In a post to his personal Facebook page, Archbishop Elia of Helsinki and all Finland referred to a report on his supposed meeting with the canonically-unrecognized Montenegrin Orthodox Church as a “masterclass in disinformation.”
The Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ) reported that during a trip to Rome, Archbishop Elia met with Boris Bojović, head of the unrecognized Montenegrin Orthodox Church. UOJ claimed that Archbishop Elia acted as a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in the encounter, highlighting “apparent inconsistencies between official denials from the Phanar and events on the ground.”
Archbishop Elia denied meeting with Bojović, asserting instead that he had had a “fleeting encounter” with “someone dressed as a bishop who introduced himself as being from Montenegro.”
“From this, a narrative is spun,” Archbishop Elias said. “Let this serve as a textbook example of how disinformation is manufactured and shamelessly disseminated.”
“There were no negotiations. There was no meeting. What occurred was a one-sided, two-minute encounter — the kind that happens at any large gathering where people cross paths.”
On Jan. 13, the Ecumenical Patriarchate issued a response to an aggressive polemic released a day earlier by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR. The statement from the SVR asserted the Ecumenical Patriarchate intends to move toward autocephaly for the Montenegrin Orthodox Church. The Ecumenical Patriarchate characterized the accusations directed at the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as baseless and unworthy of engagement.
The Montenegrin Orthodox Church is a canonically unrecognized Eastern Orthodox church, established in 1993 as a result of its separation from the Serbian Orthodox Church. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said in 2019 that the Ecumenical Patriarchate would “never give autocephaly to the so-called ‘Montenegrin Orthodox Church.’”
“No single Church … will recognize or support the anti-canonical fabrication of Dedeić,” the Ecumenical Patriarch wrote of the church’s former leader Miraš Dedeić, whom Bojović replaced in 2023.
Archbishop Elia visited Rome earlier this week as part of a Finnish ecumenical delegation to the Vatican. There, he met with Pope Leo XIV, who gave a speech to the Finnish delegation centered on Christian unity.
“Those who wish to construct elaborate stories from chance encounters may draw their own conclusions,” Archbishop Elia concluded in response to UOJ’s reportage. “The rest of us recognize this for what it is: the anatomy of a lie, laid bare.”
