistan had to implode at that very moment, setting off the most hideous foreign policy debacle and military defeat in centuries. (Don’t you hate when that happens?) Biden seemed surprised that U.S.citizens expected him to do something about it so he found the time to issue an Executive Order to take additional steps regarding certain Russian energy export pipelines to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 14024 of April 15, 2021.
The new Executive Order was created to protect our national security from the threat posed by specified harmful foreign activities of the Government of the Russian Federation with respect to security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.
In closing, I hesitate to mention this, but it looks as if Bartholomew sat on a large, red, luggage ticket that stuck to the back of his robe. The robe was replaced for the official picture but was way too big for him. Bartholomew got lost in one of the sleeves, looking more like Merlin than the “Holier Than Thou” image he normally sports. Maybe this new look will grow on him. [Edited 08/23/21)
https://orthodoxtimes.com/ecumenical-patriarch-arrived-to-kyiv-upd/
Mrs. M
I have my doubts that anything significant will come of this visit. Like all radicals, he pushes as much as he believes he can get away with, waits, and then comes back to push again. He had nothing to gain by making this his final push.
Then again, the delusional are not always rational. Crafty, yes, but not necessarily rational. And his measures of success are not those of the Church.
Brian says “I have my doubts that anything significant will come of this visit.”
What about more harassment of the Orthodox by nationalist goons?
Certainly possible, Martin.
There is no denying that his actions are largely responsible for it; and search as I might (believe me, I tried), I have never been able to find any words of condemnation of such actions from Bartholomew.
Even the hateful hack Philaret understood that it didn’t serve his interests and condemned these attacks when he was still in the running for head honcho. Philaret was evil, but not stupid. As for Bartholomew, the jury is still out on the latter point.
Like a bully, he doesn’t wish to be confronted by the UOC believers. He snuck in a back way to the Rada to avoid the crowd. The police even confiscated the posters that would offend him along the highway into the city.
I believe the plan is to take as much of Ukraine with him when he has the upcoming love feast with Frankie. He did the same in Estonia and got away with it and he thinks he can repeat it.
Wouldn’t there normally be more than 9 fellow-travelers, including 3 Metropolitans, 1 Archimandrite, 1 Grand Syncellus, 1 Deacon, 1 Press Officer, and two secretaries? with no attendance by any nearby canonical Orthodox groups? I thought I read somewhere he was the Head of 300,000,000 Orthodox Christians? Did they forget to mail the invitations? All I know is that in Uzhgorod, lamentably within that country after Stalin stole Carpatho-Rusasia in 1945, some 40,000 people come to the Cathedral for Paschal Liturgy and line the streets for many blocks around with their Easter baskets to be blessed. I wonder what it would take for a handle of police and rioters to get Fr. Sidor and thousands of faithful to just go away .
I’m waiting for a parody of ‘A partridge in a pear tree’!
Another question I have is, What do these titular metropolitan bishops do? Most of us have been catechized by Kallistos Ware’s books, but no one has ever told me what church he serves in.
America is the centerpiece of the EP, but you never see an American metropolitan bishop following him around. Nicholas of Detroit is one of his most obedient servants (at least as it seems, but maybe I’m totally wrong), but he’s been shut out of all these press entourages.
They repeat the phrase “granted autocephaly” so much that it’s easy to forget what actually happened. Bartholomew created a new sect from nothing and excommunicated the existing Church. The equivalent would be if Moscow recognized that Old Calendarists in Greece as the canonical Church instead of the Church of Greece.
Literally everything these people say is based on falsehood (John 8:44). Bartholomew and his handlers are incapable of being honest, because truth burns them. I read most of the 2016 Crete documents and wrote out something long on them, which I no longer have. It compared the peace of Jesus that is not of the world (John 14:27) to world peace. This is what the spirit of the antichrist is. It takes Christianity and inverts it into something entirely worldly and carnal and passions-driven, but it dresses it up in the language of religion.
The thing is, these people are not “worldly” or “liberal”. They do not have “philosophical differences”. They are satanic and antichrist. Those are the correct adjectives.
The people and demons in hell will think that they are the good guys. They will be convinced that God has wronged them. The victim grievance politics will continue into eternity.
I think, and maybe I’m wrong, that Bartholomew has run out of steam. COVID has shown that there is no neutrality. The schism has gone on for three years, and there’s no hope for a quick resolution. Internet rumor says that Moscow will anathematize Bartholomew this fall, and that will force the other Churches to pick a side.
No one wanted this. Bartholomew and friends chose this war. They waged it and then got enraged when everyone didn’t fall in line.
It makes me think of how the Catholics — and I mean the individuals you meet — beat you over the head about ecumenism, and when you blow them off, they are so offended. But they are the ones who initiate it! They are the ones that crave unity so badly, and then they write articles about how it shouldn’t matter whether they have statues and wafers. They are the ones insisting that there are no differences.
No, it was hilarious. It feels icky supporting the Taliban, but once again, we did not choose the premises of this war. The federal government and its vassal states waged an ideological war against the American people and every corner of the globe to overthrow all basic reality. The Taliban represents a relatively honest reflection of nature. Therefore I support the Taliban, even though I’m not jazzed on the whole “praise Allah” stuff. Someone on 4chan translated their victory message to the world, which is floating across social media.
This:
…says it all. It’s just like in school with a bully. The bully needs action, they pick a target and give the unfortunate mark a push. They start in on them.
Then of course, the crafty bully tells everyone that they were provoked by their victim. That’s exactly how Bartholomew played his game and continues to play it. In so many words “Russia is too big”. Which means it’s stepping on his toes (evidence here is unnecessary, all one has to do is say “everybody knows that…”), and he has to be the brave authoritative voice to pull in the reigns. In fact it’s very unoriginal, he simply mirrored the State Department’s Russia policy of “we need to contain the Eurasia beast, it is our sacred mission to do so”
Sadly, Bartholomew is digging his heels in deeper and deeper. He’s burning the ships and leaving no road for retreat. Hard to imagine what makes it so worth it for him to take such a crazy gamble. The man must have lost his mind, and sadly, those around him have drunken the coolaid as well, to the point where they are fine creating their own version of Orthodoxy.
I think most in the Orthodox world ultimately don’t care what Bartholomew says or does. Everyone knows he has allusions of grandeur…I mean for Heaven’s sakes, there’s more Orthodox within just the CITY of Moscow than there is within his entire patriarchate, diaspora included.
His authority is only what the Church says it is…and most of the Church ignores him and has ignored him RE: Ukraine and the sham council of Crete.
But like any injured animal, when backed into a corner he’s going to go out with a desperate fight
His comeuppance will come
Perhaps he has delusions of adequacy…?
Oh, definitely that.
I used to think that, but it’s just not true. Until Moscow three years ago, no one would stand up to the EP for reasons that an American convert cannot understand.
The Czech-Slovaks didn’t stand up to him:
https://orthochristian.com/117213.html
I can’t find an article for it, but circa 2003 the Greece Greeks didn’t stand up to him either. For about a year the Church of Greece was in schism with the EP over the right to choose the bishops of the northern dioceses. Ultimately they gave in and let the EP choose the bishops for the sake of unity. Look how that has worked out.
If you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll ask for a glass of milk. At some point Orthodox unity needs to be set on fire and destroyed. It can be rebuilt at a later date.
With the council of Crete, I’m not sure anyone actually read the documents. None of the ten Churches involved have denounced it. It seems like everyone has just forgotten it happened. Two of the Greek bishops present complained that Bartholomew tried to bully them into signing.
And that’s the complaint I have. Bartholomew puts all the Crete nonsense on a website and because no one challenged it, people think it’s true.
It’s good the Apostles and the Saints made more noise than that. They could not BEAR the truth to be twisted. They died to protect the truth. But they were lit on fire by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus’ whole ministry was around three years and our bishops can’t figure out what needs to be done in six? We all know the answer. We know what they need to do. Why don’t they act?
The problem is that the EP has entered into a deal with the euroatlanticist political institutions whose interests it has volunteered to serve, in exchange for protection and prestige.
So in essence, going against the EP is going against Brussels-Washington, and since most of the other churches are located either in the EU directly or in countries within its or NATO’s diplomatic grasp, it puts each hierarch in a challenging situation: recognize the EP’s authority and please the euroatlantic elites (a play for local political favor), or fight it and risk becoming an outcast.
It’s been often said that the Greek government has considered elevating Bartholomew to official status in Greece at cost to the archbishop of Athens, if Ieronymos didn’t fall in line. Since Bartholomew already has a lot of his bishops in Greece officially, that created a difficult situation which, sadly, Ieronymous lacked the strength to deal with. What concerns Cyprus, president Anastasiades’ desire to shift relations more toward Washington most certainly influenced Chrysostomos’ opinion.
Other reasons play into this as well, but you can see that this ultimately comes down to geopolitical leverage: Bartholomew matters simply because the figures behind him matter. Without them, he would be uninteresting to any of the other Orthodox churches, save for those few misguided souls who believe he represents the Byzantine Hellenic tradition and therefore is incapable of error.
George S, correct. This may be a case of “a day late and a dollar short” regarding the Atlantic Alliance.
The Kabul disaster has laid bare the hollowness of that alliance. Will NATO survive Biden?
I don’t think that any of us (myself included) how horrible last week was to the furtherance of the Globalist Enterprise. The British, French and Germans are positively livid with hate against the American Establishment. The British commander on the ground in Kabul wanted to take his civilians out forthwith from Kabul but was asked by the American commander to “hold off and not make us look bad”.
A screaming match ensued in which the American commander was told to go perform an unnatural act upon himself.
Do any of us realize that we closed up shop at Bagram Air Force Base in the middle of the night in mid-July and when the Afghan commander showed up the next morning it was a ghost town? Is it any wonder why the “300,000 strong Afghan Army” folded like a cheap suit in the interim, allowing the Taliban to waltz into Kabul?
This is sheer lunacy. It violates any sense of military protocol. It also tells me that our top brass are either (1) completely stupid, or (2) total cultural Marxists. (I believe in embracing the healing power of the conjunctive “and”.)
At any rate, if anybody with half a brain thinks that the major powers of NATO are gung-ho for any further military adventurism because of “muh democracy”, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
Unfortunately if the past is any indication of the future, globalists will find another place where they are sure ‘it will work THIS TIME’. It’s a mentality that’s hard to extinguish, just like one would have hoped that Stalin, Pol Pot, Mau et. al would have wiped out the appetite for communism and socialism. No such thing happened.
Too much money and ego invested in making the world safe for democracy. What are all those think tanks going to do with themselves now? Lose their gig? No way.
One of the biggest differences America has with Europe is that in Europe, people feel direct consequences of wars. I have no love for Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground, but he made a very clever point: without a draft (like in Vietnam), US citizens are much less informed and thus less interested in US foreign policy. The attitude is “You got free college, you go fight, we sit back and watch (what we’re fed on TV)”
The MSM is already very hard at work making this look like it was Trump’s fault, while Bush Jr. has already cleverly started playing games with the left so that they don’t hang him out to dry over Afghanistan. As a matter of fact, what I’m afraid of is that the ideal way out of this is to distract people with another foreign adventure which will be groomed as the redeeming success. I really hope I’m wrong, alas just as Bartholomew continues to throw good money after bad…
That red thing is part of the veil for his kamilavkion, symbolizing the blood of the martyrs, I believe.
Strange to me was the fact that the author of the article put photos from the Phanar amongst the photos from Kiev. Why?
RE: “Strange to me was the fact that the author of the article put photos from the Phanar amongst the photos from Kiev. Why?”
Because the only presence that showed up for his visit in Ukraine were the throngs of people telling him to “go home.” He has more support in his own country surrounded by Muslims than he does in Ukraine.
Reading through 1 Timothy yesterday. Interesting to note that Paul wrote that among the qualifications of a bishop/overseer be , that he be married with one wife. How did we get so far afield?
A letter from Ukrainian monastics:
https://orthochristian.com/140930.html
“Even if the whole universe holds communion with the Patriarch, I will not communicate with him. For I know from the writings of the holy Apostle Paul: the Holy Spirit declares that even the angels would be anathema if they should begin to preach another Gospel, introducing some new teaching.”- St. Maximos the Confessor
UOC believers to hand their “Tomos”
to Phanar head during prayer in Kyiv
https://spzh.news/en/news/82013-na-molebne-v-kijeve-verujushhije-upc-khotyat-vruchity-glave-fanara-svoj-tomos
‘ At a prayer action in Kyiv on August 21, believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are going to hand their “Tomos” to Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. The text of the document was published on Friday, August 20, on the Miriane tg-channel.
In this document, believers described in detail what the Tomos, granted by the head of Phanar to the schismatics, actually brought to the Orthodox of Ukraine, and called on Patriarch Bartholomew to admonish and repent “for the encroachment on the leadership in the Church, which belongs solely to our Lord Jesus Christ, for the desire to unite with the Catholics, for the recognition of Ukrainian schismatics, for the seizure of our churches, for the beating of our believers, for the enmity and hatred that you brought to our land!”
The UOJ provides the full text of the document. … ‘
Excellent.
You know things are going bad for the Globalists when Bartholomew had to enter the Rada from a back entrance. That was in order to avoid the rabble out front.