The absence of real opposition to the claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople will only whet phanariots’ appetites more and more. The Phanar began to put pressure on the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia with the threat of revoking autocephaly.
Patriarch Bartholomew once again expresses his outrage at the fact that the OCCLS remembers about its autocephaly given by the Russian Church in 1951, calling it “imaginary”. This is not the first letter of such content, but for the first time a threat to revoke the autocephaly clearly sounds. At the same time, the letter is addressed not to Metropolitan Rostislav, Primate of the Church, but to archbishop Michael of Prague – according to the Constantinople Tomos of 1998, it is the ruling bishop of Prague who is the head of the OCCLS.
Tellingly, the Greeks in their actions completely switched to case law, creating more and more precedents. Because earlier the independence of any Church was usually abolished when the state borders were changed and this or that land became part of the empire. So, for example, the Bulgarian and Serbian Churches lost their independence, becoming part of the Ottoman Empire, the Georgian – after the entry of the Georgian lands into the Russian Empire. But let us note that these acquisitions were always carried out by the secular authorities.
The Ottomans subordinated all Orthodox Christians of their state to the Patriarch of Constantinople, regardless of nationality, in Russia at that time there was a synodal administration, and the Georgian Church was integrated into this system. But to deprive the independence of the Church, which is not administratively dependent of the Patriarchate in Istanbul, and even the church authorities, is a new plot. And there will be more and more such plots, first in the form of threats, and then in the form of real actions. The absence of real opposition to the claims of the Phanar in the Orthodox world, the reaction in the style of “you are neither cold nor hot” will only whet more and more appetites.
The “Ukrainian question”, as it had been predicted, has opened Pandora’s box and has turned out to be a point of no return in world Orthodoxy. Drawing historical analogies, we can say that we have already passed 1054, but have not yet reached 1204.