Tbilisi, February 9, 2021
Patriarchs Ilia and Kirill concelebrating. Photo: fakti.org
The Holy Synod of the Georgian Orthodox Church will meet under the chairmanship of His Holiness Patriarch Catholicos Ilia II for the first time in nearly a year and a half on Friday, the Patriarchate announced yesterday.
While the official announcement does not divulge the agenda, pro-Constantinople, anti-Russian are using the situation to provoke more conflicts between the Georgian and Russian Churches. Yesterday, the anonymous “Association of Religions Experts” proclaimed that Russophile bishops of the Georgian Church are planning to overthrow the greatly beloved Pat. Ilia at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Referring to its confidential sources, the Association, whose membership is unknown, writes that compromising material and blackmail will be brought against the Patriarch in order to put his Locum Tenens, Metropolitan Shio of Senaki and Chkhorotsqu on the throne.
The group believes the move is revenge for the fact that His Eminence Metropolitan Gerasime of Zugdidi and Tsaishi, the Chairman of the Georgian Patriarchate’s Foreign Affairs Department, wrote a letter of protest to the Russian Church about a Russian priest serving in South Ossetia.
The Association helped bring international attention to the story, the statement recalls, “which greatly irritated the Russian Patriarchate”.
And in the dramatic fashion already characteristic of the new Association’s statements, it continues: “We express our deep concern over the criminal motives of the evildoers and call on the forces in the administration of the Georgian Patriarchate to refrain from carrying out the insidious and treacherous plan and to rely on Scripture, Divine Tradition, and the Church’s ecclesiastical principles in any decision.”
The group of “experts” also calls upon Met. Shio to give up his status as Locum Tenens and thus avoid the expected intrigues of the Russian Church. Pat. Ilia announced Met. Shio as his Locum Tenens in November 2017.
However, the Georgian Church was quick to dismiss the Association’s “fantasies.”
“I’m really asking journalists not to ask me any question about the fantasies they’re writing about here,” Archpriest Andria Jagmaidze, the head of the Patriarchate’s press service, wrote on Facebook.
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