http://katehon.com/article/fr-andrew...thodox-council
For example, there are three great issues in Orthodox life that are not even on the agenda of this meeting: firstly, the divisive introduction of the Roman Catholic calendar for the fixed feasts among some Local Churches, which at once caused schisms in them; secondly, the phyletistic, jurisdictional divisions in the Diaspora, with the failure to establish new Local Churches for Orthodox who live and were born outside the canonical territories of the old Local Churches; thirdly, the question of missionary work to the Non-Orthodox world. And, incredibly, these are the very three issues, probably the only important ones, that are not being discussed!
In other words, the very concept of this whole ‘Pan-Orthodox’ farce has been a purely political manipulation from the very start.
Besides religion there is a purely geopolitical issue - the status of autocephalous Churches, especially for the Ukraine. So the agenda proposed by Patriarch Bartholomew was difficult for the Russian Orthodox Church. What is the role of politics in this matter in your opinion?
I think this whole affair is a purely political operation, imposed by the US State Department on its minions. This has been made clear by the call on 16 June of the Ukrainian Parliament, the Rada, for Constantinople to grant ‘independence’ to the Ukrainian Church (which one?), despite the uncanonicity of any such move. This has obviously been thought up in the backrooms of Washington.
How do you assess the positions of the Bulgarian, Georgian, Antiochian and, at first, of the Serbian Church, which refused to participate?
Each had its own reasons for not participating, apart from disagreement with the ecumenist agenda. Antioch because of its anger at Jerusalem’s invasion of its canonical territory and the fact that Constantinople foolishly told it to ignore such a question of principle until after the Council, even though the problem has been dragging on for years; the Georgians and the Bulgarians are not participating for being insulted by the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, which declared last April that the Georgians were fundamentalists and the Bulgarians were thieves, actually creating a diplomatic incident in Bulgaria. As for the Serbs, I think their problem is that of essentially everyone else - that Constantinople simply ignores any criticism, blindly trying to impose its will regardless of others, as if it were an Eastern Papacy. Of course, the Serbian Church, racked by a US-caused schism in Kosovo and under immense pressure from Washington/the EU/NATO and the masonic government in Belgrade, then decided to attend the meeting in Crete conditionally, but that is another story.