Russian Orthodox Church breaks with Constantinople

The Holy Synod had no other choice but to cut all ties with the Istanbul Patriarchate, said Metropolitan Ilarion, head of the Russian Church’s foreign relations office, after a meeting of the Holy Synod, Russian Church’s governing body, in Minsk, Belarus, on Monday.

Last week, the Constantinople Patriarchate decided after a two-day session to grant Ukraine permission to establish an independent church, a move which Kiev declared crucial for preventing Russian meddling in Ukraine’s internal issues.

Russian Orthodox Church, on the other hand, said this marked the greatest split in Christianity in a thousand years, ever since the so-called Great Schism of 1054, when the Christian East and West split into what became the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches.

The primate of the Kiev Patriarchate, Patriarch Filaret Denysenko, who had been excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1997, was returned to his function.

A part of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine belongs to the Moscow Patriarchate, while others belong to the Kiev Patriarchate which, established after Ukraine declared its independence in 1992, remained unrecognised by the majority of Orthodox churches.