Below is a translation of a message from Met. Luke of Zaporozhye. In it, briefly, two very important topics are touched upon, the first is the courageous voice of St. Tikhon rebuking godless government authorities. His words could be addressed to any number of current world governments and leaders. In our times a very false peace is being promoted, and it is demanding complete submission from all. May God grant us, in our time, such valiant Orthodox voices as St. Tikhon. The second, has to do with the interference of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the affairs of the Russian Church. The modern crises created by the EP in Ukraine must be understood in light of EP’s continued actions and ideologies over the past hundred years or more.

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One hundred years have passed since the time Saint Tikhon wrote his epistle where in he defended Orthodoxy and stood as a guardian of our faith. Yet, as one reads his proclamations, it seems as if one hundred years have not passed at all and that he is addressing those moderns who have risen up against his Mother Church and the people of God.

On October, 25, 1918, in a letter to the Council of People’s Commissars, the holy Patriarch Tikhon wrote,

“You hold in your hands government power and are already preparing to celebrate one year of the October Revolution, yet the rivers of our brother’s spilt blood demands of us to speak to you a word of truth … You have divided all the people into warring factions, which has plunged them into an unprecedented brutality of fratricide. The love of Christ you have openly replaced with hatred and instead of peace you have brought an artificially inflamed hostility. And there is no end in sight to the war you have created … No one feels safe, everyone is living in constant fear … You seduce the people with the possible hope of ease and profit without punishment, you have clouded their conscience, and have stifled the knowledge of sin in them. Yet, whatever words may be used to cover up these atrocities: murder, violence, and robbery will always remain terrible and will cry out to Heaven for vengeance against these sins and crimes … We know that our denunciations will cause you only anger and indignation, yet the higher the ‘pillar of your malice’ rises, the more sure it will be a testimony to [the truth of] our denunciations.” (Acts of St. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russian, Moscow, 1994, pp. 149-151)

At that time, when rivers of blood were flowing in our country, and clergy were being rounded up and shot or sent off to camps to die, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Meletios (Metaxakis), through his representative communicated to L. Trotsky his willingness to come to Moscow and participate in a trial of Patriarch Tikhon so to depose him “according to all the canonical rules” and recognize the supreme ecclesiastical administration of the Revisionists. On June 1, 1924, in the publication “Isvestia” there appeared an article entitled, “The Ecumenical Patriarch removes Patriarch Tikhon from the administration of the Russian Church” (A.V. Mazyrin. Patriarch Tikhon and the Patriarch of Constantinople).

History of one hundred years ago is again being repeated in Ukraine. And the end of this history will be the same. Patriarch Tikhon is revered throughout the whole Orthodox world as a holy confessor. And only historians remember the life of Patriarch Meletios, a member of the Greek Masonic Lodge. “A power loving spirit, an evil demon,” thus did Metropolitan Methodios of Kerkyra name him. This same definition could be safely applied to the current Patriarch of Constantinople.

Patriarch Meletios had a terrible death, languishing for six days in incessant and sever agony. A person would not wish this on his worst enemy.

Met. Luke of Zaporozhye.