Port Washington, New York, March 22, 2022
Photo: Facebook
As the fratricidal war sadly continues in Ukraine, a Constantinople organization in America has announced a discussion focused on the Russian Church’s role in the conflict.
On April 4, the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, the Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in America, an organization dedicated to the person of Patriarch Bartholomew and the Patriarchate, will host a conversation with Sergei Chapnin and George Demacopoulos, entitled, “Understanding the Role of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” at Archangel Michael Greek Orthodox Church in Port Washington, New York.
The evening will also include a “pastoral reflection” by Archbishop Elpidophoros of Constantinople’s Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, the Archons report.
The Archons is the organization that awarded “Metropolitan” Epiphany Dumenko, the primate of the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” the Athenagoras Human Rights Award in 2019 for being “a staunch defender of the religious freedom of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.”
The upcoming evening isn’t the Archons first attempt to address the Church situation in Ukraine. In August last year, the Archons site ran an article featuring a number of serious falsehoods about the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Most notably, the article accused the Ukrainian Church of never condemning “Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukrainian regions.”
When OrthoChristian helped bring it to the Archons’ attention that, in fact, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry had personally appealed to both Patriarch Kirill and President Putin in 2014, condemning the annexation of Crimea, and that the Ukrainian Church had repeatedly and consistently defended Ukrainian territorial integrity, the Archons’ posted a clarifying statement on their Facebook page, but left the article, with all its errors, on their website.
As the Archons state in their new announcement, Chapnin is “a former Moscow Patriarchate insider.” He edited the Moscow Patriarchate’s official journal from 2009 to 2015, in addition to a number of positions held before that. He was eventually dismissed from his position in the Church due to his increasingly liberal and ecumenical views.
Since then, he has made a name for himself as a critic of the Moscow Patriarchate.
Last month, Chapnin published an article on Public Orthodoxy, a publication of Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center which was co-founded by the aforementioned George Demacopolous (also the Archons’ historian), entitled, “Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin’s Two Wars.”
While following a number of UOC hierarchs in critiquing the Patriarch’s response to the war in Ukraine, Chapnin makes intentionally incendiary statements, such as: “Eight years of smoldering war in the Donbass, where thousands of soldiers and civilians have died on both sides, many of whom were members of the Church of which he is the Primate, mean nothing to the Patriarch.”
In Chapnin’s estimation, the Patriarch’s call for prayers for peace is equivalent to a “magical incantation.”
Demacopoulos, who will interview Chapnin, is known as one of Constantinople’s main representatives in America. In January 2019, he moderated the Archons’ Town Hall meeting aimed at justifying Constantinople’s schism in America.
Last month, he declared that “Christian moral teaching isn’t black and white,” in response to Abp. Elpidophoros’ ambiguous statement at the pro-life March for Life in Washington, D.C.
His Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham is no stranger to controversy either. In January 2018, it was awarded a grant to study “LGBTQ rights alongside Eastern Orthodox identity,” and in September 2019, it hosted a mixed-media Orthodox exhibition that many felt desecrated holy icons of the Theotokos with the Christ Child.
On Sunday, Demacopoulos published a graph to show that the war in Ukraine has brought many more readers to his Public Orthodoxy website.
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