Patriarch Bartholomew has disclosed that he has invited the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem to his Constantinople for a ‘brotherly Synaxis’ on 30 November 2026. The All-Greek meeting of these four tiny old Patriarchates is that of the unelected leaders of 3% of the world’s 200 million Orthodox. Is such a meeting is therefore irrelevant? So why will they meet? We suspect that they will meet to discuss the consequences of Constantinople’s disastrous decision to set up a fake Church in the Ukraine in 2018.

Now that the CIA regime in Kiev, which has viciously persecuted the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, is collapsing under the weight of Russian arms. A new democratic government will be established in the post-War Ukraine, so that fake Church is heading for the dustbin of history. However, this in turn means that the CIA-sponsored Patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria will have to start resuming normal relations with the 97% of the other Local Churches, notably with the Russian, to which 70% of Orthodox belong.

Perhaps the Arab Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem will be able to mediate between those two and the Russian Church? And what of the other eleven Local Churches? Not only does the Patriarchate of Constantinople have to renounce the thugs of its fake Church in the fake Ukraine, but it also has to renounce its fake churches in Estonia and elsewhere. On the other hand, the Russian Church will at last have to sort out its deep infiltration by the CIA and the mess it has made outside Russia, notably in the Ukraine and in Africa.

Africa has been claimed for nearly 100 years to be the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. That is disputed. Who is capable of taking responsibility for the Evangelisation of the African Continent? It is our suggestion that it is Orthodox Africans themselves who should do this and not outsiders, neither Russians, nor Greeks, though their financial support and infrastructure could be welcome. Once that has been done, perhaps all sixteen Local Churches could talk about the real problems of Church life.

These consist of the fact that some 50 million of the world’s Orthodox, represented by some 250 bishops, do not have their own Churches, but have to rely on someone else’s Churches. This would not matter if ‘someone else’s Churches’ were politically free. They are not. This concerns the Orthodox who live on the vast territories of the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, Belarus, Central Asia, the whole of Africa, Western Europe, North, Central and South America and Oceania. There is a need for new and politically free Local Churches here.

Perhaps initially these would be Autonomous, perhaps later they could become Autocephalous. Here is the real problem. Invading other Local Churches’ territories is not where it is at. The real problem is the lack of Evangelisation, the lack of pastoral care and the lack of political freedom for Orthodox and those who wish to join the Orthodox Church. Let us have a real meeting between all the Local Orthodox Churches. Who knows, if there is a free and non-political agenda, maybe that could evolve into a Church Council?