Exarchate of Constantinople takes on a Russian priest who beats his parishioners
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=1296
Oslo, April 13, Interfax - A priest suspended by the Russian Orthodox Church has been incorporated in the clergy of St. Nicholas’s Parish (Patriarchate of Constantinople Exarchate for Russian Parishes in Western Europe) in Norway.
In connection with this grave violation of canon law, the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, sent a letter of protest to the head of the exarchate, Archbishop Gabriel de Vylder.
According to Russkaya Lepta, a Russian-speaking newspaper in Norway, after this protest was sent, the web-site of St. Nicholas’s in Oslo placed ‘another rude attack on the Russian Orthodox church’.
‘The impression is that distrust has been artificially sowed not only towards our holy Mother Church but generally towards all that is Russian’, the author of the newspaper article writes.
‘Systematic utterances blackening the Russian Orthodox Church contribute to the establishment and propagation of negative stereotypes and distrustful attitude to us’, he adds.
According to the communication service of the Department for External Church Relations, the said priest was suspended for ‘arbitrary abandonment of the parish, systematic drinking and a fight with parishioners’.