After ten years of pontificate, the point of arrival of the Pope Francis’s reign seems to be the October 2023 synod of bishops on the theme “For a synodal Church: communion, participation and mission”. To understand the semantic muddle of a “synod on synodality”, one must first distinguish between the two terms. A synod is a delimited historical event; synodality is a “path”, a “process” which, in the ideological landscape of Pope Francis, corresponds to the primacy of praxis over doctrine. The term “synod”, which…
Parts 1 and 2 of this series appeared in the Voice of the Family Digest on 22 February 2023. The Moscow Patriarchate — instituted by Ivan IV in 1589, and suppressed by Peter the Great in 1721 — was revived in 1917 during the Bolshevik Revolution, but its life was cut short. After the Bolshevik party of Lenin and Trotsky came to power, it proposed the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church and of every other religious confession. Patriarch Tikhon’s efforts at an agreement achieved nothing…
Parts 1 and 2 of this series appeared in the Voice of the Family Digest on 22 February 2023. The religious history of Russia is the history of a people whose leaders turned their backs on their baptismal promises, first professed in Kiev by St Vladimir, in order to create a instrumental national religion for the new state whose centre was Moscow. The first patriarch of Moscow, appointed in 1589 by Tsar Feodor I, was Iov (Job). He was succeeded by Hermogenes and by Feodor Nikitich…
Part I The attraction that some political and religious circles have fallen into in regard to the Moscow Patriarchate is accompanied by a profound ignorance of its history. These brief observations are intended to bridge this gap. The fundamental point of departure is the seventeenth Ecumenical Council of the Church, which took place in Florence in 1439 under Pope Eugene IV. The grand assembly was attended by a large group of about 700 persons from Constantinople, under the leadership of Emperor John VIII Palaeologus and…