-
3 weeks ago | 
divinediplomacy.com | Andreja Bogdanovski
Welcome to Divine Dispatch, your curated weekly briefing on church geopolitics. The dominant story this week remains the uncertainty surrounding the Egyptian court ruling on the legal status of St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. The Greek government is directly involved — Greece’s Foreign Minister is in Cairo as I write this.
-
3 weeks ago | 
churchtimes.co.uk | Andreja Bogdanovski
GREEK political and ecclesiastical authorities have defended the ancient rights of the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, after an Egyptian court ruled on its legal status last week. The UNESCO-protected site, constructed between 548 and 565 AD in the south-central Sinai Peninsula by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, is regarded as the world’s oldest continuously functioning Christian monastery.
-
4 weeks ago | 
divinediplomacy.com | Andreja Bogdanovski
Welcome to Divine Dispatch, your expertly curated weekly briefing on the pulse of church geopolitics. Over the past few days, Greece has seen significant mobilisation both from the government and the Church in response to a court ruling that could potentially lead to the closure of the Sinai monastery in Egypt. Reactions are already coming in from the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Archbishop Elpidophoros of GOARCH, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and more are certain to follow.
-
1 month ago | 
churchtimes.co.uk | Andreja Bogdanovski
ALMOST 2000 parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) (UOC) have transferred to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine since 2019, when the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, recognised the latter as an autocephalous Church (appointing its own head). The head of the State Service of Ukraine on Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience, Viktor Yelenskyi, announced that the majority of transitions took place in Kyiv, Volyn, and the Khmelnytskyi regions in western Ukraine.
-
1 month ago | 
churchtimes.co.uk | Andreja Bogdanovski
IN ITS latest annual report on Turkey’s process of accession to the EU, the European Parliament has called on the Turkish authorities to recognise “the legal personality” and the “public use of the ecclesiastical title” of the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew of Constantinople.
-
1 month ago | 
churchtimes.co.uk | Andreja Bogdanovski
POPE LEO XIV has said that the long-delayed peace talks between Russia and Ukraine should “finally happen” and bring about a “just and lasting peace”. He has offered the Vatican as a possible venue for negotiations. The Pope was addressing the crowds at his inauguration in Rome on Sunday (News, 19 May), after the peace negotiations in Istanbul on Friday had failed to produce a breakthrough.
-
1 month ago | 
premierchristianity.com | Andreja Bogdanovski
As Ukraine faces mounting international pressure to negotiate peace with Russia, some are urging the new pontiff to break with Vatican caution and confront Putin’s aggression head-on.
-
1 month ago | 
churchtimes.co.uk | Andreja Bogdanovski
PREVIOUS comments by Pope Leo XIV have been widely hailed in Ukraine as a positive sign. In interview with the Peruvian newspaper Semanario Expresión, in 2022, Bishop Robert Prevost of Chicalayo, in Peru, as the new Pope was then, described the war in Ukraine as “a true imperialist invasion” in which Russia “seeks to conquer territory for reasons of power”. A video of the interview has been shared online in Ukraine over the past week following the papal announcement.
-
1 month ago | 
churchtimes.co.uk | Andreja Bogdanovski
IN A documentary video shown on Russian state TV (Rossiya-1), marking 25 years of his leadership, President Putin has stated that Moscow is the “Third Rome”. “In Rome, Christianity was reformed, but not in Byzantium. . . And we came to believe that we are the successors of true Christianity. Moscow is the Third Rome, and there will be no Fourth. So we are the true Christians,” Mr Putin said in the documentary Russia. The Kremlin. Putin. 25 Years, made by Saida Medvedeva and Pavel Zarubin.
-
1 month ago | 
churchtimes.co.uk | Andreja Bogdanovski
THE Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has charged 14 senior figures in the Russian Orthodox Church with aiding the illegal transfer and seizure of churches in the temporarily occupied territories in southern and eastern Ukraine. The charges related to the period between 2022 and 2024 when the Moscow Patriarchate moved to annex the eparchies of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the occupied territories and place them under the direct control of Patriarch Kirill.
