Rating: 10|Votes: 1
Every observer of Church history knows that the Fathers of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, held in Chalcedon in 451, decided "out of reverence for the Lord's Passion and Resurrection" to elevate the city of Jerusalem, which at the time was a bishopric subject to the Patriarchate of Antioch, to the rank of patriarchate. Over the course of time, Antioch gave her some of her bishopric so that she could have a patriarchal existence. We could mention, for example, that Haifa remained a bishopric of Antioch until the 18th century.
Fr. Sergei Sveshnikov
Rating: 8|Votes: 5
Marriage is not quantitative but qualitative—the couple does not remain the same two people they were before the weddings but is transformed into something they were not–a specific icon of Christ and His Church.
There remain two views on the question of marriage, but they keep talking past each other. One holds that “love wins”—so one shouldn’t stand in the way of love. The other respects the anthropological truth about marriage.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Rating: 5,5|Votes: 2
For Communism was the very essence of Western materialism and its downfall was therefore the triumph of Christ and the Cross over the West. Therefore only the heroic effort of Orthodoxy that conquered the Soviet Empire can now save the West. Yes, Europe has the pieces to its puzzle, but it is unable to stick them together. For that it needs Orthodoxy. Only Christ and true Christianity, which is what Orthodoxy means, can help it.
Deacon Andrei Psarev, Protopriest Paul Velikanov
"I was pleased that a certain crisis is apparent which is common to the Russian Church in the Diaspora and in the Moscow Patriarchate. This crisis consists in the fact that the division, which hadn’t happened in the Church before, the division which led to the schism, while today from the external, formal perspective it has been overcome."