Ecumenical Patriarchate

The Eastern Orthodoxy that stands with democracy and the rule of law cannot turn a blind eye to another, different “Orthodoxy”, of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

What happens in the immediate future is of exceptional importance in the development of the Ukrainian crisis, as every party is weighing its moves and is gauging how much room there is to avert a prospective major energy crisis.

The report on religious freedom details Ankara’s violations of the religious freedom of the Ecumenical Patriarchate including the decades-long closure of the Halki seminary.

Eager to open the seminary to the world and establish it as an international Orthodox and inter-religious dialogue hub, Elpidoforos stressed that English should be one of the seminary’s teaching languages.

Metropolitan Emmanuel of France tells To Vima that Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomeos granted Autocephaly to Ukraine to preserve unity, debunks theory of Moscow as ‘Third Rome’.

'There was absolute concord and identical views in both Churches, both on the proposals regarding the revision of the Constitution and on maintaining the existing system for paying the salaries of the Orthodox clergy.'

Erdogan made clear his persistence in demanding the extradition of eight Turkish military officers who have been granted asylum in Greece.

A dour-faced PM explained that he could not extradite eight Turkish officers Erdogan wants because the Greek judiciary ruled against their extradition.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople is under canon law the sole authority that can grant independence to local churches, as it did with Greece in 1850.

The Russian Church in a statement said that until the Church of Constantinople “annuls the illegal decisions it took, there can be no joint services with [Ecumenical Patriarchate] clergy”.

There is even criticism of the Ecumenical Patriarchate for blocking Joseph Stalin’s efforts at the end of the 1940’s to convene a Synod of the Orthodox Churches in Moscow

The prospect of the Ecumenical Patriarchate granting the Orthodox Church of Ukraine independence is the largest and most serious administrative problem since the collapse of the Soviet Union

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which is currently under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, has for years petitioned the Ecumenical Patriarchate to grant it autocephaly, the status of an independent church.