OPEN LETTER TO PATRIARCH CYRIL OF MOSCOW

His Holiness, Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow
Danilov Monastery
115191 Moscow
RUSSIA
 
Your Holiness:

​As we enter Great Lent this week, I ask forgiveness and seek a humble, teachable heart.
“Where shall I begin to lament the deeds of my wretched life?”
 
As we pray,
O Lord and Master of my life take from me
the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love.
O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions,
and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages.
Amen.
 
Sincerely entreated. I confess, I am stunned by Your Holiness’s aberrant and preposterous comments composed and promoted by the Moscow Patriarchate spokesmen, notably at the inception of this penitential season. It compels a response.

Your Holiness strives tirelessly to deepen its self-isolation with a contrived polemic. In an endeavor to infect other local Orthodox churches and create schism, which does not exist in the Orthodox Church. Even as you attempt to cloak this most pointless longwinded ecclesio-ambush in pseudo-righteousness, Your Holiness toils in vain, for only Moscow has ceased commemoration of the Ecumenical Patriarch and other local churches. Only Moscow! This predatory behavior prompting Orthodox clerics to recently indict blasphemy against the Russian church’s leadership under Your Holiness’s omophorion.
​
It has been a year since Your Holiness’s instigated and uncanonical Hashemite Gathering. Going unnoticed by most, a new bald-faced tactic has repetitively been employed by the Moscow Patriarchate. Unduly burdening Christians at the commencement of Lent as to defer a response is simply caustic and antithetical to our Lenten calling. To put it forthrightly it is beneath your Holiness’s distinction and unworthy of any bishop let alone one with the title Patriarch.

Speaking on behalf of Your Holiness, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev with a spirit of despondency claims “The mechanism that operated until recently, when such meetings were initiated by the Patriarch of Constantinople, is no longer in effect… and lost legitimacy as the first among equals.” A dishonorable and petulant claim besmirching Orthodoxy’s true and singular Mother Church; Constantinople. This fabricated assertion against the Ecumenical Patriarchate exemplifies a lust of power which has become the hallmark of the Moscow Patriarchate and continues to blemish Your tenure.

Sloth takes away a man's spiritual welfare. Having become indifferent to the duties and obligations to Christ’s Church -as there are NO doctrinal separations amongst the Orthodox Churches- Your Holiness has abandoned crucial philosophical questions, neglected historical scholarship, and ineffectively challenges to alter the core ecclesiological fundamentals of Orthodoxy.

The despair or absence of hope of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations appears to be manifested in Metropolitan Hilarion’s idle talk with ecclesiological deceptiveness by inventing a host of new historical facts i.e. “The Jerusalem Patriarch is at the head of the most ancient Orthodox Patriarchates.”

As we know, Your Holiness, in all our liturgical texts the “mother of all Churches” is the “City of Jerusalem” not the “Patriarchate of Jerusalem.” In fact, any historian, theologian, or honest broker of the topic understands the Patriarchate of Jerusalem fell into obscurity for centuries. Even the Jerusalem Patriarchate writes “…the holy City as an insignificant large village was subject politically and administratively to Caesaria…” Well into the fifth century, Jerusalem was known as a simple “bishopric, when the Council of Chalcedon granted Jerusalem independence from the metropolitan of Antioch and from any other higher-ranking bishop, granted what is now known as autocephaly.” Eventually “this led to Jerusalem becoming a patriarchate, one of the five patriarchates known as the pentarchy.” Until the 1054 schism between East and West, Jerusalem maintained fifth (last) position in the diptychs. Today She is fourth, and Your Holiness is aware who maintains the fifth position.

Ill-advisedly, the local church of Moscow has entrusted Maestro Hilarion with the responsibility of reconciliation at which he, and Your Holiness have failed to date. Moreover, as Your Holiness is keenly aware, it is only Moscow’s self-imposed isolation which constitutes Your so-called “schism.” The DECR is now becoming the de facto propaganda arm of local government interests and not the Church. Yet without canonical justification, ethical cause, or ecclesiastic legitimacy Your Holiness’s comportment is consistently supercilious. As a result, Orthodoxy weeps.

To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. 1 Peter 2:21

Contrasting Moscow’s petty-mindedness which is on international display by Your Holiness’s Department of External Affairs, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew embarks this Great Lent admirably and instills in us:
‘The authentic spiritual life is a way of internal renewal, an exodus from ourselves, a loving movement toward our neighbor. It is not based on syndromes of purity and exclusion, but on forgiveness and discernment, doxology, and thanksgiving, according to the experiential wisdom of the ascetic tradition: “It is not food, but gluttony that is evil …not speaking, but idle speech …not the world, but the passions.”
 
Your Holiness, in closing I pray you step back from the breach, calm the rhetoric, pursue unity, and as Holy Seraphim of Sarov taught "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved."
 
“Have compassion on me who has sinned more than all mankind.”
The sinner,
Hagiographos
Elias Damianakis
Archon Maestor the Great Church of Christ