Re: Jeff Petro’s comment “Members of the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile would side mostly with Weigel”. Do he mean the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia? I am English by descent, and British by culture, but I go to the largest ROCOR parish in North America here in Toronto, Canada: it is thriving, bursting at the seams with young families, with hundreds taking communion every Sunday. At a guess, I would say maybe one-third of the people who attend are Ukrainian. There is a large smattering of Macedonians, Serbians, Greeks, also some Romanians, Georgians, Egyptians, Syrians, and Anglo-Canadians like myself. I can vouchsafe that the vast majority of people here would have no truck whatsoever for George Weigel or his opinions. Their sympathies are entirely with the authors of this article.

Antoine Arjakovksy is not an authoritative orthodox theologian. He represents nobody except himself and should show some logic joining the Uniate church, since he recognises the council of Ferrare Florence. He is simply a uniate posing as an orthodox.

Its believable I have read such things myself.

There is probably some truth to that on the secular state of Russia on Abortion. Russia is not the richest country and poor people probably resort to that..

Well, its no worst than having Justinian as a saint. Sure, he built the Hagia Sophia number 3 after a horrible riot that killed maybe 30,000. Putin is a sofie compared to that.

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on the United States of America and its people.

The lack of shock at the sight of Nazi ranks in the pro-Western Ukrainian militias is mind numbing to me. We have come a long way down from the generation that fought for their lives against Nazis, fascists and Godless communists across the globe. The West that has come to the rescue of the Ukrainian government is not the knight in shining armor that it was during the cold war. Modern Europe is a diseased harlot, and the United States is an animated gangrenous rotting corps. The EU and the USA are the modern Sodom and Gomorrah. When the either step up to the microphone and make demands upon Russia, all I can hear are the men of Sodom making demands upon Lot.

Forgive me for rambling…

My bet is Polish-Catholic, name and politics fit, but he’s welcome to his opinion.

Funny how “Jeff Wyborski” claims to be an Orthodox Christian, but all of his postings online are either attacks on Orthodoxy or defenses of Catholicism.

There are a couple of things that you don’t seem to understand. First, Putin is wildly popular in Russia with polling numbers any American president would kill for. This is from both Russian and foreign polls. Over 80%. The significance of this is that what Putin is doing is just exactly what the Russian people believe he should be doing. Get rid of him and his successor would be in the same position, with a populace that would like him to act as Putin did. Levada, an NGO which recently had to register as a foreign agent, puts his popularity at 89%:

http://europe.newsweek.com/vladimir-putins-popularity-reaches-historic-high-among-russians-329277

Second, the relationship between church and state in Russia is nowhere as close as it was during the Byzantine and Imperial Russian periods. Yet that did not gut the moral authority of the Church. Neither will the MP’s relationship with the Russian government.

“Members of the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile would side mostly with Weigel.”

I think this little sect has broken up into yet smaller sects since 2006. I wonder what you could get them all to agree on. I’m not sure how the MP could be run by the KGB, which no longer exists. And I’m not sure why the FSB would want to run the ROC since the Russian state is no longer atheistic. The filtering out of collaborationist clergy over the last couple of decades was enough to satisfy the Church Abroad who were/are fervent anti-communists.

It is interesting that you can hear “the Lord” crying out at the MP’s actions. Suffice it to say most Russians do not. The rest is drivel.

Recall that Patriarch Gregory of Constantinople endorsed the Living Church in Russia (directed by the Cheka) since it had the support of the Soviet state and forbade Russian clerics in his territory from commemorating Patriarch Tikhon. He also called on the Serbian Church to abolish the Russian Church Abroad, then centered there. It was a dark time for Constantinople then, as now.