- Russian Orthodox archbishop faces trial over poker moonlighting.
- Archbishop Nestor is head of Church in Western Europe.
- Church self-discipline masks tensions over Ukraine warfare dissent.
The Russian Orthodox Church has bounced a poker-playing archbishop from his position as head of the Exarchate of Western Europe.
Archbishop Nestor of Korsun, prime proper, aka poker participant Evgeny Sirotenko, most important picture, is receiving a variety of warmth from the Russian Orthodox Church proper now. (Sota Information)
Whereas the Church didn’t give a cause for the removing of Archbishop Nestor of Korsun from his place, impartial Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta has discovered it’s the cleric’s double life as a participant on the French event circuit that has so displeased Patriarch Kirill, Primate of Moscow and all Rus’.
By no means belief a poker participant, so the saying goes, and the Patriarch believes Archbishop Nestor is as much as no good, per Novaya Gazeta.
Poker Shark
Since September 2023, the archbishop has been taking part in dwell poker tournaments, primarily in Paris, underneath his actual identify, Evgeny Sirotenko, in keeping with the Hendon Mob Database. Throughout that point, he has made seven ultimate tables and amassed $47,182 in gross event earnings by taking part in low-to-medium purchase in tournaments.
He has additionally been snapped lounging on the tables wearing poker casuals, relatively than the floor-length black cassock and stiff, tall, cylindrical kamilavka headgear that usually befits one among his place.
In addition to being relieved of his duties, which contain main the Church in France, Nice Britain, Belgium, Italy, Eire, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Monaco, Sirotenko can be topic to an ecclesiastical trial, in keeping with a press launch from the Church.
It will decide whether or not he must be defrocked for violating Apostolic Canon 50 of the Council of Laodicea, which prohibits clergymen from even attending locations the place playing is going down. It’s going to additionally study whether or not he has used Church cash to fund his poker profession, Novaya Gazeta claims.
Voice of Dissent
However others are questioning whether or not this poker factor may very well be a pretext to eliminate a hard voice of opposition to the warfare in Ukraine.
In April 2022, Sirotenko and Archbishop Francisco Javier Martínez revealed a joint declaration in opposition to the warfare that known as for “an finish to violence and barbarity and to pay attention in a single’s conscience to the voice of God, who rejects evil.”
That seemingly rankled with Patriarch Kirill, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin, who has praised the invasion and blamed the battle on “homosexual parades.” In the meantime, he has described Moscow’s opponents in Ukraine as “evil forces” and Putin’s reign as “a miracle from God.”
“He didn’t promote the Russian world,” Ksenia Luchenko, a journalist specializing within the position of the Church in Russian society and politics, wrote on Telegram of Sirotenko’s downfall.
“He didn’t bow low sufficient… He at all times sided along with his monks, not the patriarchate, and stood up for them,” she mentioned.
