Moscow Patriarchate

From Interfax:

Moscow, May 26 – The 4th all-Orthodox pre-conciliar consultation is to be held in the Constantinople Patriarchate Orthodox center in Chambésy on June 6-13, 2009.

“Participants will touch upon the topic of organizing Orthodox diaspora (Orthodox believers living out of borders of any local Orthodox church),” Acting Secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Priest Igor Yakimchuk has told Interfax-Religion on Tuesday.

He noted that several centuries had passed after the last seventh Ecumenical Council and “there are a lot of questions that need all-church solution for the sake of strengthening unity and avoiding schisms in one Orthodox Church.”

“To settle these questions it is planned to hold the Holy and Great Council of the Eastern Orthodox Church in foreseeable future,” the priest said.

It was decided to get ready for the Great Council by way of convening all-Orthodox pre-council consultations and inter-Orthodox preparatory commissions.

Three all-Orthodox pre-conciliar consultations (Chambésy 1976, 1982, 1986) and five inter-Orthodox preparatory commissions (Geneva, 1971, Chambésy 1986, 1990, 1993 and 1999) were held in the past.

Ten-year break in holding meetings and preparatory commissions was caused by complications in inter-Orthodox relations connected with disagreements between the Moscow and Constantinople Patriarchates on church structure in Estonia. The Istanbul meeting of primates and representatives of Orthodox Churches in October 2008 made it possible to resume inter-Orthodox cooperation for getting ready to the Council.

Next session of the inter-Orthodox preparatory commission is planned for December 2009.

Good coverage in the New York Times about the dedication on Sunday of the Church of the Great Martyr Saint Catherine on the grounds of the Russian Embassy in Rome.

From Russian Orthodox Consecrate Parish in Rome:

“Today is a special event,” said Andrey Shumkin, a priest with the delegation from the Moscow Patriarchate, “and the presence of two cardinals here is a visual sign of collaboration.”

Cardinal Kasper said that “a lot of progress” between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox church had been made in the last 10 years. Both sides have demonstrated a willingness to discuss, as have the pope and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, he said. A meeting between the two will come “when the time is mature,” he said.

And, from the advance story, Relations Warm Between Russian Orthodox Church and Vatican:

Reflecting Russia’s geopolitical dance with Europe, the Moscow Patriarchate has found common ground with Benedict, and since Patriarch Kirill was enthroned, he has appointed church officials who portray the pope as a like-minded man of the church, not politics.

“This pope, in contrast to the previous one, doesn’t strive to always be politically correct,” said Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk, an Oxford-educated theologian who was until recently the Russian Orthodox Bishop of Vienna and Austria and the Russian Church’s representative to European institutions. “He believes he must speak of the teachings of the Catholic church. The task of such a church figure, especially of such rank, is to clearly state the teaching of the church, even if it doesn’t correspond to contemporary standards of political correctness.” Continue reading →

The ANA-MPA news service is reporting that “the new Patriarch of Moscow, Kyrill will be on a formal visit to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople at Phanar on July 4-6. Patriarch Kyrill and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople will co-officiate in a mass, while the visiting Patriarch is expected to follow the example of his predecessor and visit Aghia Sophia.”

Here’s a good backgrounder on the tensions that have existed between Moscow and Constantinople for years. The report in AsiaNews was a “table setter” for the Pan-Orthodox Synaxis held in October at the Ecumenical Patriarchate. From the article:

The dispute between Moscow and Constantinople has been going on for some time: first in Rhodes (Greece) in 2007, when Moscow announced it would not take part in the pan-Orthodox Synod in 2008; then in Ravenna when Moscow’s representatives walked out of a conference because they objected to the presence of the Estonian Orthodox Church which Moscow does not recognise.

The confrontation began to ebb when Aleksij II decided to take part in the Kiev festivities.

Since his arrival last Friday Bartholomew made it clear that his trip was not meant to reassert his “supremacy” but only “contribute to the unity of the Ukrainian Church . . . and honour the martyrs of the Holotovol famine of 1932-1933, victims of the atheist fury.”

From Interfax:

Moscow Patriarchate disagrees with Constantinople desire to play special role in Orthodoxy

MOSCOW (April 10) — Bishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s external church relations department, has criticized the Constantinople Patriarchate’s intention to control all church communities within the Orthodox diaspora.

“I see the situation in the inter-Orthodox relations surrounding the Constantinople Patriarchate’s claim to have some special role in the Orthodox Church as one of the key challenges today,” Bishop Hilarion said at a press conference at the Interfax main office in Moscow on Friday.

“What is happening is in fact an attempt to impose a model existing in the Catholic Church on the Orthodox Church to have as centralized church power as possible, with one bishop leading it as the head of the Ecumenical Church,” he said.

“There has never been such a model in the Orthodox tradition,” Bishop Hilarion said. He doubted that “we are entitled to revise our teaching about the Church.”

The leading hierarchs of the Constantinople Patriarchate are calling for revising the principle of primacy in the Orthodox world, Bishop Hilarion said. This model presumes that the Constantinople Patriarchate “should administer all the churches within the so-called diaspora,” that is, that all the communities outside the borders of the historical canonic national churches should be within Constantinople’s jurisdiction, he said.

Bishop Hilarion said this issue will be discussed at an inter-Orthodox conference in June.

Also see “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology” by Fr. Alexander Schmemann.