Five years ago, in December 2018, under US political and financial pressure, the once prestigious Patriarchate of Constantinople set out on a disastrous course of setting up a tiny new ‘Church’ of its own in the Ukraine. It called this the OCU. At once it created a schism with the Russian Church, to whom that territory had belonged for some 340 years, though until then it had been under Constantinople. There were no more concelebrations between the two and an extremist part of the Russian Church in the Diaspora began taking clergy and parishes from Constantinople without letters of release. (That extremist part then, in December 2019, created a schism with another part of the Russian Church, creating an internal schism, which problem has still not been dealt with by Moscow, but which has led to clergy leaving the schismatic part, in accordance with Canon XV of the First and Second Council). On top of this, in December 2021 the Russian Church then set up a Church on the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, allied to Constantinople, in Africa.
The spiral was out of control and now the only way of overcoming all these problems between Greeks and Russians is for Constantinople to repent for its initial action, which created the spiral in the first place. Today, having realised that the ‘Church’ that it set up in the Ukraine consists of villains, gangsters, men of violence and defrocked perverts, Constantinople has realised that it must do something. Metropolitan Savva of the Church of Poland, as well as all leaders of the other Local Churches which are politically free, has informed the Patriarch of Constantinople in conversations about this. Now comes the news that Metropolitan Emmanuel of Constantinople and a delegation of others are to visit the Ukraine to investigate the behaviour of those whom it has there promoted as the OCU. There is now a glimmer of light. If Metropolitan Emmanuel, who issued the ‘tomos’, the document that created its fake Church in the first place, were to rescind it, as is urgently and obviously required, the existence of this scandalous, fake American ‘Church’ would be over.
If, in a second phase, the Patriarch of Constantinople then reissued the ‘tomos’ and granted it to the authentic Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) under Metropolitan Onufry, that would solve all the problems. Metropolitan Onufry and his Church are canonical, they are not defrocked gangsters and perverts, they do not concelebrate with Roman Catholics and they observe the traditional Orthodox fixed calendar and not the Roman Catholic/Protestant calendar, as enthusiastically imposed on the fake OCU Church by US bureaucrats. Moreover, the UOC should have received autocephaly (independence) decades ago, and only because of Moscow’s Soviet-style imperialist centralism it did not. If Constantinople were to grant the UOC autocephaly, as it could do, other Local Churches would at once recognise it. Eventually, after all the others, Moscow would in turn be forced to recognise it as well. Thus, the machinations of both Washington and Moscow would fail. Furthermore, Constantinople would regain at least some of its lost prestige and Moscow would eventually have to end its schism with Constantinople.
Is it possible that this could happen? Does Constantinople have the courage to defy Washington? Does Constantinople have the courage to admit that it was deceived by the villains in the Ukraine in 2018 and made mistakes? We do not know, but what we do know is that man proposes, but God disposes.