The Shepherd, August 2005
NEWS SECTION
SERBIAN HIERARCHS PROTEST PROPOSED SACRILEGE
HIS BEATITUDE Patriarch Pavle of Serbia and Metropolitan Amfilohije are among Orthodox churchmen who have voiced protests to the Montenegran government over plans to destroy the church of the Holy Trinity on the top of Mount Rumija. The Ministry of Ecology and Space Planning passed a decision that the church should be destroyed on 22nd June, at the request of Muslim deputies. Metropolitan Amfilohije points out that he himself personally interceded to prevent the destruction of a mosque in Belgrade, and yet the same respect is not now reciprocated. The Patriarch, in a letter to the President of Montenegro, Svetozar Marovic, mentions that the tiny church, which is only three by two-and-a-half metres, was re-built with the help of Muslims! The original chapel there had been destroyed by the Turks in A.D. 1571, and, says the Patriarch, “from then to today Orthodox faithful from the region - with the participation until very recently of Roman Catholic and Islamic believers - carried a stone or two up the mountain every year on the feast of the Holy Trinity to the church on top of Rumija … intended for the restoration of this destroyed but not forgotten holy shrine of the people.”
ABBOT TORTURED AND MURDERED
ARCHIMANDRITE GERMAN of the Davydova Pustyn, some 50 miles from Moscow, was found on Tuesday 26th June murdered in his cell with his hands tied with electric cable. At first it was believed that this crime was a case of violent robbery - monies amounting to £115,000 in cash was taken from his safe, and another £3,000 left on his desk. However investigations have revealed that the clergyman, Vyacheslav Khapugin in the world, was tortured before he was killed, and that he had extensive connections with the criminal underworld. From the evidences of torture, it is presumed that he had somehow crossed these rather shady associates. Fr German was ordained at the age of 22 after serving in the Soviet army, and eight years later he was made abbot of the monastery. Despite his monastic calling, he is said to have been a “rich businessman,” and to have rebuilt the monastery from zero. It is also reported that his connections with mafia figures such as Anton Melevsky gave him access to the vast amounts of money needed to finance these projects. Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, an official spokesman for the Patriarchate, said that he did not know why Fr German had so much money in his possession because monasteries largely controlled their own finances. He said that some 20 priests had been killed in the past 15 years.
BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE
THE AUGUST 2005 issue of BBC History Magazine contains two items of passing interest to Orthodox Christians. In the first it relates how a British Conservative MP, Oliver Locker Lampson, who was in command of a unit of Royal Naval armoured cars in Russia in the period immediately after the Revolution, devised a plan to rescue the Tsar-Martyr Nicolas II from captivity. Lampson made contact with the Tsar and suggested that he take the place of his own orderly, a man named Tovell. He would then be taken to Archangel and put on a ship for Britain. However, the Tsar is reported to have refused to be rescued unless his wife and family could also be saved, and the plan came to nothing.
In a second piece, the magazine reports that documents, newly released from the national Archives, show that 25 years ago the Queen was advised that “there is nothing in English law that endorses her position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” At the request of the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Philip Moore, in 1979 a Home Office legal adviser, barrister Anthony Hewins, commented on a paper relating to the Crown and the constitution which had been published by the SPCK. He said: “The paper may go too far in asserting that the Sovereign must be a communicant member of the Church of England. The coronation service provides for the reception of Holy Communion by the monarch but the ceremony is not essential to succession. It may be the King Edward VIII was not a communicant during his tenure on the throne.” Hewlins, the article says, considered that the purpose of the Act of Settlement of 1701, was to prevent the monarch accepting the primacy of the Pope. The article ends with his comment: “On this assumption no greater objection could be taken to the enjoyment of the crown by a member of the Holy Orthodox Church, or the Old Catholic Church, than to a Presbyterian monarch” (emphasis ours!). 
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