Russian Church is "schismatic?"
Met. Emmanuel's statements paint a picture of an alternative reality in which Moscow is waging a "Manichaean crusade" while Constantinople has not been sewing violence and schism, but defending the faithful.
In an interview with Le Point, Metropolitan Emmanuel makes a number of bizarre claims about the Churches of Russia and Constantinople. His words seem to reveal that the Phanar has fully bought into a neo-papal ecclesiology.
Let's unpack his claims and see if they match up with reality.
When asked whether granting autocephaly to Ukraine was the root cause of the current division within the Orthodox Church, Emmanuel firmly denied the claim. He emphasized that "it was precisely Constantinople that, despite pressure from the tsarist government in the 18th century and later from the Soviet regime in the 20th, defended the desire for independence among Orthodox peoples—Slavic, Baltic, and Scandinavian—and provided canonical grounds for this independence after 1991."
These are interesting comments. Met. Emmanuel seems to have forgotten the period of the Turkish Yoke, when the Phanar abolished the native hierarchies of the Southern Slavic churches and ruled over them on behalf of the Turks.
Or perhaps we should recall the Soviet period, when the Church in Russia and Ukraine suffered through the most extensive and systematic persecution in the history of the Christianity? While Constantinople today reveres the sanctity of St. Tikhon of Moscow, when he and his flock were being brutalized by the Red Terror, Constantinople chose to pressure him into dissolving the Russian Church, declaring the heretics of the Soviet-backed Living Church to be the true, canonically legitimate Church of Russia.
Constantinople exploited the internal chaos of the Russian Revolution, attempting to seize large swaths of the Russian Church.
Having unilaterally granted itself ultimate authority over all Orthodox parishes across the globe, Constantinople issued false Tomos of Autocephaly to churches in Poland, Finland, Estonia, and Czechoslovakia. This greatly weakened the Russian Church's ability to defend itself when thousands of clergy and monastics were being massacred by Communist fanatics.
When the Russian Church was finally liberated from her suffering, she did not demand repentance from Constantinople. Perhaps she should have. For Constantinople—having lost most of its own flock during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire—has continued down the path of seizing other local churches’ territories.
This is precisely what occurred in Ukraine.
Metropolitan Emmanuel continues: "The decision of His All-Holiness regarding Ukraine was not only prophetic but fully in line with the rights and responsibilities of the primacy of service vested in the Ecumenical Throne as the Mother Church."
A "right" that Constantinople conveniently bestowed upon itself. It is worth noting that, of the nineteen autocephalous churches, only one—Alexandria—has recognized the legitimacy of Constantinople's so-called "Orthodox Church in Ukraine."
"Today, only the Moscow Patriarchate insists on the schism—and it alone is schismatic, having once again, this time voluntarily, fallen under the influence of the Kremlin."
This is a truly phenomenal assertion. It was Constantinople who invaded the canonical territory of Ukraine and fomented schism–at the behest of then CIA Director Mike Pompeo, no less. Met. Emmanuel remains silent on how his new "daughter church" has spent the last seven years violently seizing the canonical churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
According to him, "the break did not occur at our initiative; we do not equate this deviation with the rich contribution of the Russian Orthodox tradition to global culture, and we are working toward restoring unity with the Russian Church once it regains true freedom."
He further elaborates: "the double-headed eagle—symbolizing harmony between spiritual and secular authority—was the emblem of the Roman and later Byzantine Empires, as well as of many who claimed their legacy... In modern Russia, however, this eagle has turned into a single-headed one—a complete merger of powers has taken place."
On the one hand, the Metropolitan says that Constantinople has been defending the faithful in the face of "tsarist pressure" and "the Soviet regime," but then seems to claim that only in modern Russia is the conflation of church and state an issue.
He recalled that the Council of Eastern Patriarchs, held in Constantinople in 1872, "condemned as ‘ethnophyletism’ the fusion of religion and politics, nation and denomination, Church and state, defining it as ‘the most dangerous modern heresy.’"
This is not what the council said, but since the Metropolitan's mind is hazy on the topic, we have provided an exerpt:
"... We repress, blame, and condemn phyletism, i.e., distinctions of races, disputes, emulation, and national divisions within the Church of Jesus Christ, as opposed to the doctrine of the Gospel and the sacred canons of our blessed fathers who support the Holy Church and maintain in good order the Christian community they guide on the path of divine piety.
II. We declare, in agreement with the sacred canons, those who admit this phyletism and dare to establish new phyletic assemblies based on this principle as real schismatics, alien to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Therefore, we declare schismatic and alien to the Orthodox Church of Christ all those who have separated themselves from the Orthodox Church, who have set up a separate altar, and who have formed a phyletic assembly..."
It would seem then, that Constantinople's own actions in setting up the so-called Orthodox Church in Ukraine (OCU), violate the decree of 1872.
The decree goes on to denounce messianic nationalism and racial superiority; we feel it pertinent then, to mention Patriarch Bartholomew's declaration of the Greek language as the "Mother tongue of the Holy Spirit," and Greek culture "the greatest intellectual paradise in the world."
Constantinople's actions have nothing to do with "Russian phyletism." By their definition, anything which prevents them from consolidating all ecclesial authority under Bartholomew is ethnophyletism, as Bartholomew's ultimate goal is to set himself up as the Pope of the East.
The Phanar has spent much of the last decade convincing the West that Pat. Bartholomew is already Pope of the East, as we see in La Point's article: "Metropolitan Emmanuel (Adamakis) is one of the top officials of the Orthodox Church. [He] has been at the head of the major see of Chalcedon since 2021 and works directly in Istanbul with Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the Primate of Orthodoxy."
This is why Pat. Bartholomew is so eager to unite with Rome. If he can heal the supposedly non-existent schism, his global popularity would skyrocket so substantially that, practically speaking, it wouldn't matter that the other Churches oppose him. He would be the second most powerful churchman in the world overnight, by default.
Overnight, any local church not submitting to his "authority" would be deemed schismatic not merely by the Phanar, but Rome and the governments of the West.
But if Bartholomew wants to be the man who sees the lamp stands of the Churches of Asia Minor snuffed out, so be it. The rest of us must remain steadfast and uphold the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith of Christ's Holy Orthodox Church.
