Source: Eurasia Review
October 7, 2019
The hierarchs of the Church of Greece will gather at the Synod on October 7-11. They will elect three metropolitans and two vicar bishops, as well as discuss important issues. In particular, since the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece Ieronymos II refused to decide on the recognition of the Autocephalous Church of Ukraine, the Synod of Hierarchy may consider this issue, though beyond the agenda.
If the Church of Greece establishes communion with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, as Patriarch Bartholomew expected in his interview with Ukrainian journalists, it will be a precedent for any church or pseudo-church group in the territory of any Local Church to be recognized as an “autocephalous” but in fact controlled by the Ecumenical patriarchate.
In particular, the role of the New Lands as a lever of pressure on the Greek Church will increase. Similar threats will arise for many other Local Churches. That is, the acceptance of ‘hierarchs’ with no canonical ordinations into the Orthodox Church will not only undermine the canonical foundations of the church and destabilize it, as is shown by the Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus, but also bring the Ecumenical Patriarch one step closer to “Eastern papism”.
In such new conditions, weak churches will not be able to resist Phanar’s course of rapprochement with the Vatican.
... Read the rest at Eurasia Review.
