Archpastoral Letter of our Bishop, Metropolitan Gregory of Nyssa.
https://www.acrod.org/diocesan-life/news/16697/paschal-archpastoral-2026

April 12, 2026
​Protocol No. 6/2026
PASCHA ARCHPASTORAL LETTER                                                                  
To the Very Reverend Protopresbyters, Very Reverend and Reverend Fathers, and Faithful (Young and Old) of our God-Protected Diocese:
CHRIST IS RISEN!                                  INDEED HE IS RISEN!
Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death,
and to those in the tombs bestowing life."
Today I greet you with great love and joy in the Name of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ following His glorious Resurrection. On Great and Holy Pascha, we behold the triumph of Christ, as He rose from death to life, from darkness of the tomb into the Light. With the Resurrection of Christ, all Creation is filled with a new Light of life and joy. On this Feast of Feasts, this Holy Day of Holy Days, we all proclaim the only truth that matters, the Truth that Christ is Risen!
We gather together as family and friends, in joy and in love, celebrating the presence of the Risen Lord in our midst, and singing with one voice the triumphant hymn "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and to those in the tombs bestowing life."
This day of the Resurrection marks the beginning of an explosion of joy that comes immediately after the spiritually intense period of Great Lent and Holy Week. This beautiful hymn captures in three verses the fundamental message of the Feast of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.  It is a message of victory, of love, and of hope in everlasting life. On this day, and throughout the Paschal season over the next forty days, we proclaim this message of victory, love, and hope together in song through this beautiful hymn at the beginning of every divine service in our Church. This hymn, simple in form yet deep in power, is worthy of study as we seek to fully understand its meaning
The first verse of this hymn expresses the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, "Christ is risen from the dead." This reality of the Resurrection has been a distinguishing feature of Christianity from the beginning. St. Paul expresses this idea to the Corinthians "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (I Corinthians 15:17). He declares unequivocally that Christ has been raised from the dead, that He appeared after His resurrection to as many as five hundred people at one time, most of whom were still alive when St. Paul was writing. (I Corinthians 15:6). The reassuring words of this Epistle continue to provide us with their intended effect, which is that our faith in Christ is not futile at all and that, because of the reality of His Resurrection, we are no longer held captive to our sins.
The second verse of the Paschal hymn explains to us the extraordinary manner by which Christ conquered death’s dominion over us once and for all: "Trampling death by death." When Jesus was crucified, He took on the sins of all humanity and suffered the intensity of which remains truly incomprehensible to us as human beings. This demonstrates the unending love of our God, Who took on human flesh and Who died on a Cross for our salvation. By submitting Himself to death, Christ not only annihilated sin but also death. The final defeat of the archenemy death could not happen but only through death itself, not an ordinary death however, but the death of God who became man.
The third and final verse reveals the very essence of the feast, for it encapsulates the full consequence of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead: "And to those in the tombs bestowing life." To all of us on this day then, this is a day of promise and of hope for life everlasting with Him. This last verse reiterates the message that St. Paul was communicating to the Romans when he wrote that as Christians we are dead to sin but alive in Christ: "We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4). This is the message of our Orthodox Christian faith which we celebrate on this day, and indeed every day of our lives here on Earth.  It is a message that proclaims our ultimate victory over all forces of darkness that attempt to impede our progress on the road to salvation and  eternal life with Jesus Christ.
It is in this spirit that our repeated singing of this beautiful triumphant hymn for 40 days will enable us to come closer and closer toward understanding the power of its message:
CHRIST IS RISEN!                                  INDEED HE IS RISEN!
May the Clergy and Laity, Friends and Supporters of the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese experience the love, joy, and excitement of the early followers of Christ when they first saw Him after His Resurrection. Christ is Risen!
Working in the Risen Lord’s Vineyard with much love,

+His Eminence, Metropolitan Gregory of Nyssa

https://archons.org/patriarchal-encyclical-pascha-2026/

† B A R T H O L O M E W
BY GOD’S MERCY
ARCHBISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE – NEW ROME
AND ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH
TO THE ENTIRE PLENITUDE OF THE CHURCH:
GRACE, PEACE, AND MERCY FROM CHRIST, RISEN IN GLORY
* * *
Most honourable brother Hierarchs and blessed children in the Lord,
Having arrived, through fasting, prayer, and solemnity, at the radiant and all-festal day of Holy Pascha, we hymn and glorify the world-saving Resurrection of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, which marks the manifest victory of life over death, renews all creation, and opens to humanity the way of deification by grace. The Church of Christ preserves the paschal experience in her liturgical life, in the labours of the Saints and Martyrs of the faith, in the eschatological impulse of monasticism, in the proclamation of the Gospel “to the ends of the earth,” in theology and the ecclesial arts, in the good witness of the faithful in the world, in the culture of love and solidarity, and in the immovable certainty that evil does not have the final word in history.
The Resurrection of the Lord is lived as a Christ-bestowed freedom, which inspires, nourishes, and strengthens the creative powers of the human person and the good struggle for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable,”[1] while reminding us all that the journey toward the Resurrection is inseparably bound to the Cross. The joy of the Cross and the Resurrection has preserved the people of God from identifying themselves with the spirit of this world, while at the same time safeguarding them from barren insularity and a spirituality devoid of dynamism and hope-bearing breath. The life of the faithful, in the crucified and risen Christ “for us men,” still today refutes every alien narrative of Christian ethos as a “morality of the weak,” supposedly embodied in humility, forgiveness, sacrificial love, asceticism, the Lord’s saying “but I say to you, do not resist the evil one,”[2] and other principles and dispositions that belong to the very core of our identity. Nothing could be further from the truth than this reading of the ethos of Christianity — of sacrificial love that “does not seek its own,” a love interwoven with courage, boldness, and existential authenticity. Pascha is a hymn to this freedom, to faith “working through love,”[3] which is not our own achievement but grace and a gift from above, and which is lived in the holy Sacraments of the Church and in the “mystery” of service to one’s neighbour. Indeed, “love for God does not in any way tolerate hatred toward one’s fellow human being.”[4]
The Church of Christ — the “salt of the earth,” the “light of the world,” the city “set on a hill,” the lamp placed “on the lampstand”[5] — bears active witness in the world, before the signs of the times, about the grace that has come and “the hope that is in us.”[6] The message of the Cross and the Resurrection resounds today as a Gospel of peace, reconciliation, and justice. War, hatred, and injustice stand opposed to the fundamental Christian principles for whose realization and establishment the people of God pray and labour each day. In the light of the Resurrection, we beseech the Lord on behalf of the victims of wartime violence, the orphans, the mothers who mourn their children, and all those who bear in body and soul the effects of human cruelty and callousness. “Christ is risen” is a denial and condemnation of violence and fear and an invitation to a life of peace. War brings forth lamentation and death; the Resurrection conquers death and bestows incorruptibility.
Before the daily images of the cruelty of war, the Church raises her voice and proclaims the sacredness of the human person — of every concrete human being anywhere on earth — and the duty of absolute respect for that dignity; and she calls upon us to “know our own worth, honour the Prototype, recognise the power of the mystery, and understand for whose sake Christ died.”[7] The Resurrection of the Lord is the restoration of the human being to his pre-eternal calling. As the “beginning of another eternal life,” it heals alienating relationships and establishes the peace “which surpasses all understanding”[8] — a peace that encompasses worldly reconciliation and pacification.
Inspired by God, the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church — the tenth anniversary of whose convocation we honour this year — underlined the duty of the Church “to encourage whatever truly serves the cause of peace (Rom. 14:19) and opens the way to justice, brotherhood, true freedom, and mutual love among all the children of the one heavenly Father, as well as among all peoples who make up the one human family.”[9]
Holy Pascha is the whole of our spiritual civilization, the very core of our piety. The Resurrection of the Lord is also our own resurrection in the present age, and at the same time a prefiguration and foretaste of the “common resurrection of all human beings” and of the renewal of the whole creation. Illumined by the all-radiant light of the face of the Risen Christ, and glorifying in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs His all-holy Name — the Prince of Peace, who is with us “always, unto the end of the age” [10]— we wish you a blessed Resurrection, a paschal season filled with divine gifts, and every day of your lives likewise, crying out the universal proclamation of joy: “Christ is risen! Truly the Lord is risen!”
Phanar, Holy Pascha 2026
† Bartholomew of Constantinople
fervent supplicant for you all 
to the Risen Lord ​