So, the meeting of the heads of churches in Amman, initiated by the Russian Orthodox Church as a showoff challenge to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and “coronation” of Kirill, which has been postponed and delayed a few times, can be considered absolutely insolvent. Not failed, but namely insolvent, void, meaningless, etc.
That’s because practically all senior clerics who have serious weight in the religious community, and on whose support the ROC and Kirill personally counted in the war against the Ecumenical Patriarch, have turned down Russia’s invitation to participate in this adventurous event.
One of the latest refusals to take part in the “sectarian rally” in Amman was the patriarch of Bulgaria, who will not even send his representatives to Jordan.
So, the event, scheduled for February 26, is seen as this year’s first major failure of the Russian Orthodox Church and the FSB security service, firmly affiliated with it. Moreover, all preparations that the ROC HQ in Danilov Monastery has been conducting since the second half of 2019, sending its envoys to all Orthodox churches trying to persuade, bribe, and even blackmail clerics, turned out to be just a waste of effort and money.
Indeed, instead of the 15 heads of Orthodox churches, or at least half of them, it’s only ROC’s actual representative, its main conspirator and eternal companion, the Serbian Church, which will attend the Russia-initiated meeting alongside an absolutely spineless Jerusalem church.Not a lot, frankly speaking, but also rather indicative. It’s indicative both in seeing black sheep in a herd and also in realizing how much the ROC authority has staggered, since they only managed to pull on their side those who had never actually crawled from under Kirill’s cassock.
Moreover, this shaky authority, which doesn’t really testify to Moscow’s claims to become the “third Rome”, will further drown Kirill, whose positions have recently been extremely unstable as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spiritual mentor, Metropolitan Tikhon, is already breathing down Kirill the loser’s neck.
So this fiasco, the latest in a row, will only harden Patriarch Kirill in his struggle for the throne because he is perfectly well aware that with every single day, the power is slipping from his hands. And while the Ecumenical Patriarchate has maintained its unshakable position, it will be very funny to watch the confrontation within the Russian Orthodox Church, which has been gaining momentum since the end of 2019, will this year reach its climax.
