The Russian version of the book entitled Ukrainskiy tserkovniy vopros (Ukrainian church issue) has come out. It continues a series of books devoted to the Ukrainian schism. Its author is Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus, one of the most authoritative hierarchs of the Greek Orthodox Church, an ardent defender of the interests of the Church, purity of her confession and integrity of her canonical order.
Collected in the book are articles written by Metropolitan Seraphim from 2018 to 2020 in response to the events happened in church life in Ukraine. These years were marked by the beginning of a crisis in the inter-Orthodox relations caused by the intervention of the Patriarchate of Constantinople into the church life in Ukraine. This lawless interference was crowned by the uncanonical act in which Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople granted on January 6, 2019, ‘the tomos of autocephaly’ to a group of Ukrainian schismatics. In his publications, the most of which have been published in Russian for the first time, Metropolitan Seraphim gives an assessment to these events tragic for the Universal Orthodoxy.
In his preface to the book, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, stresses that ‘the Metropolitan of Piraeus, unerringly defines both the principal nerve of the Ukrainian church issue and its most profound and painful component. It lies in the violation of the right correlation between unity and conciliarity in the Church – ‘the inaction and distortion of conciliarity’.
The edition prepared by the Poznaniye Publishers in cooperation with the Foundation for the Support of Christian Culture and Heritage is the second one in the series of ten books devoted to international and inter-Orthodox relations. Among the authors of the next publications are Metropolitan Daniel of Vidin, Bulgarian Orthodox Church; Bishop Anthony of Moravici, Serbian Orthodox Church; and Protopresbyter Anastasios Gotsopoulos, Greek Orthodox Church, and others.