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Today, Jan. 13, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople issued a response to an aggressive polemic released a day earlier by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). The Ecumenical Patriarchate characterized the accusations directed at Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as baseless and unworthy of engagement.
The SVR, in a statement released Monday, employed inflammatory rhetoric in referring to His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and accused him of seeking to provoke divisions within the Orthodox world traditionally aligned with Moscow, alleging coordination with British intelligence services without substantiation.
The same statement further asserted that the Ecumenical Patriarch intends to move toward recognizing autocephaly for the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, which remains outside canonical recognition, framing this as an effort to weaken the Serbian Orthodox Church—an allegation the Ecumenical Patriarchate implicitly dismissed by declining to address it directly.
In its responding communiqué, the Ecumenical Patriarchate recalled that since its 2018 decision to proclaim the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, it has deliberately chosen not to reply to the steady stream of similar attacks emanating from political and ecclesiastical circles within the Russian Federation. That principled restraint, it stressed, continues to guide its public posture today.
The statement underscored that sensational claims, deliberate distortions of fact, personal insults, and other elements typical of propaganda campaigns do not detract the Mother Church from the fulfillment of its pastoral responsibilities or from its broader mission in service to Orthodox unity and ecumenical dialogue.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s full response is as follows:
“The Mother Church of Constantinople—who is also the Mother of the Church of Russia—expresses its deepest sorrow over the latest Russian attack directed against the person of His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, an attack which on this occasion has been mounted by state authorities of that country. Since 2018, when the Ecumenical Patriarchate resolved to grant autocephalous status to the Church of Ukraine, the Mother Church has consistently refrained from responding to the innumerable similar assaults emanating from ecclesiastical and political centers and figures in Russia. It maintains the same stance today.
Fantastical narratives, false reports, verbal abuse, and fabricated claims of every sort put forth by propagandists do not deter the Ecumenical Patriarchate from the continuation of its ministry and its ecumenical mission.”
Read the original Greek communiqué here.
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