| The Assembly of Bishops specifically demands the inviolability of the religious rights and freedoms of the Serbian people and of other peoples in Kosovo and Metohija. We, the bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the ancient and glorious Patriarchate of Pech, gathered by the grace of the Holy Spirit, for the regular convocation of the Holy Assembly of Bishops in the historic See of Serbian archbishops and patriarchs, the Monastery of the Patriarchate of Pech, and in the republic capital Belgrade. During this preparatory year for the Commemoration of the 800 th Anniversary of Autocephaly of our Church of Saint Sava (1219-2019), concerned with the survival and wellbeing of the Serbian people and their holy sites in Kosovo and Metohija, headed by His Holiness the Serbian Patriarch, direct this message to all faithful sons and daughters of our holy Church, as well as local and international media. The question of Kosovo and Metohija represents a Serbian church, national and state question of the first order. Our Church, the spiritual mother of our people, as a whole, and of Serbia, the country in which the largest number of Serbian people reside, to which the territory of Kosovo and Metohija belongs, bears the greatest burden of responsibility for the preservation of that historic province within the borders of Serbia and for the future of the Serbian people in it. Kosovo and Metohija, with its one thousand and five hundred Serbian Orthodox monasteries, churches, foundations and monuments of Serbian culture, represents the inalienable central part of Serbia. This is convincingly witnessed by the traditional spiritual conscienceness of our Church, in which the Kosovo Testament signifies the expression of the central message of the New Testament. Concretely, experienced in the historical experience of the Serbian people, as well as the conscienceness of the Serbian people with regard to their indentity, spiritual and ethical values and historical path. Kosovo and Metohija, from our standpoint, is neither a question of national ideology or mythology nor, even less, of mere terminology, but represents the very core of our being and existence as a church and people, without which we will be lost in the overall process of globalization and secularization. The prosperity of Serbia cannot be built on the disintegration of that which represents the cornerstone of its identity, history and statehood. |
| Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamskon the Issue of Primacy in the Universal Church Source: DECR What is the importance of the gathering for the discussion of primacy in the Church? It defined a theological consensus which was formulated during the years of preparation for the Pan-Orthodox Council. The essence of this consensus is that primacy at the universal level is recognized to be important for the Church. However, the forms and content of this primacy remain debatable, for they are thought of in different local traditions in various ways. 1. The topic of primacy in the Universal Church is one of the most important in Christian ecclesiology alongside the topics of conciliarity and the unity in the Church. The history of the theological interpretation of primacy was dominated for a long time by the subject of papal primacy posed by the Roman Catholic Church. As a result the Orthodox teaching on primacy found itself wholly dependent on this discussion and was represented mainly as an anti-papal polemic. In the twentieth century the situation changed: there appeared in Orthodox theology attempts at a positive (non-polemical) opening of the problem of primacy in the Churchits. These attempts engendered a theological discussion in the Orthodox milieu. At present the topic of primacy is one of the fundamental topics in the Pan-Orthodox pre-Council preparatory process and in Orthodox-Catholic theological discussions. The practical importance of the topics of primacy and conciliarity at the Pan-Orthodox level was demonstrated in Istanbul from 6th to 9th of March this year by the gathering of the First Hierarchs of the autocephalous Local Orthodox Churches. The heads of the autocephalous Local Orthodox Churches took the joint decision of holding a Pan-Orthodox Council in 2016, provided that unforeseen circumstances do not arise. It is very important that the decisions at the Pan-Orthodox Council are arrived at by consensus – in this manner no single Church will find herself in a minority and no decisions will be taken that do not meet with the approval of at least one of the Local Churches. |
| Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk heads liturgy at Moscow representation of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch Source: DECR Photo: mospat.ru On 26 th July 2022, on the feast of the Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel, celebrations took place at the metochion of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch to mark the patronal feast day. The Divine Liturgy in the Church of the Archangel Gabriel was celebrated by the Chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk and the representative of the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East to the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and dean of the metochion, Metropolitan Niphon of Philippopolis. Photo: mospat.ru Serving with the bishops were the representative of His Holiness the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia to the Patriarch of Great Antioch and All the East archimandrite Philipp (Vasiltsev) and the clergy of the metochion. Protodeacon Vladimir Nazarkin headed the diaconal part of the service. At the conclusion of the Liturgy a prayer service was offered to the archangel Gabriel in the open air in the courtyard of the church. The prayer service was attended by representatives of the diplomatic missions of Mexico, Belgium, USA, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Montenegro, Argentina, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Romania, Luxemburg, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Tunisia, Columbia, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Iraq, Albania, Palestine, France, Greece and Denmark. Among those present was also the president of the International Foundation for the Spiritual Unity of Nations V.A. Alexeyev. Photo: mospat.ru At the conclusion of the prayer service, Metropolitan Niphon of Philippopolis greeted the chairman of the DECR and said: “It is a great joy for me today, Vladyka, to convey to all those present at this celebration the love, blessing, prayers and greetings of our Patriarch, the Most Blessed John, Patriarch of Great Antioch and All the East. |
| Accept The site uses cookies to help show you the most up-to-date information. By continuing to use the site, you consent to the use of your Metadata and cookies. Cookie policy Our Churches and our peoples have undergone many trials. Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Awa III on the Assyrian Church of the East and its ties with Russia The Primate of the Assyrian Church of the East, His Holiness Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Awa III , has headed this ancient sea for only two years and has already visited Russia twice. In November 2023, the President of the Russian Federation V. Putin signed a decree awarding the Catholicos " for his great contribution to the preservation and development of spiritual and cultural traditions, strengthening peace and harmony between peoples " with the Russian state award - the Order of Friendship. In an interview with the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate (No. 3, 2024), His Holiness Mar Awa spoke about the close ties between the Russian and Assyrian peoples, the dialogue between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, and the goals of his ministry. Assyrians in Russia in the time of Nicholas II - Your Holiness, the Assyrian people have longstanding close ties with the Russian people, which was especially evident in the late 19th century and during the First World War. The best proof of this fact is your ancestors who served in the Russian army during those years. Tell us about them. - My maternal great-grandfather, Shmuel Khan, became a full Cavalier of the Cross of St. George. His father, my great-great-grandfather, Bejan, according to our family legend, also received the St. George Cross. He came fr om Targavar district, fr om the Urmia county¹, wh ere in the late 19th century there was a Russian vice-consulate, and in the early 20th century - the Russian military presence and the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Urmia. Bejan was killed by the Kurds in 1907. Shmuel Khan was a commander of the Targavar Assyrians " squad and served on the Persian-Turkish border. During World War I, in September 1914, he defended Urmia against the Kurds. In his detachment were 250 Assyrians, and with them was a detachment of 60 Cossacks. At the beginning of the siege, the Cossack commander was killed by a sniper, and Shmuel Khan took charge of the united detachment. The fighting went on for almost three days, and the Kurdish attack was repelled. Later he took part in a retaliatory expedition of Russian detachments, the Kurds were driven back. He then commanded the 3rd separate Assyrian cavalry centuria [a hundred men] as part of the Assyrian units fighting in the Russian army. |
| Chapter V. Christianity and Civilization A new epoch commences in the life of the Church with the beginning of the IVth century. The Empire accepts christening in the person of the «isapostolic» Caesar. The Church emerges from its forced seclusion and receives the seeking world under its sacred vaults. But the World brings with it its fears, its doubts and its temptations. There were both pride and despair paradoxically intermingled. The Church was called on to quench the despair and to humble the pride. The IVth century was in many respects more of an epilogue than of a dawn. It was rather a finale of an outworn history than a true beginning. Yet, a new civilization emerges often out of the ashes. During the Nicene age for the majority the time was out of joint, and a peculiar cultural disharmony prevailed. Two worlds had come into collision and stood opposed to one another: Hellenism and Christianity. Modern historians are tempted to underestimate the pain of tension and the depth of conflict. The Church did not deny the culture in principle. Christian culture was already in the process of formation. And in a sense Christianity had already made its contribution to the treasury of the Hellenistic civilization. The school of Alexandria had a considerable impact on the contemporary experiments in the field of philosophy. But Hellenism was not prepared to concede anything to the Church. The attitudes of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, on one side, and of Celsus and Porphyrius, on the other, were typical and instructive. The external struggle was not the most important feature of the conflict. The inner struggle was much more difficult and tragic: every follower of the Hellenic tradition was called at that time to live through and overcome an inner discord. Civilization meant precisely Hellenism, with all its pagan memories, mental habits, and esthetical charms. The «dead gods» of Hellenism were still worshipped in numerous temples, and pagan traditions were still cherished by a significant number of intellectuals. To go to a school meant at that precisely to go to a pagan school and to study pagan writers and poets. Julian the Apostate was not the just an out-of-date dreamer, who attempted an impossible restoration of the dead ideals, but a representative of a cultural resistance which was not yet broken from inside. The ancient world was reborn and transfigured in a desperate struggle. The whole of the inner life of the Hellenistic men had to undergo a drastic revaluation. The process was slow and dramatic, and finally resolved in the birth of a new civilization, which we may describe as Byzantine. One has to realize that there was but one Christian civilization for centuries, the same for the East and the West, and this civilization was born and made in the East. A specifically Western civilization came much later. |
| The term “Coptic Orthodoxy” has often been used by historians to describe the multicultural Christianity of Egypt from the vantage point of the city of Alexandria, a perspective which tends to approach Coptic Christianity as basically a form of Greek Christianity expressed on Egyptian soil. The word Copt derives from a corruption of the Greek term for “Egyptian” (Aigyptos) signifying (pejoratively at first) a native of the hinterland outside the Greek-speaking littoral cities. The word carried with it in early Byzantine times a freight of disapproval, and this aura of prejudice lasted long into the modern age, with theological historians regularly presuming (without having looked at the evidence) that Coptic Christianity had to be uneducated, peasant, and therefore unsophisticated. It was a colonial blindness among Eurocentric commentators that accounts for the late emergence of the real significance of Coptic theology in the textbooks. This scholarly confusion of earlier times, eliding the life of the Greek Alexandrian Church with the conditions of Christian Egypt in the interior, failed to distinguish sufficiently between native Egyptians (Copts) and their colonial, almost foreign, neighbors to the north in the Romanized cities and in places of power throughout the Egyptian chora (countryside), as well as failing to engage thoroughly with the literature of the Coptic speaking Church, especially as it developed after the Council of Chalcedon. After the 8th century the distinction between Greeks and Copts became less important, given the new circumstances that faced the church in the form of the deep isolation that the overwhelming advent of Islam brought. In the long period of Islamic domination the fortunes of the minority Greek Orthodox were sustained by the favor of the sultans, whose hierarchy was acknowledged as ethnarchs under the terms of the sultan’s ascription of dominion to the patriarch of Constantinople. The Greek patriarch of Alexandria, therefore, became a virtual part of the administration of the Phanar until modern times. The Coptic clergy, heirs of those who had renounced links with Constantinople in the aftermath of the christological controversies of the 5th century, had a closer link with the people of the countryside and the towns, adopting Arabic as their normal mode of discourse, but rooting themselves in the Coptic tongue for liturgical purposes. The use of the ancient Coptic served to underline their distinctive traditions, their sense of ethnic antiquity, and their differentiation from the Byzantine Orthodox world. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Canon Law ANDREI PSAREV Canon law is the sum of ecclesiastical regulations recognized by church authorities; the discipline, study, or practice of church jurisprudence. The term derives from the ancient Greek word kanon, meaning “yardstick” or “standard.” It has been used since the time of the early church for the rule of faith (regula fidei) established by Christ and the apostles ( Gal. 6.16 ; Phil. 3.16 ). THE TASKS OF CANON LAW As a field, canon law deals with the following issues: the sources of canon law, church order, the foundation of new Orthodox churches, the canonization of saints, the ecclesiastical calendar, control for the execution of justice, the ecclesiastical court, marriage regulations, reception of converts from other confessions, the church’s relations with civil authorities, the correlation of church law with civil law, finances, and ownership relations. Canon law includes the subjects and methods of other theological disciplines: critical analysis (church history), doctrinal teaching (dogmatics), canons of the holy fathers (patristics), baptism, and reception into the church (liturgics). The New Testament is the disclosure of the essence of the “Covenant of the Law” contained in the Old Testament Pentateuch: “Not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” ( 2Cor. 3.6 ); thus, for Christian Orthodox: “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but rather faith working through love” ( Gal. 5.6 ). The Decalogue and all the commandments of Christ and his apostles have received in the Christian Church the status of law. Every church regulation is supposed to be based on them as on a source. From the very beginning, Christian society had to deal with a diversity of opinions. In order to establish consensus as to whether or not the proselytes had to observe Mosaic Law, a council of apostles was convened in Jerusalem (Acts 15). This principle of conciliarity, the convention of church representatives for an open competition of views, became one of the main mechanisms that the Orthodox Church applied, and still uses, to establish consensus. |
| Accept The site uses cookies to help show you the most up-to-date information. By continuing to use the site, you consent to the use of your Metadata and cookies. Cookie policy His Holiness Patriarch Kirill opens conference on primacy and conciliarity in Orthodoxy On September 16, 2021, the conference on “World Orthodoxy: Primacy and Conciliarity in the Light of Orthodox Teaching” began its work at the St. Sergius Hall of the Cathedral Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. The forum was organized and promoted by the Synodal Biblical-Theological Commission, the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Ss Cyril and Methodius Institute of Post-Graduate and Doctoral Studies. The event is held with the support of the Foundation for the Support of Christian Culture and Heritage. The conference was opened with the introductory remarks of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia. Pointing to the topicality of the theme under consideration, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church stressed, “The state of affairs in the family of the Local Orthodox Churches is of much concern. The situation as it has developed in the Orthodox world can be assessed as critical. An evident testimony to the crisis are serious differences among the Orthodox Christians over our understanding of the order of the Universal Orthodoxy - what we mean by primacy and conciliarity, how we correlate the canonical order of the Church and actions in the area of church governance”. His Holiness pointed out that an influence of certain political forces can be perceived in this crisis. “It cannot be denied that in the world there are those who would like to destroy the foundations of the Orthodox life, to sow division and enmity between nations and Churches”, Patriarch Kirill said, “And there is quite an evident trend to create a dividing wall, if not altogether to tear away the Greek Orthodoxy, the Mediterranean Orthodoxy fr om the Slavic Orthodoxy, and first of all, fr om the Russian Orthodox Church, that is to say, to reproduce the model of the 1054 schism and thus weaken the Orthodox Church, which carries out and is capable of carrying out the prophetic service - such service, I am not afraid to say. as few of other Christian confessions are able to do - first of all by assessing all that is happening to the human civilization”. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Constantinople, Patriarchate of JOHN A. MCGUCKIN The patriarch of Constantinople is today rooted in the ancient former capital city of the Roman Empire (not Rome, but after the 4th-century Christian ascent to power, “New Rome” or Constantine’s City, Konstantinopolis). The city retained the ancient name of Constantinople until the early decades of the 20th century when Ataturk, signaling new beginnings after the fall of the Ottoman sultans whose capital it had also been, changed the name to Istanbul (originally another Greek Christian shorthand for “To the City” – eis tin polin) and at the same time moved the capital of Turkey to Ankara. After the rise of Turkish nationalism, and the disastrous Greco-Turkish War of the early decades of the 20th century (reflected, for example, in Kazantzakis’ novel Christ Recrucified), Constantinople, which had always been a major hub of world affairs, and a massively cosmopolitan city, changed into becoming a monochromatic backwater. The many religious communities that had remained there even after its fall to Islam in the 15th century dwindled, until today, demographically, Orthodox church life in that once great metropolis is a sad shadow of what it once was. From the foundation of the city as a Christian hub of the Eastern Empire by Constantine in the early 4th century, the city was the center of a great and burgeoning Christian empire: the Christian style and culture of Byzantium made its presence felt all over the world, from the Saxons of England, to the Slavs of the cold North, to the southern plateaux of Ethiopia. The Great Imperial Church (once the cathedral church of the patriarchate, too) was Hagia Sophia. After the conquest of the city by Islamic forces in 1453, the last emperor was killed and Byzantine dynastic rule was ended, and the patriarchate took over (under the sultans) political and religious supervision of all the Christians of the large Ottoman dominion. Under Mehmet II and his successors, many churches in Constantinople were seized as mosques. It had lost the Great Church of Hagia Sophia at the time of the conquest, but was also later ousted from the large headquarters of St. Mary Pammakaristos. After many vicissitudes and sufferings, the patriarchate came in 1603 to be established in its present location in the very modest Church of St. George at the Phanar in Istanbul. |
| The Miracle of Saint Euphemia the All-Praised Commemorated July 11/24 Miracle of St. Euphemia The holy Great Martyr Euphemia (September 16) suffered martyrdom in the city of Chalcedon in the year 304, during the time of the persecution against Christians by the emperor Diocletian (284-305). One and a half centuries later, at a time when the Christian Church had become victorious within the Roman Empire, God deigned that Euphemia the All-Praised should again be a witness and confessor of the purity of the Orthodox teaching. In the year 451 in the city of Chalcedon, in the very church where the glorified relics of the holy Great Martyr Euphemia rested, the sessions of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (July 16) took place. The Council was convened for determining the precise dogmatic formulae of the Orthodox Church concerning the nature of the God-Man Jesus Christ. This was necessary because of the widespread heresy of the Monophysites [ " mono-physis " meaning " one nature " ], who opposed the Orthodox teaching of the two natures in Jesus Christ, the Divine and the Human natures (in one Divine Person). The Monophysites falsely affirmed that in Christ was only one nature, the Divine [i.e. that Jesus is God but not man, by nature], causing discord and unrest within the Church. At the Council were present 630 representatives from all the local Christian Churches. On the Orthodox side Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople (July 3), Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem (July 2), and representatives of St Leo, Pope of Rome (February 18) participated in the conciliar deliberations. The Monophysites were present in large numbers, headed by Dioscorus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and the Constantinople archimandrite Eutychius. After prolonged discussions the two sides could not come to a decisive agreement. The holy Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople proposed that the Council submit the decision of the Church dispute to the Holy Spirit, through His undoubted bearer St Euphemia the All-Praised, whose wonderworking relics had been discovered during the Council’s discussions. |
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