The hackers, known as Fancy Bear, have targeted top aides to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who is the spiritual leader of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians. Batholomew himself does not use email.

After months of research, the AP says it has evidence the hackers' information came from a hit list of 4,700 email addresses supplied last year by Dell subsidiary, Secureworks.

AP says targeting Bartholomew's aides shows the high stakes Kiev and Moscow place on Ukraine's religious future, as Bartholomew is currently deciding whether to accept a Ukrainian bid to remove the Ukranian church from its association with Russia.

He has the exclusive right to grant the Ukranian church "Tomos of Autocephaly" - full ecclesiastic independence.

The armed conflict between Ukrainian military forces and Russia-backed separatists is said to be behind Bartholomew's deliberations.

If he were to grant Ukranians the ecclesiastic independence they want, it would split the world's largest Eastern Orthodox denomination and erode the power and prestige of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Moscow Patriarchate has positioned itself as a leading player within the global Orthodox community.

Some observers say the issue could be decided as soon as next month.

"If something like this will take place on their doorstep, it would be a huge blow to the claims of Moscow's transnational role," says Vasilios Makrides, who is a specialist in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Erfurt in Germany.

"It's something I don't think they will accept."

Hilarion Alfeyev, the Moscow Patriarch's representative abroad, says granting the Tomos could lead to the biggest Christian schism since 1054, when Catholic and Orthodox believers parted ways.

"If such a thing happens, Orthodox unity will be buried," Alfeyev says.

The Russian Orthodox Church says it has no information about the hacking and declined to comment.

Source

• New York Post
• Religion News Service
• ABC
• Image: Greek Reporter

An Associated Press (AP) report saying it isn't is a hoax based on an incorrect, old report, says the hospital president, Mariella Enoc.

Enoc has been the hospital president since 2015.

The AP report's focus is on the time before Enoc took over as president. It says under its previous 2008-2015 administration, the mission of the "pope's hospital" as Bambino Gesu is known, had shifted to focus on profits over childcare.

In a statement on Monday the hospital threatened legal action against AP for what it said was a report containing "false, dated and gravely defamatory" accusations.

It said the report's accusations had been long been disproven by a Vatican investigation, which was led by a team of Americans who spent three days at the hospital in 2015.

The investigators' subsequent report "disproved" all the first report's allegations — except one involving space constraints — and declared the hospital in many ways "best in class."

It also said the Vatican should be proud of its hospital for the quality of care it provided, the staff's devotion to children and their families and employees' sense of pride at working there.

Enoc says since she took over as president,"the climate [at the hospital] today is more serene, and I urge everyone when there is a problem ... that we talk and talk and not keep it inside and then have it explode," she says.

"We can't always say 'yes,' unfortunately, but we can communicate."

Source

• TIME
• Catholic Herald
• Image: Alessia & Calliope