Before 2022, Sister Vassa Larin was best known as an Orthodox nun who taught thousands on YouTube about saints and holy days. She became one of the most prominent female intellectuals in Orthodoxy — widely respected within the highly patriarchal religion where all clergy and bishops are male.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine.

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Larin publicly opposed it.

Eventually her bishop revoked her status as a nun.

He had essentially sought to silence her, ordering her to cease her media work, Larin said. When she balked, he removed her as a nun. That decision was ratified in May by the Synod of Bishops in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, a jurisdiction within Eastern Orthodoxy known as ROCOR.

The official reason the bishops gave was “disobedience” — with no specific

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