Orthodox Church – praag.org

Moscow and Athens forge new alliance

The Greek prime minister’s visit to Moscow aimed at improving relations with Russia angers many in Europe – this is what reports in Greek media, covering the visit, boil down to.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is on a two-day visit to Moscow, making headlines in Greek media.”Alexis Tsipras’ upcoming visit to Moscow and meeting with Putin has generated much talk, analysis and warnings,” iefimerida.gr wrote in a piece titled Tsipras-Putin: Smiles in Moscow, Annoyance in Brussels. “Both sides underline that Moscow and Athens will discuss many issues and there is no shortage of speculations on what Tsipras will ask and what Putin will offer.

“The visit could help return Greek produce to the Russian market, according to the media outlet. “Exports are worth 125 million Euros and are of primary importance to the agriculture in northern Greece,” iefimerida.gr said.

EU sanctions and the Russian food ban, investments, privatization, energy cooperation and the Turkish Stream gas pipeline, tourism, the Ukrainian crisis and Greece-Turkey relations are the main topics on the agenda.

“Putin is preparing a ‘gift’ for Tsipras,” newsit.gr said, adding that it is the first visit of a Greek prime minister to Moscow in five years. According to the media outlet, Tsipras’ visit “caused outrage in Brussels” that “thinks the Russian president is trying to undermine the European stance on sanctions against Moscow.”

The visit sent partners and creditors, especially in Berlin, into turmoil. Some “on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean also worry that Greece would throw itself into Russia’s arms to come up with ‘alternative plans’ to solve the Greek problem,” the Crete media outlet pointed out.

“Tsipras and Putin are forging a new alliance,” according to protothema.gr. “All eyes in Europe are on Tsipras and Putin. ‘The spring’ in Greek-Russian relations gets on Europe’s nerves. The visit has created an atmosphere of enthusiasm in Moscow. … It is seen as a breakthrough in the bilateral relations that would revive and strengthen cooperation in a number of areas,” the media outlet said.”

The visit also sends important political signals: both countries are discontent with the West. In this context Tsipras wants to develop a diverse foreign policy and alliances, while Putin wants to show that he has power and influence to attract the attention of European leaders and countries,” protothema.gr said.

Source: Sputniknews

Russians celebrate Christmas today

Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas today.

This year, the Russian president Vladimir Putin celebrated the holiday in Russia’s Otradnoye village near the southern city of Voronezh, where he attended a Christmas service at a local church.

The Russian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar and celebrates Christmas on January 7.

The Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in the Otradnoye village, accommodating some 450 people, was crowded during the Christmas Eve service.

Putin sent his greetings to the congregation and personally thanked Archpriest Gennady Zaridze, the rector of the church, who helped to restore the building and open a church-run orphanage.

The church in Otradnoye is among the country’s cultural heritage sites. Construction work began in 1893 and lasted eight years. In 1930, the church was closed and used as a grain storage facility. The restoration began only in 1991.

Russian Christmas card from 1912, before the Red Revolution

Russian churches shelled by US-backed military in Ukraine

His Holiness, Patriarch Kirill, of Moscow and All Russia, has stated that around fifty churches of the Russian Orthodox Church have been either completely destroyed or heavily damaged as a result of actions of the Ukrainian military since the beginning of the armed opposition in Ukraine this spring.

The RIA News Agency has reported that the Patriarch delivered a speech during a meeting with students of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Federation Ministry for Foreign Affairs at the Christ the Savior Cathedral, in which he noted: “Currently there is a forceful opposition against our Church – three clergymen have been killed, over ten priests have been arrested, detained, and tortured, and many clerics have been expelled from the country. Approximately fifty of our churches are either completely destroyed or heavily damaged by precision strikes of the Ukrainian artillery.”

Speaking about the tragic events in Ukraine, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church noted that the Church consistently supports a position on peace, disapproves of bloodshed, and tirelessly encourages both sides to invest in dialogue and peace.

“Today there is no other peaceful force in Ukraine, but the one of the Russian Orthodox Church. Considering our historical experience, we do not identify ourselves with either of the sides of this civil conflict,” His Holiness, Patriarch Kirill, pointed out.

God is on the side of Russia

Russia is a Christian country, Putin repeated recently.

This speech recalls last December’s address where the former KGB chief spoke of Russia as standing against a decadent West:

“Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.”

Heard any Western leader, say, Barack Obama, talk like that lately?

Indicting the “Bolsheviks” who gave away Crimea to Ukraine, Putin declared, “May God judge them.”

What is going on here?

With Marxism-Leninism a dead faith, Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

In the new war of beliefs, Putin is saying, it is Russia that is on God’s side. The West is Gomorrah.

Vladimir Putin knows exactly what he is doing, and his new claim has a venerable lineage. The ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers who exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, was, at the time of his death in 1964, writing a book on “The Third Rome.”

The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today’s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was — Moscow.

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

Putin is plugging into some of the modern world’s most powerful currents.

Not only in his defiance of what much of the world sees as America’s arrogant drive for global hegemony. Not only in his tribal defense of lost Russians left behind when the USSR disintegrated.

He is also tapping into the worldwide revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West.

In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity. His recent speeches carry echoes of John Paul II whose Evangelium Vitae in 1995 excoriated the West for its embrace of a “culture of death.”

What did Pope John Paul mean by moral crimes?

The West’s capitulation to a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide — the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes that she was stunned when in Tbilisi to hear a Georgian lawyer declare of the former pro-Western regime of Mikhail Saakashvili, “They were LGBT.”

“It was an eye-opening moment,” wrote Applebaum. Fear and loathing of the same-sex-marriage pandemic has gone global. In Paris, a million-man Moral Majority marched in angry protest.

Author Martha Gessen, who has written a book on Putin, says of his last two years, “Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world.”

But the war to be waged with the West is not with rockets. It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia’s role, in Putin’s words, is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”

Would that be the “chaotic darkness” and “primitive state” of mankind, before the Light came into the world?

This writer was startled to read in the Jan-Feb. newsletter from the social conservative World Council of Families in Rockford, Ill., that, of the “ten best trends” in the world in 2013, number one was “Russia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader.”

In 2013, the Kremlin imposed a ban on homosexual propaganda, a ban on abortion advertising, a ban on abortions after 12 weeks and a ban on sacrilegious insults to religious believers.

“While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view,” writes WCF’s Allan Carlson, “Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values. During the Soviet era, Western communists flocked to Moscow. This year, World Congress of Families VII will be held in Moscow, Sept. 10-12.”

Will Vladimir Putin give the keynote?

In the new ideological Cold War, whose side is God on now?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.