| Archbishop Clement: Nationalists are Already Killing our Priests and Capturing Churches Source: DECR Archbishop Clement (Vecheria) of Nezhin and Priluki Archbishop Clement, an official representative of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and chairman of the Synodal Information and Education Department, answered questions from Komsomolskaya Pravda daily: The conflict between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate (of Constantinople) has reached its climax. At its session in Minsk, the ROC Synod adopted a decision to halt the Eucharistic communion with Constantinople. It was caused by the decision of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople to launch a process of granting the Tomos (a decree on legalization – auth .) to the Ukrainian local church, which is believed to be schismatic. In simple words, the secular Ukrainian power wishes that the country had its own Orthodox church that would have nothing to do with the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Because, in the understanding of those who rule the country now, every Moscow thing is linked with hated Russia. – The first among representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to support the decision of the Synod of Constantinople was Metropolitan Alexander (Drabinko) of Pereyaslv-Khmelnitsky and Vishneva. He declared himself a cleric of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Did he inform you about this decision? – Metropolitan Alexander has never concealed his position. It has been built in accordance with new political realities, although before that he had been quite loyal to the previous authorities as well. It is his personal affair. As bishop, he did not make any official statement about whether he would take part in some uncanonical actions in support of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. All his statements voiced in the mass media are very contradictory. – Is there a mechanism for such moves? – There is no such mechanisms. It is not supposed that a person can leave the Church and move to a schism. It is an abnormal situation. Actually, it develops like this. One begins to serve together with schismatics. Then it becomes obvious that he has left the Church and moved to an unrecognized structure. |
| A growing number of people today believe that nothing has caused more bloodshed through the ages as has religious hatred and intolerance. Notwithstanding the obvious inference to the violence undertaken by extremist Muslims in the West since 2001, they site what appears to be ample evidence throughout human history in order to validate such an argument. The “holy wars” of the crusades during the Middle Ages are the most obvious example. The 30 Years War in Europe (1618-1648ad) fought between Protestant and Roman Catholic principalities was especially destructive. More recently, one might also point to Bosnian war in the 1990’s and the internecine warring that is presently raging between Shiite and Sunni Islamic sects in the Middle East. As the atheist Sam Harris has recently penned, “Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past.” And it is this “blatant” correlation between blood and faith that is leading growing number of Americans to loath organized religion in every form.Such ideas, however, are nothing new. Tracing back Western civilization several hundred years reveals the same attitudes and assumptions by the Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries who portrayed no less of the same loathing for the religion of their own day. It was this kind of religious revulsion exemplified by Voltaire that formed the basis for the emergence of the secular state. Subsequently, the Western Enlightenment that began in the 18th century gradually unhinged European culture from its Christian roots by “liberating” the Western mind from its “captivity” to Christian Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. People were told they no longer need to live in fear an angry, vengeful deity who doesn’t even exist. No longer must they bow in obeisance to bishops and priests who propagated a religion that denies enjoyment in this life in favor of a future life that isn’t even real. The only life that is real, and the only life that matters, for the enlightenment thinkers, is life in this age. There is no such thing as the human soul. The Bible is a hoax. Religion is a sham. The Church’s promise of an eternal Kingdom is a mindless fairy tale that has no credibility. It is no longer the soul that needs to be saved, but the mind that must now be redeemed from centuries of religious ignorance, bigotry, and superstition. |
| A relatively modern term deriving from the Latin Patres, or “Fathers.” It was also known as patrology up to the mid-20th century, though this latter designation has now been restricted mainly to signify reference manuals dealing with the works of the fathers of the church. The fathers were the bishops, outstanding theologians, and leading monastic elders ofthe early church, who left behind them authoritative bodies of spiritual, biblical, liturgical, and dogmatic writings. The age of the fathers is generally seen as extending from after the apostolic era (beginning of the 2nd century) to the 8th and 9th centuries, whose great luminaries then included St. John of Damascus and St. Photios the Great. John is, in many ways, a certain sign of the closing of the patristic age, with his works gathering together as a kind of encyclopedia of the earlier authoritative materials to form a synthesis of patristic theology for the later church’s reference. In terms of Latin patristics, the traditional cut-off point has been significantly extended beyond this time, even up to the medieval western theologian Bernard of Clairvaux, who is sometimes called, in the Catholic Church, the “last of the fathers» Even so, there is not a hard and fast historical line, as Orthodoxy understands it, for some of the late Byzantine writers such as St. Symeon the New Theologian of the 11th century, or St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), for example, certainly enjoy a high “patristic status” in contemporary Orthodoxy. The word generally means, in Orthodox circles, those definitive and highly authoritative theologians of the church in its classical ages who represent purity of doctrine allied with great holiness of life; a life that manifests the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in their acts and their consciousness, such that they are not merely good speculative thinkers, or interesting religious writers, as such, but rather substantial guides to the will of God, and Spirit-bearers (pneumatophoroi) whose doctrine and advice can be trusted as conveying the authentic Orthodox tradition of faith and piety. This does not mean that every single thing any one of the fathers ever wrote is given “canonical” status. Orthodoxy admits that the general rule of human authorship applies even among the saints, for as the adage tells, “even Homer nods,” but it does mean that collectively, and by the consensus of the fathers among themselves, and by the manner in which they stand in a stream of defense of the ecumenical faith of the church, they together comprise a library of immense prestige and authority. They are thus collectively strong and concrete evidence for the central tradition of the Orthodox Church. This is why the church affords them a very high theological authority, not as great as the Scriptures or the ecumenical councils, but certainly alongside the latter; for it was from their writings that the doctrine of the great councils generally emerged. |
| During a monthly visit over coffee with a local pastor friend of mine, I was a bit disturbed to learn of a new store that went up in a neighboring community that was dedicated to selling items used for witchcraft and seances. As if that wasn’t enough, I was bombarded a day later with brochures describing an upcoming “Witches Ball” as well as invitations to a group that teaches people special dances to call upon the spirits for Halloween! All of these events have led me to offer this small word of warning to anyone reading this: Do not fall prey to this ignorance dear ones! Our society at large tends to think of witches, demons, ghouls, and spirits as harmless games and fun. Orthodox Christians understand from experience however, that these things are incredibly dangerous. When we are invited to events or parties that deal with spirits, whether it is organized in complete knowledge of what is being done, or out of ignorance in the spirit of fun, we have to ask ourselves: “ Why would I go to poke the bear?” As we get closer and closer to the end of October, allow me to give this annual public service announcement. Demons and Evil spirits are absolutely, positively, without a shadow of a doubt, REAL. They surround us like vultures, waiting to crash down on those who show either weakness in the spiritual life, or (worse yet) attacking those who playfully deny their existence. With that in mind, here are three things to remember about the existence of demons and how we are to react to them. 1.) If you look for them, they will very easily find you! In the very popular book “Everyday Saints”, the young student Tikhon talks about his experience with calling upon the spirits prior to his conversion to Orthodoxy. His group of friends spent time researching and learning how to do seances so that they could establish a connection with spirits, and eventually they were quite successful! In their seances, they would have conversations with entities that called themselves “Napoleon” or “Socrates”. These spirits would even tell them intimate details about their personal lives as well as details about the future. Tikhon and his friends didn’t truly know what they were getting into, but one thing was for certain…their moods changed after the seances began. Depression and darkness that could not be described in words had slowly started to creep into their lives, and what started with innocent curiosity eventually ended in a very scary situation. |
| John Anthony McGuckin Divine Liturgy, Orthodox JOHN A. MCGUCKIN The divine liturgy of the Orthodox Church is its spiritual heart and soul. A closer and more revealing knowledge can be had of Orthodoxy by an observer from the study of the rituals and prayers than of any other external thing related to the church. The word “liturgy” (leitourgia) derives from the ancient Greek (pre-Christian) term for “public works” and grew in significance to mean a work conducted for the benefit of the state or community by a benefactor. It was with some of these residual associations that the term was then taken over by the writers of the Greek Septuagint Bible, and used by them to signify the Temple rituals of ancient Israel. It thus became, for the early Christians, the chief word to signify the divine “worship and sacrifice” of the church, a term which would distinguish it from the pagan sacrificial cults around them. The divine liturgy predominantly means the Eucharistic service of the Orthodox Church (often simply referred to as “the liturgy”) and the other mysteries (what the western churches generally call the “sacramental” services). Orthodoxy’s preferred term is mysterion. The latter word means “thing to be silent about” and was used by the apostles and fathers with deliberate analogous reference to the pre-Christian mysteries, or mystery religions, where the element of the arcana (refusing to divulge the contents of the initiation) became a very important identifying mark of the adherent. The mysteries are experiences of Christian initiation that are not easily explicable, and each one of them is deeply resonant with the grace of the Lord who has empowered them by his Holy Spirit, so as to use them as primary ways of manifesting his life-giving presence and energy within the earthly church until the Eschaton. As Sergei Bulgakov once described it, the mysteries are the continuing signs that Pentecost is still occurring within the heart of Christ’s church, and their youthful, unfailing freshness is a sure sign of the authenticity and truth of the church (Bulgakov 1988: 110–11). All the Christian mysteries are eschatological in essence. They stand, as does the earthly church itself, poised between the two ages: this age of conflicted loyalty to God, the expectation of the kingdom, and the next Aeon where the Kingdom of God will be revealed as all in all. (Each of the greater mysteries – baptism, chrismation, Eucharist, confession [metanoia or exomologesis], ordination, marriage, and anointing of the sick – has a separate entry in this encyclopedia and can be further studied there.) |
| Loving the Storm-Drenched Contemporary Issues Last Updated: Feb 8th, 2011 - 05:50:02 Loving the Storm-Drenched By Frederica Mathewes-Green Oct 6, 2009, 10:00 Discuss this article Printer friendly page Source: The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America If you hang around with Christians, you find that the same topic keeps coming up in conversation: their worries about “the culture.” Christians talk about sex and violence in popular entertainment. They talk about bias in news reporting. They talk about how their views are ignored or misrepresented. “The culture” appears to be an aggressive challenge to “the church,” and Christians keep worrying over what to do about it. You soon get the impression that Church, Inc., and Culture Amalgamated are like two corporations confronting each other at a negotiating table. Over there sits The Culture-huge, complex, and self-absorbed. It’s powerful, dangerous, unpredictable, and turbulent. The Church is smaller, anxious; it studies the culture, trying to figure out a way to weasel in. But there are flaws in this picture. For one thing, neither party is as monolithic as it seems. There are many devout believers among the ranks of journalists and entertainers, and there are even more culture-consumers among the ranks of devout believers. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to avoid absorbing this culture; if you sealed the windows, it would leak under the door. I once heard a retreat leader say she’d attempted a “media fast,” but found the gaudy world met her on every side. “I may be free in many ways,” she said, “But I am not free to not know what Madonna is doing.” Furthermore, the church is not a corporation; rather, it is incorporate, or better, incarnate, carried in the vulnerable bodies of fallible individuals who love and follow Jesus Christ. The culture is even less of an organization. It is more like a photomosaic, composed of tiny faces, faces of the millions of people-or billions, rather, thanks to the worldwide toxic leak of American entertainment-who are caught up in its path. |
| My Orthodox Beginnings My Way to Orthodoxy Last Updated: Feb 8th, 2011 - 05:50:02 My Orthodox Beginnings m. S. Dec 27, 2008, 10:00 Discuss this article Printer friendly page My father was a seminarian in an Anglican School of Theology, and he later received a master’s in theology. Interestingly, even with a master’s in theology, he never had heard of the Orthodox Church. It was generally unheard of in our parts. My mother was also of strict Anglican upbringing. The theological course in this school was interesting in that Roman Catholic, Anglican and Unitarian students all studied in the same classes. Often classes would erupt in heated debates over one or another theological point. Within this melee, my father noticed that what they were teaching then in class was not what early Christians taught, as they understood it within those classes. He did historical research back to the reformation, and studied Catholicism. Again the same thing, the church’s teachings were changed. He continued going back further in history, and he began studying the schism between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. He became interested in Orthodoxy and read what he could about it. Unfortunately, his first contacts with the Orthodox Church were very unpleasant. After looking throughout the region we lived for any Orthodox Churches, he discovered that there was a small Greek parish. He went to the parish and introduced himself to a Greek gentleman that was there, who happened to be the church warden. After mentioning that he was interested in Orthodoxy, the man said, “You are a good English boy, but an English boy should go to an English church!” That did not discourage my father, and he later called up the priest of the parish. But, after introducing himself on the phone and explaining his interest in Orthodoxy, the priest said, “speak Greek!” and hung up the phone. I was about eight years old at the time this was happening. Our mother would take us every Sunday to the Anglican parish, and we would attend Sunday school. |
| Panayiotis Christou Скачать epub pdf The origin of the monastic life During the fourth century A.D. there appeared within the Church a strong movement of withdrawal from organized society to the desert, a movement which grew ever larger during the subsequent period. To interpret the sudden appearance of this movement historians have put forward various hypotheses, the most favoured of which are two. According to the first, the monastic life was a product of eastern religions, in which from earlier times asceticism was practiced, either in total solitude or in a monastery. According to the second, the monastic life provided a way out when a reaction was provoked by the closer contact of Christianity with the world, and the inevitable decline of moral standards. The first hypothesis is without foundation, because it has not been possible historically to discover a link between oriental asceticism and the Christian monastic life. Moreover, if Christianity had been influenced in this way, the influence should have come from the ascetic groups of the Essene sect, whose environment was that in which Christianity was born; yet the monastic life appeared well after the disappearance of the Essence communities. This, of course, does not mean that in its later stages monasticism did not have certain features in common with the Essence and Neo-Pythagorean communities. The second hypothesis is likewise unacceptable, because there were numerous hermits living in the open country even before the recognition of Christianity by Constantine the Great. Monasticism is a way of life which appeared within the Church and developed organically by pushing the moral principles of Christianity to their limits. Indeed, although Christianity did not enter the world either as a pessimistic philosophy or as a society dissolving force, nevertheless it was governed by principles which separated in the society of that time. It turned its whole attention to the center of life and disregarded the periphery. One thing has supreme value for man: the soul, beside which the whole world is insignificant. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? (Matthew XVI, 26). The affairs of this world impede the movements of the soul, and the goods of this world accumulate around it, choking it and preventing it from developing into an integrated personality. A hard struggle therefore awaits man if he is to liberate himself from his lower self, which is attached to worldly things, and develop his higher, ideal self, which will render him capable of standing boldly before God. In this struggle, as Jesus Christ declared, man will have to submit himself and his activities to rigorous examination. He must divorce himself from many earthly goods in order to acquire the heavenly treasure, and submit to the trial of suffering in order to purify his will. |
| Patriarch Kirill Discusses the Situation in Ukraine with Head of Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland Source: DECR Photo: mospat.ru On February 28, 2019, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia met with the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, Archbishop Luoma of Turku and Finland, at the Patriarchal and Synodal Residence in the St. Daniel Monastery in Moscow. Participating in the meeting from the Russian Orthodox Church were Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Moscow Patriarchate department for external church relations (DECR); Archbishop Amvrosy of Vereya, rector of Moscow theological schools; Archimandrite Philaret (Bulekov), DECR vice-chairman; Archpriest Sergiy Zvonarev, DECR secretary for the far abroad; Archpriest Victor Lyutik, rector of the Patriarchal Parishes in Finland; and R. Akhmatkhanov, DECR secretariat for inter-Christian relations. From the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland there were Bishop Seppo Häkkinen of Mikkeli; Rev. Jari Huokuna, ELCF chancellor; Rev. Tomi Karttunen, secretary of the ELCF Department for International Relations; Rev. Dr. Juha Meriläinen, secretary of the Archbishop; Rev. Timo Rosqvist, secretary of the Diocese of Mikkeli; and Rev. Vladimir Dorotniy, Church of Ingria. Also attending the meeting was H.E. Mikko Hautala, Ambassador of the Republic of Finland to the Russian Federation. Welcoming the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, Patriarch Kirill said that he was glad to meet with the high guest in Moscow. His Holiness also mentioned the previous meeting, which took place in autumn 2019 in St. Petersburg. ‘We are living at a difficult time from the perspective of the political situation in the world,’ His Holiness said in particular, ‘But political storms is one thing and relation between Christians, between Churches is another. I remember the hard time during the ‘Cold War’, when East and West were in a state close to an armed conflict. I remember how active Christian contacts were at that time. It was really a bloom of inter-Christian relations because the awareness of our common responsibility for the world, for cooperation between countries, between people was a great impetus for developing these relations’. |
| Patriarch Kirill: When Freedom Destroys God’s Plan for the World and Man it Becomes Slavery Without changing the situation for the better in the business community, without increasing the moral approach to deciding professional objectives, we will have constant problems. On March 28, 2014, a meeting between His Holiness, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, and women entrepreneurs from forty regions of Russia – members of the “Women of Business” All-Russian social organization – took place in the St. Sergius Hall of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Business is a realm that requires dynamism and passionarity. People go into business that are capable of taking risks and achieving their goals; in this sense, those who are effectively engaged in business constitute, undoubtedly, a certain social elite. And inasmuch as today any public activity depends on economics, on finances, then it is quite obvious that lack of economic success – including success in business – entails the reduction of social activity in the community. An enormous amount of humanitarian and cultural programs and many lines of serving the Church are, one way or another, fueled by the results of entrepreneurial activity. Strictly speaking, this was always the case in pre-revolutionary Russia: merchants fed the economic might of our state; churches and monasteries were built and towns and villages were equipped at their expense. May God grant that this tradition not cease and that today the same thing would come about. I would like to express gratitude for the attention that many of you have shown to the activity of the Russian Orthodox Church by directly or indirectly participating in programs that we are realizing today. And the Church today really does perform a very large number of socially useful activities. Thus, about a year ago I had the opportunity of meeting with the leadership of the State Anti-Drug Committee, Mr. Ivanov and his team. It was from him that I first heard that there are thirty times more church shelters for the rehabilitation of drug addicts in Russia than there are state shelters, moreover with a very high level of rehabilitation: sometimes more than 60%. Who is supporting this effort financially? Of course, the money comes from business, through our benefactors or, as they put it now, our sponsors. |
|
|
