Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast. I'm your host, Catholic Answers

Apologists and Speaker, Trent Horn. Obviously, the biggest thing in the news right now

is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Obviously, there's a lot to talk about there. But one

thing I wanted to focus on today was an article that was published at Catholic Answers

magazine online, written by my friend and colleague Michael Lofton on the spiritual war in

Ukraine, that to really, there's a lot of geopolitical, historical elements involved in the

Russian-Ukrain conflict. And one of the elements of the conflict is religious, specifically

dealing with the Eastern Orthodox churches there in Ukraine, in Russia. So we're going

to be talking all of that with someone who knows a lot about that. He is Mr. Michael Lofton,

the host of Reason and Theology. He is here with us today to talk about the spiritual

war in Ukraine and why that matters. So Michael, welcome back to the show.

Hey Trent, thanks for having me back on.

Absolutely. So let's jump into it. Your article is about the problem of schism in the Eastern

Orthodox churches. Now, it's where people understand that when we say Eastern Orthodoxy,

it's not one unified thing like Catholicism. You have Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox,

Armenian Orthodox, all of these different Orthodox churches under different metropolitan

and patriarchs. And so you talk about schism. And I think that can be hard for us to wrap

our heads around in Eastern Orthodoxy because when we think of schism, we think of refusing

to submit to the Pope and to the bishops in union with the Pope. But how can you people

make a charge of schism among the different Eastern Orthodox churches?

Yeah, that's what's really complex here because as you note in Catholicism, we have an

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