Category: Articles

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…

2023 conveys to future ages an absolutely unprecedented image: the funeral of one pope presided over by another pope. An image that touches upon the very essence of the papacy, which Jesus Christ meant to be one and indivisible. In an interview given to Bruno Vespa on Good Friday of 2005, when he was still prefect of the Congregation of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated that “the pontificate is a unique responsibility given by the Lord, and one that the Lord alone can take…

The season of Advent, which is the beginning of the liturgical year, has many similarities with the season of Lent. Advent, like Lent, is a time of penance, but Lenten penance is stricter, because Holy Easter is preceded by the Passion of Our Lord, while Advent prepares and introduces us directly to the joy of Holy Christmas. For this reason, as Father Faber notes, there is a difference between the night of Bethlehem and the night of Calvary. On Calvary there was an earthquake, whereas…

Cristiana de Magistris has explained well the nature of Christian peace (Voice of the Family Digest, 26 Nov), which is the Church’s moral imperative and a precept of divine law. Peace, however, is not the mere absence of war but is founded on the order established by God; and only the state which promotes or at least respects this order can enjoy political and social tranquility. So, for the sake of achieving peace, it is no use appealing to a purely human idea of brotherhood…