Greek Archdiocese creates "Slavic" Vicariate

For those keeping score at home... in Europe the EP's Russian parishes left their newly formed vicariate for a fledgling Muscovite archdiocese. In the US some ROCOR parishes left and became an EP vicariate. Regardless of the extenuating circumstances here, we are left with a complicated situation in world Orthodoxy where Russians are talking about serving people in places like Africa and the EP is setting up legal entities in the Czech Republic. The sharp-eyed will note that there are already autocephalous Orthodox bodies in place there. Once formed it is hard to undo such idiosyncratic configurations. I still long for the day other jurisdictions get out of the otherwise pristine Alaska and leave it to the episcopate that has been serving that lands for hundreds of years. It only makes sense, but sense is not what put those parishes under non-local omophoria.

Ironically, it is under the idea of "better serving" such-and-such group that we find Orthodox patriarchates painting over each other in evangelizing/proselytizing efforts in the Far East, South America, and maybe soon places like Kenya and Slovakia.

God willing this brinksmanship will end in my lifetime because I find it ever harder to explain to my children (much less my parishioners) why Patriarch W is saying or doing something in country X when Orthodox group Y is tragically dying at the hands of Islamic/dictatorship group Z. In the interest of time, I often make the physical emotive equivalent of the Facebook "It's complicated" status and hope that will suffice for any given conversation.

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New York (GOARCH) - On Monday, March 9, 2020, following approval of the Mother Church of Constantinople last November after the request of the Holy Eparchial Synod, His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and Exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, announced the creation of the Vicariate for the Orthodox Christian Communities of Slavic Tradition.

The new Vicariate will report directly to Archbishop Elpidophoros and at the beginning includes hundreds of faithful belonging to the following three Orthodox communities: Saint Matrona of Moscow Cathedral of Miami, Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker Monastery in North Fort Myers, Florida, and Saint John the Forerunner and Baptist Cathedral of Brooklyn. The clergy of the Vicariate are Very Rev. Archimandrite Alexander Belya, Very Rev. Archpriest Vasiliy Deyak, Rev. Archpriest Oleksandr Belya, Rev. Archpriest Ioann Spasyuk, Rev. Protodeacon Rostislav Zadorozhnyy and Rev. Deacon George A. Hero.

Archbishop Elpidophoros has appointed Very Rev. Archimandrite Alexander Belya as the first Vicar of the Vicariate.