On March 29-31, 2021, the St. Filaret Orthodox Christian Institute (Moscow) held an online conference “Modern Orthodox Ecclesiology: Theological Foundations of the Unity of the Church”. The conference, scheduled for May 2020, was postponed due to the pandemic and was held online with participation of theologians from Austria, Greece, Italy, Romania, Russia and Ukraine. During the three days of the conference, eight meetings were held on various aspects of the mentioned topic.
Sergii Bortnyk took part at the session “Unity of the Church: Contemporary Challenges” and made a report “Reconciliation of the Ukrainian Orthodoxy: Attempts and Prospects”. The speaker stressed here that the main cause of the conflict situation in the church milieu of Ukraine in the last few years was the merging of two different problems ‒ granting the autocephaly and solving the problem of schism.
At the session there were also two reports of the representatives of the Greek Orthodox tradition ‒ Petros Vassiliadis and Dimitrios Keramidas. In their speeches they touched the same topic and highlighted their vision of solving a range of problems related to various aspects of the mentioned theme.
Video record of the session is available at https://sfi.ru/sfi-today/news/bogoslovskie-osnovaniia-edinstva-tserkvi.html (March 31, Wednesday, Part 1). The written text of the report of Sergii Bortnyk (in Russian) is posted here.