Two Local Orthodox Churches, Bulgaria and Antioch, have withdrawn from the Crete meeting, organized by Phanar bureaucrats in Constantinople. The Georgian Church, savagely insulted by the Phanar (just as it also insulted the Bulgarian Church, causing a diplomatic incident, and the Church of Greece, whose canonical territory it invaded) for its faithfulness to Orthodoxy, may not attend. The Serbian Church has called for the meeting to be postponed and the Russian Church, 75% of the whole, has called for an emergency conference to convene to discuss the problems and mediate. If the Russian Church does not attend the meeting, as it has said it will not if others do not attend, then the whole fantastic project will fall apart. Only the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Romanian Church, both with US-appointed Patriarchs, and the tiny Albanian Church (which is financed and run from the Greek Diaspora in the USA) are for the moment attending.

The modernistic and even heretical documents the Phanar has prepared, with help from its sponsors in Washington which wants an Orthodox Vatican II, have been torn to pieces by Orthodox everywhere, not least by Mt Athos – part of the Phanar’s own jurisdiction. Now we have heard the absurd words of the notorious Phanar agent in the USA, Fr John Chryssavgis, who has openly stated that, ‘if one or more Churches doesn’t attend, or withdraws during the Council (sic), or is not present and doesn’t vote, all the decisions made will still hold and be binding for all Orthodox Churches. A Great Council is above and beyond any individual Church council or Synod … and it remains such even without the participation of one or more Church’. This piece of blackmail would be hilarious, if it were not meant seriously and so were not criminal in intent.

The Phanar is now desperate: it knows that it is make or break time. If it loses here, it will no longer be taken seriously by either of its two backers, the US State Department, that ensures its mere survival in Turkey, and the Vatican, that alone takes it seriously. Power will pass to Moscow, where everyone is looking as the natural Orthodox leader. In its desperation to put pressure on the Russian Church, the Phanar is resorting to the US-inspired Plan B. This is to ‘do an Estonia’ in the Ukraine, that is, to blackmail by invading Russian canonical territory in the Ukraine and set up a schismatic Ukrainian Church under its jurisdiction (1). Thus the Phanar, its bureaucrats with their Uniatizing doctorates obtained at the Catholic Gregorian University in Rome, in control of less than 2% of the Orthodox world, tries to browbeat the Orthodox into submission, as though it were run a Turkish sultan (some say it is).

It looks as though the Phanar is going to hold a meeting in Crete, at which it will talk to itself – as it has been doing all along, on account of its refusal to consult and to listen, which has led it to its present self-humiliating fiasco. Its dictatorship has led to its self-marginalization from the Orthodox world. We are seeing not the Council of Crete, but the Second Council of Florence. Only this time St Mark of Ephesus is the vast majority. The fact is that the US attempt to impose heresy on the Orthodox world has been an abject failure, unlike at Vatican II. Since the Phanar has been abandoned by Mt Athos, it would be better if its discredited Patriarch resigned and went to repent in a monastery there as a simple monk. And in his place an Orthodox monk from Mt Athos could be elected, this time without, for the first time since 1948, any meddling from the US State Department.

In three days’ time we will be celebrating the Fathers of the First Universal Council, those who preached Christ as God and man, unlike the humanist (‘personalist’) philosophers of the Phanar. In three days’ time we will be celebrating the Fathers of the First Universal Council, those who adopted the Church calendar, unlike the philosophers of the Phanar who rejected it. Those in the Phanar, greedy for power and domination as in Rome of old, may yet fall away from the Church into schism; it does not matter, we in the Church shall celebrate victory: sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks before a proposed Council, as it has done through the Churches of Bulgaria and Antioch.

The Ascension of the Lord 2016

Note:
1. ‘To do an Estonia’ refers to the 7,000-strong ‘Estonian Apostolic Church’ set up by Constantinople on the canonical territory of the 100,000-strong Estonian Orthodox Church, which is part of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Greek-run group is led by a Greek bishop who speaks Greek and French; the canonical Estonian Orthodox Church by an Estonian Orthodox.