Last week while glancing through the Indian Express News Paper at the Mahatma Gandhi University Library, I came across an article titled “ From Russia , With Mixed Feelings” by Shevlin Sebastian dated 4/3/2010. The article explains the life of an Indian Jesuit Priest Fr Paul Chemprathy,who have been serving in Russia for quite some time. Fr Paul is on a brief vacation to India. He speaks about the sad faces of Russians, the post soviet Russian life, religious life, broken families, drug and alcohol addictions and so on

What attracted me in the article was the story of a Russian family whom Fr Paul is closely associated with. The family consist of a Seven year old boy named Poulo, his divorced mother, and grandparents. The family belonged to Orthodox Christians, but did not go to Church for decades. One day Fr Paul invited them to a function in a Roman Catholic Church. They came and had a good time. Thereafter they began attending Mass regularly and even said their confession during one Christmas. Later the grandfather Petrova said “ Fr Paul, before we met you we were living like animals. Now there is a meaning in our lives. Thank You very much”.

I was quite unhappy about the situation of the traditional Orthodox Christian family who have not gone to Church for decades, later invited by a Jesuit priest to a Roman Catholic Church. Am happy that the family had got back their lost hope, but unhappy that the Russian Orthodox Church ignored them. Am not sure whether they have converted to Roman Catholicism, but it is sad that the Church of Russia ignores people in deprived conditions, both physically and spiritually. Is this a new technique employed by Rome to Convert Orthodox Christians by trying to fill the gap that exist between the people and Orthodox Church in Russia?

This is the case of one family, but there are thousand of such families who are seek invitation, care and concern from the Orthodox Church and its keepers to change their conditions and to build new hope.

We all claim that Orthodoxy is experiencing a wide revival in Russia and former Communist Countries. In Russia Churches and monasteries are begin restored and given back to the Orthodox Church. The Church has improved relations with the government, revives government funding, involves in wide socio-economic, educational and ecumenical activities. All these things are happening, but how can the Church close its eyes to the commons who are in need of support and spiritual care? We have everything, good priests, good administration, spiritual revival, seminaries, social networking, charity etc. We have Priest working among Muslims, among Aborigines, we have great missionaries, champions of Orthodoxy, we are improving tries with the Papacy, we involve in law making and public affairs, we have numerous projects and programmes for all age groups, but we are ignoring the needy..

Do we need some Roman Catholic Priest in Russia to take care of the Orthodox Christians???

I have written this small piece of article not discredit Roman Catholics nor the Russian Orthodox Church, but only because I feel for Orthodoxy, the living body of Jesus Christ in the World.

George Alexander
Spokesperson
Orthodoxy Beyond Limits Forum
www.theorthodoxchurch.info

Talk given at a conference sponsored by the Northern California Brotherhood of Orthodox Clergy and held at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Sacramento, California, October 21, 2006 .

1. WHY PREACH THE GOSPEL

The theme of today’s conference, “Preaching the Gospel of Christ in the Modern World,” is relevant to everyone here, not only to those who are called to preach sermons from the ambo. Each of us is called to preach the Gospel, first of all by bearing witness to it through our lives, and secondly by making it available to others. This morning I will talk about why we should preach the Gospel, about the prerequisites for preaching the Gospel, and finally about how to bear witness to it in our lives.

The Gospel, of course, is the sum of the message of the Christian Faith, and especially the good news that Christ has saved mankind from the eternal consequences of sin, that He has overcome the central problem of the world — death, both bodily and spiritual — by means of His Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection.

In approaching the subject of preaching the Gospel, the first question that arises is: Why should we be preaching the Gospel of Christ in our modern world?

Why, indeed, when the Protestants seem to be doing it much better? They have evangelistic programs, crusades that fill stadiums, mega-churches, television channels, Christian bookstores, a Christian music industry, and all the money they could want. We Orthodox in America are small by comparison. Why can’t we just concentrate on our beautiful services and our social functions, and let the evangelicals preach to the unchurched?

The answer to this question is that the Protestants, and the Roman Catholics as well, do not preach the whole, complete, and unadulterated Gospel of Christ. Only the Orthodox Church can do that, because the Orthodox Church is the true Church that Christ founded, and that has continued up to today in a continuous, unbroken line of Holy Apostolic Tradition. This is the Church against which, as Christ promised, the gates of hell shall not prevail (cf. Matt. 16:18). Right before His Crucifixion, Christ told His disciples that the Holy Spirit would come and lead them into all Truth. That promise was indeed fulfilled after Christ’s Resurrection. But it did not cease to be fulfilled after His Apostles reposed. Christ has continued to fulfill that promise through two millennia of upheaval and tribulation; He continues doing so even now, and He will continue until His Second Coming. During our Church’s history, heretical emperors, priests, bishops, and even patriarchs threatened to destroy the purity of the Orthodox Faith, but through the guidance of the Holy Spirit the Church was preserved in Truth, and the heresies were overcome.

The non-Orthodox Christian churches have preserved some of the Truth of the original Christian Faith. But whatever they have that is true — whether it be the Holy Scriptures, the dogma of the Holy Trinity, or the dogma of Christ’s Incarnation — they have received from the original, Apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church, whether they acknowledge this or not. But, again, they possess only some of the Truth, and the rest they have distorted because they are separated from the true Church that Christ founded. Only the Orthodox Church is the repository of the pristine Gospel and the undistorted image of Christ.

This, then, is why we Orthodox Christians are called to preach the Gospel of Christ. We have something to give that no one outside the Church can give. Since the Christian Faith is the true Faith, and the Orthodox Faith is the true form of that true Faith, we alone can give the fullness of Truth to the searching humanity of our days. It would be selfish of us to keep it to ourselves. Yes, we should care about our beautiful church services, which are the center of our life as the worshipping Body of Christ; and, yes, we should have our social functions, since we need to have fellowship with other members of Christ’s Body. But, together with this, we are called to share our Faith, to offer it to those who have not yet been given the great gift of being part of Christ’s true Church. This is a tremendous responsibility, and it’s time the Orthodox Christians in this country stepped up to it. Of course, much has been done and is being done. Just in the last twenty-five years since I first discovered Orthodoxy, I’ve seen a tremendous growth in the Orthodox mission in this country. But we can do a lot more, and that’s what we’ll be looking at and discussing today.

Back in the early 1960s, when the co-founder of our St. Herman Brotherhood, Fr. Seraphim (then Eugene ) Rose, was working in the brotherhood’s Orthodox bookstore in San Francisco, his ruling bishop, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, walked in, as he often did. Fr. Seraphim asked St. John a question he had been pondering: “Nearly all the peoples of the earth have had the Gospel preached to them. Does this mean that it’s the end of the world, as the Scriptures say?”[1]

“No,” replied St. John . “The Gospel of Christ must be preached in all tongues throughout the world in an Orthodox context. Only then will the end come.”[2]

This is an awesome thing to contemplate. St. John, who in other instances demonstrated that he had the gift of prophecy, is telling us that we cannot leave it up to Protestants and Roman Catholics to enlighten the world with the Gospel. That task ultimately belongs to us Orthodox Christians. It’s not enough, for example, that three thousand Chinese are becoming Christian every day, according to the latest statistics. Yes, they are becoming Protestants and Roman Catholics, and that’s good as far as it goes, but they are not becoming Orthodox Christians. Ultimately, it will be up to us to preach the Gospel to them in the Orthodox context.

Fr. Seraphim once noted that, “When Archbishop John[3] first came to Paris from Shanghai [in the early 1950s], instead of giving a merely polite and formal greeting to his new flock in church the first time he saw them, he gave them real spiritual meat: The meaning of the Russian exile [he said] is to preach the Gospel over the whole earth, which must happen before the end of the world; and that means not just any Gospel, any kind of ‘Christianity,’ but Orthodoxy.”[4]

What St. John said about the Russian exiles can be applied equally well to the diaspora of all the other Orthodox nationalities: Bulgarian, Georgian, Greek, Lebanese, Palestinian, Romanian, Serbian, Syrian, Ukrainian, etc.

Speaking of prophecy, here is one from a Greek saint of our times (not yet canonized): Elder Paisios of Mount Athos. Before his repose in 1994, he was asked by one of his spiritual sons: “Elder, today there are so many people— billions who don’t know Christ and so few of them who do know Him. What will happen?”

Elder Paisios answered: “Things will happen which will shake the nations. It will not be the Second Coming, but it will be a Divine intervention. People will be searching for someone to speak to about Christ. They will pull you by the hand: ‘Come here, sit down and tell me about Christ.’[5]

We don’t have to look into the future for this. Already, even now, people are starving spiritually. How can we give them what they need?

2. PREREQUISITES FOR PREACHING THE GOSPEL

I would now like to outline three things which we should have in place in order to preach the Gospel of Christ in the modern world: First, we must know the Orthodox Gospel of Christ; second, we must live the Gospel; and, third, we must know the modern world, in order to know what we’re dealing with.

1. So, to begin with, we must know the Gospel in the Orthodox context. This means that, not only should we know the Divinely inspired Holy Scriptures, but we should know how the Church, which gave us the Scriptures, has interpreted the Scriptures through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We can know this through the writings of the Holy Fathers of the Church who have written extensive commentaries on the Scriptures, especially the book of Genesis and the entire New Testament. Almost all of these commentaries are now easily available in English. They are not hard to understand, even though some of them, like the commentaries of St. John Chrysostom, were written sixteen hundred years ago.

There is no question in our confused times that cannot be answered by a careful, pious, and reverent reading of the Holy Fathers, who give us to understand the true meaning of Holy Scripture and to know the substance of our Orthodox Faith. We must go to the Fathers in order to become their disciples, laying aside our own “wisdom” which we have acquired from the modern secular world.” When we find the consensus of the Fathers on any given issue, we find the teaching which has prevailed and has been upheld in the Church. Thus, we find the mind of the Church, which is the mind of Christ, since Christ is the Head of His Church.

Of course, we should read Orthodox books by some contemporary authors also, because they distill the teaching of the Fathers and bring it to bear on modern concerns. But to get a well-rounded view of the Patristic teaching, and to know which modern authors reflect more of the Patristic mind, we should not neglect to go to the writings of the Fathers directly.

The Lives of Saints and righteous ones of earlier times and of our own times are also essential reading, as are the spiritual counsels of these same saints and righteous ones. These writings give us a blueprint for our own Christian life, both instructing and inspiring us to live our lives in Christ, in communion with Him, and on the path to unending union with Him.

St. John Chrysostom once said: “The Christian who is not reading spiritual books cannot save his soul.” Commenting on this statement, Fr. Seraphim Rose said: “We must be constantly filling ourselves with the word of God, the Holy Scriptures, and other Orthodox literature, so that, as St. Seraphim [of Sarov] says, we will be literally ’swimming in the law of the Lord.’ The science of how to please God and save our souls will become a deep part of ourselves that can’t be taken away from us.

“The process of Orthodox education begins with infancy, with the simplest Bible stories and Lives of Saints related by one’s parents, and it should not cease this side of the grave. If anyone learning an earthly profession devotes all his energy to studying and gaining practice in it, how much more should Christians be studying and preparing for eternal life, the Kingdom of Heaven which is ours for a short struggle in this life.”[6]

2. This brings us to the second prerequisite for preaching the Gospel in the modern world, and that is, we must live the Gospel.

Again, to quote from Fr. Seraphim: “There exists a false opinion, which unfortunately is all too widespread today, that it is enough to have an Orthodoxy that is limited to the church building and formal ‘Orthodox’ activities, such as praying at certain times and making the sign of the Cross; in everything else, so this opinion goes, one can be like anyone else; participating in the life and culture of our times without any problem, as long as we don’t commit sin.

“Anyone who has come to realize how deep Orthodoxy is, and how full is the commitment which is required of the serious Orthodox Christian, and likewise what totalitarian demands the contemporary world makes on us, will easily see how wrong this opinion is. One is Orthodox all the time, everyday, in every situation of life, or one is not really Orthodox at all. Our Orthodoxy is revealed not just in our strictly religious views, but in everything we do and say. Most of us are very unaware of the Christian, religious responsibility we have for the seemingly secular part of our lives. The person with a truly Orthodox worldview lives every part of his life as Orthodox.”[7]

As we go deeper into the Orthodox Christian life, with daily prayer, daily reading of spiritual books, regular attendance of Church services, and regular confession and reception of Holy Communion, we will see our entire lives transformed in this way. When we come before Christ every day and speak to Him with love and longing, we will find our relationship with Him deepen, so that He will live in us more fully. When we daily reestablish our connection with Jesus Christ in this way, it will become natural for us to follow His commandments throughout the day, in every aspect of our lives. Then His commandments — even the hardest ones, like loving those who spitefully use us (cf. Matt. 5:44) — will not seem burdensome to us.

Through our life of Grace in the Church, we are to be continually transformed into the likeness of God, which is the likeness of Christ. We are to be united with God ever more fully by acquiring and assimilating His Grace, His Uncreated Energy.

For the Orthodox Church, salvation includes the forgiveness of sins and justification before God (cf. Eph. 1:7; Rom. 5:16, 18), but it is also more than these. It means to abide in Christ the God-man and have Him abiding in us (cf. John 15:4), to participate in the life of God Himself, to become partakers of the Divine Nature (II Peter 1:4) both in the present life and in eternity. In the language of Orthodox Patristic theology, to be saved ultimately means to be deified. As the Romanian Orthodox writer Fr. Dumitru Staniloae explains: “Deification is the passing of man from created things to the Uncreated, to the level of the Divine Energies — Man assimilates more and more of the Divine Energies, without this assimilation ever ending, since he will never assimilate their Source itself, that is, the Divine Essence, and become God by Essence, or another Christ. In the measure in which man increases his capacity to become a subject of ever richer Divine Energies, these Energies from the Divine Essence are revealed to him in a greater proportion.”[8]

In a similar vein, we can say that being Orthodox includes having the right beliefs, the right doctrines, the right worship, and the right interpretation of Scripture, but it is more than these. Being Orthodox means being in the Church. We should not only know this intellectually; we should feel it in the depths of our being. By the Grace of God, although we are sinful and unworthy, we are part of Christ’s Body; we are members of His one and only true Church. As such, we believe in the Church.

In order to communicate this belief in the Church to those outside the Church, we must experience what it means to be in the Church. In other words, we must experience, gradually and a step at a time, what it means to be transformed into the likeness of Christ, to live in Christ and have Him live in us, to participate in His life, to be deified.

It is significant that, of all the Christian confessions, only the Orthodox Faith understands Grace to be the Uncreated Energy of God, in which God Himself is fully present. In the Orthodox Church, Grace is known to be God Himself. In the non-Orthodox confessions, on the other hand, the grace that is communicated is considered to be a created phenomenon. In Roman Catholic theology, it is said that grace cannot exist apart from the soul, and that it is only a “quality” of the soul.[9]

When in the Orthodox Church we say that we are to be filled with Grace, that we are to acquire the Grace of the Holy Spirit, this means to be literally filled with God Himself. Only in the Orthodox Church do we know and confess that it is possible for a Christian to be deified in the sense of becoming god through His Grace— that is, not God by Nature and pre-eternal begetting, as only Christ was and is, but a god by Grace and adoption. This is what the Apostle John meant when he wrote in his Gospel: As many as received Him [Christ], to them He gave the power to become sons of God, even to those who believe on His name(John 1:12).

Yes, it is significant that only the Orthodox Church has this understanding of Grace and deification. But it is significant not just in the sense that only the Orthodox Church has the right views on these subjects. Most of all, it is important to consider why the Orthodox Church alone has the right understanding. Of course, one could say that it is because, as I’ve already mentioned, only the Orthodox Church is the true Church which Christ has preserved from error and heresy for two thousand years. But I would say that it is more than this. Does not the Orthodox Church alone have the right understanding of Grace and deification because she alone makes possible this full participation in the life of God, this union with God, this deification? To be sure, those outside the Church can experience God’s Grace. In fact, some Holy Fathers, such as St. Maximus the Confessor,[10] teach that nothing could exist for an instant without God’s Grace. But full participation in God’s Energies, as much as is possible for human nature, is only available in the Orthodox Church.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, the Gospel of Christ is, most essentially, the good news that the central problem of the world — death, both bodily and spiritual — has been overcome by Jesus Christ. Through His Incarnation, His Death on the Cross, and His Resurrection, Christ has brought Life to the world; He has made it possible for man to live eternally with Him in His Kingdom — not only in soul, but also in body after the General Resurrection. Any Christian confession that has retained the basic teachings of Christianity will affirm this. But only in the Orthodox Church do we find the complete understanding and experience of this salvation that Christ has brought to the world, this Life that He has brought to the world (cf. John 11:25), this Living Water that He has promised to His followers (cf. John 7:38). This Life that Christ gives is the Life of God Himself — it is God Himself— and that is why the Saints and righteous ones of the Orthodox Church are known to be literally filled with God, to be deified by Him. And, in the General Resurrection, it will not only be the soul of man that will be deified; the body will be deified as well. Therefore, the Orthodox Holy Fathers have summed up the Gospel of Christ with a phrase that might seem surprising to Christians outside the Orthodox Church. “God became man,” they say, “so that man can become god.”

These considerations can help us to appreciate more fully why we, as Orthodox Christians, have a responsibility to preach the Gospel of Christ to those around us. We have the right teaching; we know — or should know — what it means to be in the Church and believe in the Church; and we have all the means that Christ has made available to mankind to be saved— saved, that is, in the maximalist sense of being transformed, even deified, in order to be made fit for the everlasting Kingdom of Heaven.

Of course, we do not have to be fully deified — that is, fully and perfectly penetrated by God’s Energies — in order to preach the Gospel. All of us who have been baptized and chrismated Orthodox have already been deified to some extent, since we receive the Uncreated Energy of God united to our souls at Baptism; and all of us who receive Holy Communion experience a kind of deification. St. Symeon the New Theologian, who was deified in the full and strict sense of the word, affirmed that all those who partake of the Holy Mysteries “with sincerity of heart are quickened and deified” [11] — that is, deified in the broader sense. We are to grow toward a more full deification, a more full participation in God throughout our whole lives. As we grow in this way, we will have more and more Grace to give to others when we preach the Gospel of Christ.

3. Now we come to the third prerequisite for preaching the Gospel in the modern world, and that is to know the modern world, or, more specifically, the modern Western society in which we find ourselves. Compared to the countries of Western Europe , our American society has retained a considerable Christian sector, but that sector is becoming smaller and smaller. Recent polls have found that every year, there are two million fewer Christians in America . At the same time, there are two million workpeople who say, “I’m not religious; I’m spiritual.” In other words, they are abandoning churches and are opting for a spirituality of their own devising: personalized spirituality.

Fr. Seraphim Rose identified the sickness of the modern world as “nihilism”: the abandonment of belief in absolute Truth, which is grounded in faith in God. As Fr. Seraphim taught, the philosophy of the modern age can be summed up in the following phrase: “God is dead, therefore man becomes God and everything is possible.”[12]

We have to be aware of the effects of this underlying nihilistic philosophy on the life around us, and on ourselves. Although many people give lip service to God, they live as though He doesn’t exist. And we ourselves, sadly, if we will only admit it, also behave sometimes as if God doesn’t exist, being also under the influence of the spirit of the times.

If there is no God to Whom we are answerable and Who gives meaning and purpose to our lives, then our lives are all about “me”: what I want, my personal gratification, my personal fulfillment, my “quality of life.” According to this view, there is no absolute or objective meaning to life; there is only a relative or subjective meaning: what it means to me, how it suits me. This idea is very strong in our society; we breathe it in with the contemporary air, so to speak.

In preparing this talk, I was reading over the talks that Fr. Seraphim gave at our monastery nearly twenty-five years ago, which I have already been quoting from. Back then, he was saying that the current generation has been described as the “me” generation. Many of us here are from that generation. But what of the generations that have come after the “me” generation? They have been called “generation X” and “generation Y.” These generations have also grown up in a society characterized by a gradual loss of belief in absolute Truth and by a concurrent absorption in self-gratification. At the same time, noticeably more than the “me” generation, they have felt the angst of this empty philosophy of life. As society moves further away from God, we are supplied with more sophisticated ways of distracting us from the pain that comes from being separated from God, and more medications to numb that pain. Generation Y has more access to entertainments than any other generation in history, but at the same time, with its use of antidepressants, it has been called the most medicated generation in human history.

In the meantime, to fill in the vacuum caused by the abandonment of Christian Faith, numerous forms of false spirituality have been on the rise for decades. Today, the fastest growing religion in the United States , in terms of percentage, is witchcraft. This is not unrelated to the fact that numerous movies, television shows, books, and games present young people with the idea that witchcraft is “cool” and “fun.” Members of Pagan and Wiccan groups say that, whenever a popular book, movie or TV show comes out with this theme, they get a surge of phone calls from young people.

This is only the latest sign of the times. There are many other such signs, from the growth of Eastern religions to the UFO subculture, to the pseudo-Christian experiences seen at such gatherings as the “Toronto Blessing.”

And, while all of this pseudo-spirituality is being put into the air, there is a concerted effort to obliterate what is left of traditional Christian society in contemporary America . Not a year goes by without several cover stories in such major national magazines as Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report, which attempt to undermine Christian faith under the guise of “objective” reporting. Not only is the reality of the Biblical account of creation and the global Flood rejected, but the historicity of the Prophet Moses is dismissed, the historicity of the Gospels is called into question, and the lives of Christ and His Apostles are reinterpreted according to heretical Gnostic notions which were condemned by the Church many centuries ago. The aim of these articles — and of much else of what we see and hear in the media nowadays — is to denature Christianity. In order to fit in with the nihilistic, secularistic, self-worshipping spirit of the times, Christianity must be reinterpreted so as to abandon any claims to absolute Truth, and to abandon faith in Christ as the Only Begotten Son of God. Instead, Christ is made out to be some kind of New Age guru who leads each of us to the realization that each one of us is God: not god by Grace as in the Orthodox understanding, but God by Nature in the New Age, Gnostic understanding. To a self-worshipping society for which absolute Truth has been replaced by “me,” nothing less than this false form of self-deification is satisfactory. It is precisely with this idea that Lucifer tempted Adam and Eve: Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as Gods (Gen. 3:5).

As we Orthodox Christians reach out to the modern world, we need to take into account this barrage of propaganda that is thrust on people in our society, that makes them forget God, give up on Christ as traditional Christianity understands Him, and live for themselves, live for this world only, live for today. It so happens that we Orthodox Christians have answers to all the misguided attempts to deny the historicity of the Old and New Testaments, and to turn Christianity into something that it is not. Books and articles have been written by Orthodox theological writers, historians, and scientists to defend the historical interpretation of Holy Scripture that is found in the writings of the Holy Fathers. Some of these only exist in Russian, Greek, or Serbian, but some are in English, and others will be translated. It can be helpful for us to avail ourselves of these materials in order to defend our Faith, but we must also realize that, ultimately, it is not arguments that persuade people to come to the Orthodox Church, but something that moves their hearts. And, to move hearts, we must first of all have our own hearts turned to God.

With all the so-called spirituality available to people today, which they can find literally at their fingertips on the internet, people’s souls are empty. They are desperately in need of the fullness of Christ’s Uncreated Grace, which only the Orthodox Church can give.

3. BEARING WITNESS ТО THE GOSPEL

Now that we have looked at three prerequisites to preaching the Gospel in the modern world — knowing the Gospel, living the Gospel, and knowing the modern world — we can now go on to discuss how to preach the Gospel.

In preaching the Gospel, we should not take the in-your-face approach that is occasionally found among Protestants. Sometimes Protestants will place pressure on people to convert. Perhaps this stems, at least in part, from the Calvinist doctrine that denies free will — even though most Protestant churches have rejected the strict interpretation of that doctrine. In any case, the Orthodox approach in preaching the Gospel is, contrary to Calvinism, to honor a person’s free will just as God honors it. Our task is simply to bear witness to the Truth, and to make it available to others. Each person must make his own choice, without any coercion, as to whether or not to become a member of the Orthodox Church.

What does it mean to bear witness to our Faith? In one of the talks he gave toward the end of his life, Fr. Seraphim Rose said: “Once we are learning of the Orthodox Faith, we must be ready, as the Apostle Peter teaches, to give an account of it to those who may ask (cf. I Peter 3:15). Nowadays there is no one who is not asked at some time about his Faith. We must make our Faith something deep, conscious, and serious, so that we ourselves know why we are Orthodox — and this will already be an answer to those outside the Faith.

“And further, in our times of searching, we should be on the watch for those who are searching. We should be prepared to find them in the most unexpected places. We should be evangelical — and this does not mean just sticking Bible verses into one’s conversation or asking everyone, ‘Are you saved?’ It means living by the Gospel, even with all our weaknesses and falls — living the Orthodox Faith. Many outsiders, just seeing that we try to lead a life different from the pagan and semi-pagan society around us, can become interested in the Faith just by this.”[13]

To illustrate this last point, I will relate a few stories. In the early history of our brotherhood, some Orthodox pilgrims were on their way home from our monastery, when they stopped at a restaurant in Williams, California . Before the meal, they crossed themselves and prayed aloud. Some people at an adjacent table asked them what Faith they belonged to. They struck up a friendship with the Orthodox pilgrims, and went on to become Orthodox Christians themselves.

Just by doing such a simple things as making the sign of the Cross and praying, one can change the lives of those who are looking for something authentic in Christianity.

Here is another story which provides an even better example of what Fr. Seraphim said about “outsiders” becoming interested in the Orthodox Faith just by seeing us live that Faith. About five years ago, a young mother in Santa Rosa , California was in a toy store with her two-year-old son. As she was walking around looking at things, she saw a woman older than herself, modestly dressed, who had come to the store with her teenaged son. The young mother noticed that there was something different about this woman and her son. They were calm, peaceful, not distracted; but it was their relationship that impressed her most of all. The older mother and her teenaged son obviously had a close relationship; the boy showed respect and consideration for his mother, and she was kind and loving to him. The younger woman thought to herself: That’s the kind of relationship I want with my son when he gets older. So she went up to the other woman and asked her, “Do you go to a church?” It so happened that the older woman was the wife of a priest, and her church was in Santa Rosa . She talked with the younger woman, told her about her church, and told her that there was an Orthodox bookstore just a few blocks away. The young woman went directly to the bookstore, which serves as an outreach center for the Orthodox Faith, and talked with the man who runs the store. She then started attending the church with her husband and son, and in time they all became Orthodox. They still attend the church regularly, and now have another boy in the family.

In discussing what it means to bear witness to our Faith, we should emphasize that, in all situations, we must act and speak with love. Christ told His disciples: By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another (John 13:35). We have the fullness of Truth, yes, but this Truth must be spoken and given in love, lest it be corrupted in the very manner in which it is presented. People will look for God in us, and if they see no love there, they will not recognize the presence of God, even if we know all the Orthodox dogmas and can recite Scripture verses and the Nicene Creed by heart.

Fr. Seraphim stressed this in one of his talks. He said: “Being filled with the Gospel teaching and trying to live by it, we should have love and compassion for the miserable humanity of our days. Probably never have people been more unhappy than the people of our days, even with all the outward conveniences and gadgets our society provides us with. People are suffering and dying for the lack of God — and we can help give God to them. The love of many has truly grown cold in our days — but let us not be cold. As long as Christ sends us His Grace and warms our hearts, we do not need to be cold. If we are cold and indifferent; if our response to the need for a Christian answer to those who are miserable is only: ‘Who cares? Let someone else do it; I don’t feel like it’ (and I have heard Orthodox people say those very things!) — then we are the salt that has lost its savor and is good for nothing but to be thrown out (cf. Matt. 5:13).”‘

May these words warm our hearts, so that we will go forth and bear witness to the Orthodox Gospel with love — a love that flows from our relationship with Jesus Christ, and from the Grace He bestows on us in His Church.

Source:

Hristo Mishkov, now known as Brother Nikanor, embraces his new life as a monk in Bulgaria.

A FORMER Wall Street broker has swapped Manhattan for a monastery in Bulgaria to become an Orthodox monk.

Hristo Mishkov, 32, had a successful career as a broker on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York until he decided to give it all up to return to his native Bulgaria.

Exchanging tailored suits and expensive shoes for a cassock and sandals, Brother Nikanor, as he is now known, believes Wall Street and the City deserve all they get as the credit crunch bites deeper and the global financial system goes into meltdown.

“It is right to see people who consume more than they deserve shattered by a financial crisis from time to time, to suffer so that they can become more reasonable,” he said.

The collapse of banks and investment firms was a necessary correction because they had grown greedy, he said.

Brother Nikanor wakes at dawn to attend to a herd of buffalo in the 12th-century Tsurnogorski monastery, 50 kilometres west of the capital, Sofia. But he has not entirely turned his back on his past. When he became a monk five years ago, he retained one luxury, a mobile phone, and has used it to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from former colleagues to rebuild the monastery.

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Throughout history the Vatican has asserted it power through secular armies, but none so recent during the invasion of Africa by Italian forces in 1935.

Why would the Vatican be so interested in Ethiopia?

Ethiopia, with its long, rich history of Judaism and Christianity, claimed to possess the one artifact most desired by all the major religions, the Ark of the Covenant. How can the Vatican justify itself as the representative of Christianity if the world’s Holiest artifact still remained in the possession of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?

Mussolini was wanting to expand and extend into the resource rich continent of Ethiopia. With blessing of the Catholic Church he would be seen as hero to the local people in Italy to do the bidding of the Vatican. Of course the Pope would not give formal approval, but the Archbishop of Torano was quoted as saying:

“The war against Ethiopia should be considered as a holy war, a crusade to open Ethiopia, a country of infidels and schismatics, to the expansion of the Catholic Faith.”
Ethiopian Cleverness

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has a long history of moving the Ark for safe keeping. After residing in the Lake Tana Islands for more than 800 years, it was eventually moved to Axum in 333. On multiple occasions when the Ark was threatened it was put into hiding, in locations such as:

1. Lake Tana Islands

2. Gonder

3. In the caves of the Semien mountains

4. Shewa

5. Zeway Islands

And as expected, Ethiopian religious officials claim the Ark was moved from Axum during the Italian occupation. To make matters even more confusing there are supposedly 100 exact copies in locations throughout Ethiopia.

Still the Italian forces in Ethiopia left no stone unturned. Some estimates state over 1 million Ethiopians were killed, which included over 300 clergy killed, 2,000 churches destroyed along with 525,000 homes and 14 million head of livestock. Official records do not indicate that the original Ark of the Covenant was found during the occupation.

Today

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is one of the oldest direct lineage churches in existence today. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has every right to call itself the original Christian faith just as much as the Roman Catholics.

The Ark the Covenant is presumably held in St. Mary’s of Zion in Axum, and is still the crown jewel of Biblical artifacts today.

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BY JULIA GORIN

22/02/2010

Catholic Church, looking for a bulwark against communism, supported what became genocidal regime of Nazi satellite Croatia.

The controversy over the canonization of Pope Pius XII concerns whether he spoke out enough against the slaughter of Jews during World War II. But that question is a red herring when trying to grasp the big picture of the Vatican’s role during the war.

The real question is whether the Vatican supported the world order, or at least aspects of it, that the Third Reich promised to bring, a world order in which dead Jews were collateral damage – which Pius indeed regretted. The answer can be found in a region of Europe that is generally ignored despite being the nexus of world wars: the Balkans.

The Catholic Church was looking for a bulwark against expanding, ruthless, church-destroying communism, but in doing so it supported a Croatian movement called Ustasha, which rose to become the genocidal regime of Nazi satellite Croatia.

American historian Jared Israel points to a February 17, 1941 New York Times article which reported that the archbishop of Zagreb (Croatia’s capital), Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac, was holding conferences in Vatican City “seeking the freedom of Catholic priests detained in [pre-Nazi] Croatia in connection with the circulation of… ‘Free Croatia!’ pamphlets, attributed to Ante Pavelic.” Pavelic, who once criticized Hitler for originally being too soft on the Jews, was the founder of the fascist Ustashas, who were engaging in terrorism all over Europe to “liberate” Croatia from Yugoslavia. He famously said, “A good Ustasha is one who can use a knife to cut a child from the womb of its mother.”

Israel explains the significance of the understated Times article: “The arrested priests were agitating for a fascist coup d’etat,” and if these had been rogue priests, “the Vatican would have disciplined them and perhaps issued a statement condemning them; it certainly would not have [held] top-level conferences to manage their defense.”

At the time, Pavelic was being harbored in Mussolini’s Italy – where his Ustasha soldiers were being trained – after France sentenced him to death for masterminding the 1934 double assassination of Yugoslavian King Alexander I and French foreign minister Louis Barthou. When Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, Pavelic was activated and became fuehrer, or “Poglavnik,” of the new, clerical-fascist Croatia.

Archbishop Stepinac held a banquet for Pavelic, blessed the Ustasha leader and regime, calling them “God’s hand at work,” and the following month had Pavelic received by Pius XII. This was four days after the massacre in the town of Glina, where the Ustashas locked hundreds of Serbian Orthodox inside their church and burned it down, as became standard practice in Pavelic’s Independent State of Croatia (known by its Croatian acronym NDH). Pius XII received Pavelic despite a Yugoslav envoy’s request that he not do so, given the atrocities taking place.

In July of that year, Pavelic’s minister of education, Mile Budak, publicly outlined the purification process, already being implemented against Serbs: Kill a third, expel a third, convert a third.

That August, more than a thousand Serbs had gathered inside another Glina church for conversion, after which Zagreb police chief Bozidar Corouski announced, “Now that you are all Roman Catholics, I guarantee you that I can save your souls, but I cannot save your bodies.” In came Ustasha henchmen with bludgeons, knives and axes, killing all but one man – Ljuban Jednak – who played dead, then stole away from the mass grave he was dumped into.

Pius and Pavelic continued exchanging “cordial telegrams,” as author Vladimir Dedijer – former cochairman of Bertrand Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal – wrote in his 1992 book The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican. The Croatian Catholic press consistently published approving articles about the regime.

In his forthcoming book The Krajina Chronicles: A Short History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic writes, “A part of the Roman Catholic hierarchy became de facto accomplices, as did a majority of the clergy. The leading NDH racial ‘theorist’ was a clergyman, Dr. Ivo Guberina… He urged Croatia’s ‘cleansing of foreign elements’ by any means. His views were echoed by the influential head of the Ustasha Central Propaganda Office, Fr. Grga Peinovic.

“When the anti-Serb and anti-Jewish racial laws of April and May 1941 were enacted, the Catholic press welcomed them as vital for ‘the survival and development of the Croatian nation’… Archbishop of Sarajevo [then part of Croatia] Ivan Saric declared… ‘It is stupid and unworthy of Christ’s disciples to think that the struggle against evil could be waged… with gloves on.’”

IN AN unusual move, Germany entrusted Croatia with running its own concentration camps, without oversight. Shamefully, clergy members took a voracious dive into the bloodbath, serving as guards, commanders and executioners at the 40 camps, most famously Jasenovac, the Holocaust’s third-largest yet least spoken-of camp. There, they killed Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats. On August 29, 1942, a friar from the monastery of Siroki Brijeg, named Petar Brzica, won first place for killing the most Serbs in the shortest time, boasting 1,350 throats slit in one night.

Historian Carl Savich quotes an AP report stating that “a priest from Petricevac led Croat fascists, armed with hatchets and knives, to a nearby village. In the 1942 attack, they butchered 2,300 Serbs.” Testimony from a survivor of that February 7 massacre, Selo Drakulic, reads: “Prior to killing the adults, unborn children were violently cut from their mothers’ womb[s] and slaughtered. Of the remaining children in the village, all under the age of 12, the Ustashas brutally removed arms, legs, noses, ears and genitals. Young girls were raped and killed, while their families were forced to witness the violation and carnage. The most grotesque torture of all was the decapitation of children, their heads thrown into the laps of their mothers, who were themselves then killed.”

Archive photos of sadism that would make horror filmmakers blush survive today: Ustashas displaying an Orthodox priest’s head; an eyeless peasant woman; Serbs and Jews being pushed off a cliff; a Serb with a saw to his neck; and a smiling Ustasha holding the still-beating heart of prominent industrialist Milos Teslitch, who had been castrated, disemboweled and his ears and lips cut off.

Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in his 1944 book Kaputt offers this detail: “While [Pavelic] spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik’s desk [which] seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters… ‘Are they Dalmatian oysters?’ I asked. [Pavelic] said smiling, ‘It is a present from my loyal Ustashas… Forty pounds of human eyes.’”

In their 1991 book Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks, reporter Mark Aarons and former Justice Department attorney John Loftus corroborate the grisly Croatian crimes, as does Genocide in Satellite Croatia 1941-1945 by Edmond Paris: “The Italians photographed an Ustasha wearing two chains of human tongues and ears around his neck.”

It has been 60 years, and the world still doesn’t know the story of wartime Croatia, where not only did the Vatican not speak out against crimes, not only was it complicit in the genocide of a million people, but it subsequently never expressed remorse for the spilled Orthodox blood as it’s done for Jewish blood. Because the world never demanded it. Which points to the same apprehensions that have dogged Jewish groups about the Vatican’s genuineness, especially with its reluctance to open archives about Pius’s World War II conduct.

ONE CAN’T help wondering whether the Vatican as an institution was silently cheering the decimation of its Orthodox rival. Stepinac, who was photographed blessing the Ustashas before an upcoming battle or slaughter, reported in May 1944 the good news about 244,000 forced conversions to Pius. (Pius himself might have caught BBC broadcasts such as on February 16, 1942: “The Orthodox are being forcibly converted to Catholicism and we do not hear the archbishop’s voice preaching revolt. Instead it is reported that he is taking part in Nazi and fascist parades.”) Observing the liquidation of Croatia’s Orthodox, Heinrich Himmler’s second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, wrote a February 17, 1942, letter to Himmler stating, “It is clear that the Croat-Serbian state of tension is not least of all a struggle of the Catholic Church against the Orthodox Church.”

It is not Jews to whom the Church owes the biggest apology over World War II, but Serbs. If by not speaking out about Europe’s Jews Pius hoped to avoid endangering millions of Catholics, what could have been the reason for not speaking out about Croatia, which itself horrified the Nazis to the point that German and Italian soldiers started shielding Serbs from Ustashas? And what would have been the risk to the faithful inside Croatia?

A July 5, 1994, Washington Times article attempted to get to the bottom of why so little is known of the Croatia chapter of World War II, and why Jasenovac is so rarely spoken of: “For years the gruesome details… remained officially taboo. Although documents and eyewitness accounts were at first ignored, and then mysteriously removed from international archives… [i]t now appears that a vast international conspiracy involving Marshal Josip Broz Tito… [and] the United Nations, some Vatican officials and even Jewish organizations strove to keep the Jasenovac story buried forever… Tito’s watchwords were ‘brotherhood and unity,’ and to pursue these high goals he tried to erase the chapter of Jasenovac. The West generally went along, particularly after Tito broke with Stalin in 1948. The Vatican wanted to protect Roman Catholic Croats, who had been willing Nazi proxies in the Balkans.

“The silence of Jewish organizations is less easily explained… [The late Milan Bulajic, of Belgrade's Genocide Museum, met] officials of the Holocaust Museum [in Washington to] find out why no one mentions the Yugoslav Jews who died there. He did not seem to get a clear-cut answer… When Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991… troops of newly independent Croatia briefly captured the site and, according to Serbian sources, blew up whatever was left of the camp and destroyed all remaining records.”

An apology is also owed to Catholic clergy whose appeals the Church ignored. Archbishop Misic of Mostar, Herzegovina, asked Stepinac to use his influence with authorities to prevent the massacres. And Bulajic wrote of a group of Slovenian Catholic priests who were “sent to the Jasenovac camp because they refused to serve a mass of thanksgiving to Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic… One of the imprisoned Slovenian priests, Anton Rantasa, managed to escape… On 10 November 1942, he informed [Stepinac and the papal legate Ramiro Marcone]… on the crimes of genocide being perpetrated at Jasenovac. He was told to keep silent.”

Similarly, historian Savich writes, “It bears noting that Stepinac was tried and convicted… by Roman Catholic Croats… under the regime of a Roman Catholic Croatian… Many of the historians who documented the Ustasha NDH genocide were Roman Catholic Croats, such as Viktor Novak.”

In his 1950 book Behind the Purple Curtain, Walter Montano wrote of the Stepinac trial: “A parade of prosecution witnesses testified at Zagreb, on October 5, 1946, that Catholic priests armed with pistols went out to convert Orthodox Serbs and massacred them… Most of the witnesses were Croat Catholic peasants and laborers.”

INDEED, JUST as blame for tacit approval of a genocide and subsequent escape for the perpetrators can’t fall merely on “a few individuals,” it’s more than a few individuals who deserve credit for the opposite. For example, Jews were saved by the entire Catholic nation of Italy (in its sovereign pre-1943 form), including the commandant of the Ferramonti concentration camp, who “said his job was to protect the inmates, not kill them,” as UPI reported in 2003. Not surprisingly, Italian soldiers also intervened in the slaughter of Serbs by Croats and Axis-aligned Albanians in Kosovo.

Unfortunately, rather than distancing the Church from Aloysius Stepinac, the Vatican-centered newspaper L’Osservatore Romano responded that the “trial was a trial against the Catholic Church.” New York cardinal Francis Spellman outrageously named a parochial school in White Plains after Stepinac, and in 1952 Pius XII made him cardinal. Then, despite requests by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to hold off until the cardinal’s wartime role could be better assessed, Pope John Paul II beatified Stepinac in 1998.

Croatian groups (and some Croatian Jews) even appealed to Yad Vashem to give Stepinac the Righteous Gentile title, since he saved some Jews on condition of conversion. To which Yad Vashem had to reply in almost absurd terms: “Persons who assisted Jews but simultaneously collaborated or were linked with a fascist regime which took part in the Nazi-orchestrated persecution of Jews, may be disqualified for the Righteous title.”

The same should be said to Pope Benedict about his efforts to canonize Pius XII. Even as it denied Stepinac’s well known association with the Ustasha, Pius’s Vatican served as the conduit for smuggling the Ustashas out after the war. According to declassified US documents introduced in a recent class-action lawsuit against the Vatican Bank for laundering Ustasha loot – used to finance the Ustashas’ escapes and postwar sustenance – Pavelic was hidden in a Croatian Catholic monastery in Rome, where the office of the American Counterintelligence Corps on September 12, 1947, reported that “Pavelic’s contacts are so high, and his present position is so compromising to the Vatican, that any extradition of subject would deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church.” From Rome, Pavelic fled to Argentina, where he became a security adviser to Juan Peron, who issued thousands of visas to fleeing Ustashas.

Haaretz in 2006 reported that Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, Pius’s undersecretary of state and later Pope Paul VI, learned of “the investigation [that US Army counterintelligence agent William] Gowen’s unit was conducting. Montini complained about Gowen to his superiors and accused him of having violated the Vatican’s immunity by having entered church buildings, such as the Croatian college, and conducting searches there. The aim of the complaint was to interfere with the investigation.”

A May 2007 press release from plaintiffs’ attorney Jonathan Levy in the Vatican Bank case states, “To date, the Vatican attorneys… [are] insisting that the Vatican Bank’s money laundering scheme for Axis plunder violated no international law, since the Ustasha’s victims, mainly Orthodox Christian Serbs, were technically citizens of ‘Independent’ Croatia. The unrepentant tone of the Vatican bodes poorly for Pius XII and the current controversy involving his elevation to sainthood.”

THE VATICAN’S ongoing World War II identity crisis was evident last September when, after prodding from Croatian leaders, Zagreb Archbishop Josip Bozanic paid a 60-year-late visit to the Jasenovac memorial site, the first official representative of the Croatian Church to attend the annual memorial ceremony. Instead of an apology, Bozanic defended Stepinac and the Church, and used the long-awaited moment to also mourn the massacre of fleeing Nazis by partisans in Bleiburg, Austria – where an annual, Croatian government-sponsored commemoration ceremony is well attended by Catholic dignitaries. Bozanic was not reproached by the Vatican, which also doesn’t reproach the Croatian Church’s tolerance of the ubiquitous pro-Nazi symbolism in that country, which reemerged as Croatian “culture” in the early 1990s.

President Stjepan Mesic himself, who just left office after 10 years, had to recently ask the Vatican to pay closer attention to a bishop and military chaplain who regularly recites a violent poem that ends with the Ustasha saying: “For the fatherland, ready.”

This is the Balkan country that’s on the fast-track for EU membership. That’s where decades of evasion, deflection and cover-up get us, something that contributed to John Paul II’s own neglect of Jasenovac – the Balkans’ largest killing grounds – during his three trips to Croatia. It also leads us to last December’s spectacle of Pope Benedict having a private audience with Marko Perkovic, lead singer of the notorious clerical-fascist Croatian pop band Thompson, which regularly invokes “For the fatherland, ready” and had odes to concentration camps on earlier albums. Many Thompson fans engage in Nazi salutes, and nuns and politicians attend the “patriotic” concerts.

People bury history in order to repeat it. John Ranz, chairman of Buchenwald Survivors, in a 1996 letter to The New York Times, wrote: “Ironically, with US help, [1990s president] Franjo Tudjman was able to accomplish last year what the Nazis and their World War II collaborators could not, namely the uprooting of the entire Serbian Krajina population… The World War II fascist regime of Ante Pavelic is being officially rehabilitated in Croatia today. Streets and public buildings are being named after the architects of the Holocaust, Nazi-era currency revived, while the numbers and scope of the human carnage are being rewritten.”

Had history not been dumped into a mass grave, Western publics might have been allowed a fuller understanding of the Balkan wars, given that by 1991 it was “normal to kill Serbs,” as Zarko Puhovski, of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, put it. When Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia in June 1991 – and the Vatican was the first to recognize it despite a UN resolution warning this could imperil a peaceful solution – survival dictated that the Serbs secede from the secessionists. “A few days after the Croatians declared war,” writes historian Israel, Pope John Paul II “sent a letter to the Yugoslav government demanding it not suppress the rebellion.” And so it was that in 1991 three Croatian soldiers saw “truckloads of bloated, stinking bodies, mothers and children blown up by bombs, and someone wearing a necklace made of ears,” Reuters reported on January 28, 1998.

And so it was that president Tudjman was a prominent guest at the inauguration of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993, despite saying that “900,000 died, not 6 million,” and ranged from calling Jasenovac a “myth,” to blaming Jews for the killings there, to offering a formal apology for the 20,000 Jews killed there – but not for the several hundred thousand Serbs. And so it was that in 1995, as Croatian soldiers with Ustasha insignia cleansed the Krajina of Serbs – under US air cover – the Glina massacre survivor Ljuban Jednak once again fled for his life, dying a refugee in 1997.

And so it was that in 2005, when then Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte learned that indicted 1990s war criminal Gen. Ante Gotovina was being sheltered in a Franciscan monastery in Croatia, the Roman Catholic lady found herself “‘extremely disappointed’ to encounter a wall of silence from the Vatican” which, she told the Daily Telegraph, “could probably pinpoint exactly which of Croatia’s 80 monasteries was sheltering him ‘in a few days.’”

And so it was that at the 2006 inauguration of the spruced-up Jasenovac memorial, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff observed “the absence of any identification of the individuals responsible for the crimes described… I was amazed that none of the speakers mentioned… Croatia’s greatest achievement in facing its Ustasha past – the prosecution and conviction of Jasenovac commander Dinko Sakic… Could it be that the punishment of such a criminal… is so unpopular, even in today’s Croatia…?”

And so it was that Sakic was buried last July in full Nazi uniform, with a Father Vjekoslav Lasic – one of many who hold masses in honor of Ante Pavelic – officiating. “Independent State of Croatia is the foundation of today’s homeland of Croatia,” Lasic said. “Every honorable Croat is proud of the name Dinko Sakic.”

When no Croatian official of stature spoke out against the display, Zuroff called on the president to condemn the organizers and remind Croatian society that Sakic brought it shame, not pride.

In enshrining the Church’s divided World War II loyalties by canonizing the ambivalent pope at the time, the Church would be announcing to the world what it’s made of. But the Church is better than the sum of its nastier parts. Canonizing Pius XII would be unjust to Catholics who did more than he, and an insult to Catholics everywhere. Pius shouldn’t be demonized, but he shouldn’t be sanctified.

The writer specializes in the Balkans, and is an unpaid advisory board member of the American Council for Kosovo.

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Posted by Rev. Gregory Jensen

Like many, my first encounter with Orthodox theology was intoxicating. Here, finally, in the works of thinkers such as Vladimir Lossky, John Meyendorf and Alexander Schmemann and others I found an intellectually rigorous approach to theology that was biblical and patristic in its sources, mystical in its orientation and beautiful in its language.

But over the years I have found a curious lacunae in Orthodox theology.

For all that it is firmly grounded in the historical sources of the Christian tradition, Orthodox theology often lacks what Elizabeth Theokritoff in her book Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology calls “the practical application” that is central to patristic thought. “There is a temptation [for Orthodox Christians] to say, ‘Look, it’s all in the Fathers’” as if somehow this solves all of life’s problems (p. 253). However fidelity to patristic theology requires more than simply reading the Fathers. As the Fathers did in their own time, I must wrestle with the intellectual and practical concerns of the contemporary world with an eye to redeeming the time (see Ephesians 5:16).

Theokritoff wrestles with the cosmological and anthropological implications of Orthodox theology as they apply to contemporary concerns about the environment. In so doing she sketches out what I would call a theory of natural law grounded in the Scriptures, the Fathers and the liturgical tradition of the Orthodox Church. For many outside the Orthodox Church, and for not a few within, the notion that there even is an Orthodox understanding of natural law might come as a surprise. But such tradition exists and while Theokritoff does not use the term, her work is very much a work concerned with natural law.

Following St. Maximus the Confessor, Theokritoff argues that as a “‘bond of unity’ in creation,” humanity’s vocation “is progressively to unite the disparate aspects of the created order, and ultimately to unite the whole with God” (p. 31). For this reason, “It is necessary to accept that human beings are the cause of the world’s plight.” Unlike many in the environmental movement however, the author does not take this to mean that humanity is a blight or a cancer on the enviroment. Rather she argues “that we are also God’s chosen instruments through which all things are to be brought to fulfillment in Christ” (p. 32).

That said, it is not all together clear to me what, if anything, are the author’s specific environmental goals. What, in other words, does she hope us to accomplish as we work to bring all things to fulfillment in Christ? And how, in a practical way, are we to accomplish this?

These are not trivial questions. And to assert, as she does, that it is “not the task of theology to come up with such solutions” is less than satisfying. This is doubly the case given that she thinks policies such as fair trade, population control, and reduced consumption and production in the West are appropriate Christian means of caring for the environment (p. 30).

On the last page of the book there is a trivial illustration of the author’s uncritical identification of the tradition of the Orthodox Church with her own preferred environmental policies. Rightly, as the author reminds us, “there is no path to the Kingdom except through a thousand ordinary, humdrum decisions.” But is it also true to say, as she suggests, that “recycling a sheet of paper . . . is a practical assent to [God's] plan of salvation. . . . [and] signals our willingness to be co-workers with the Almighty in bring his creation to the fulfillment for which it was made” (p. 265)? Maybe, but not necessarily.

While I disagree with author’s progressive politics and policies, it is important to note that Theokritoff offers her suggestions in a spirit of humility. As she writes, “there will sometimes be genuine differences among Christians about the practicalities of remedying various ills” (p. 30). True enough, but I do wish that the author had left her own politics completely out of the book or, having included them, she engaged those who disagree with her.

While we certainly ought not to minimize the seriousness of Theokritoff’s policy suggestions, — especially what I would argue are her misguided and very dangerous flirtation with population control — the real strength of the book is in her articulation of an Orthodox approach to natural law grounded in Scripture and the Church Fathers and embodied in Christian worship and the lives and witnesses of the saints. Living in God’s Creation offers us a rich cosmological and anthropological vision that has implications not only for the environment but also economics and politics and it raises themes worthy of further exploration and study.

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St. John Chrysostom

Preachers Institute Article

By St. John Chrysostom

St. John was the Archbishop of Constantinople during the fourth century. He was fearless when denouncing sin in high places, and was a prolific writer, and bold preacher, unafraid to hit the topical issues of the day squarely between the eyes with all the subtlety of a ball peen hammer. He had many powerful enemies, but they feared him, and had him banished. He had to march, at the age of 60, to the place of his banishment, and died on the way. His last words were “Glory to God for all things!”

Let us not then despair of our safety, but let us pray; let us make invocation; let us supplicate; let us go on embassy to the King that is above with many tears! We have this fast too as an ally, and as an assistant in this good intercession.

Therefore, as when the winter is over and the summer is appearing, the sailor draws his vessel to the deep; and the soldier burnishes his arms, and makes ready his steed for the battle; and the husbandman sharpens his sickle; and the traveler boldly undertakes a long journey, and the wrestler strips and bares himself for the contest.

So too, when the fast makes its appearance, like a kind of spiritual summer, let us as soldiers burnish our weapons; and as husbandmen let us sharpen our sickle; and as sailors let us order our thoughts against the waves of extravagant desires; and as travelers let us set out on the journey towards heaven; and as wrestlers let us strip for the contest. For the believer is at once a husbandman, and a sailor, and a soldier, a wrestler, and a traveler.

Hence St. Paul saith,

“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers. Put on therefore the whole armor of God.” Eph. 6. 12.

Hast thou observed the wrestler? Hast thou observed the soldier? If thou art a wrestler, it is necessary for thee to engage in the conflict naked. If a soldier, it behooves thee to stand in the battle line armed at all points. How then are both these things possible, to be naked, and yet not naked; to be clothed, and yet not clothed! How? I will tell thee. Divest thyself of worldly business, and thou hast become a wrestler. Put on the spiritual amour, and thou hast become a soldier.

Strip thyself of worldly cares, for the season is one of wrestling. Clothe thyself with the spiritual amour, for we have a heavy warfare to wage with demons. Therefore also it is needful we should be naked, so as to offer nothing that the devil may take hold of, while he is wrestling with us; and to be fully armed at all points, so as on no side to receive a deadly blow.

Cultivate thy soul.

Cut away the thorns.

Sow the word of godliness.

Propagate and nurse with much care the fair plants of divine wisdom, and thou hast become a husbandman.

And Paul will say to thee,

“The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits.” 2 Tim.2. 6.

He too himself practiced this art. Therefore writing to the Corinthians, he said,

“I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.” 1 Cor. 3. 6.

Sharpen thy sickle, which thou hast blunted through gluttony—sharpen it by fasting. Lay hold of the pathway which leads towards heaven; rugged and narrow as it is, lay hold of it, and journey on.

And how mayest thou be able to do these things? By subduing thy body, and bringing it into subjection. For when the way grows narrow, the corpulence that comes of gluttony is a great hindrance.

Keep down the waves of inordinate desires.

Repel the tempest of evil thoughts.

Preserve the boat; display much skill, and thou hast become a pilot.

But we shall have the fast for a groundwork and instructor in all these things.

8. I speak not, indeed, of such a fast as most persons keep, but of real fasting ; not merely an abstinence from meats; but from sins too. For the nature of a fast is such, that it does not suffice to deliver those who practice it, unless it be done according to a suitable law.

“For the wrestler,” it is said, “is not crowned unless he strive lawfully.” 2 Tim 2:5

To the end then, that when we have gone through the labor of fasting, we forfeit not the crown of fasting, we should understand how, and after what manner, it is necessary to conduct this business; since

that Pharisee also fasted, Luke 18:12.

but afterwards went down empty, and destitute of the fruit of fasting. The Publican fasted not; and yet he was accepted in preference to him who had fasted; in order that thou mayest learn that fasting is unprofitable, except all other duties follow with it.

The Ninevites fasted, and won the favor of God. (Jonah3. 10)

The Jews, fasted too, and profited nothing, nay, they departed with blame. (Isa. 58: 3, 7; 1 Cor. 9. 26)

Since then the danger in fasting is so great to those who do not know how they ought to fast, we should learn the laws of this exercise, in order that we may not “run uncertainly,” nor “beat the air,” nor while we are fighting contend with a shadow.

Fasting is a medicine; but a medicine, though it be never so profitable, becomes frequently useless owing to the unskilfulness of him who employs it. For it is necessary to know, moreover, the time when it should be applied, and the requisite quantity of it; and the temperament of body that admits it; and the nature of the country, and the season of the year; and the corresponding diet; as well as various other particulars; any of which, if one overlooks, he will mar all the rest that have been named.

Now if, when the body needs healing, such exactness is required on our part, much more ought we, when our care is about the soul, and we seek to heal the distempers of the mind, to look, and to search into every particular with the utmost accuracy.

I have said these things, not that we may disparage fasting, but that we may honor fasting; for the honor of fasting consists not in abstinence from food, but in withdrawing from sinful practices; since he who limits his fasting only to an abstinence from meats, is one who especially disparages it.

Dost thou fast? Give me proof of it by thy works!

Is it said by what kind of works?

If thou seest a poor man, take pity on him!

If thou seest in enemy, be reconciled to him!

If thou seest a friend gaining honor, envy him not!

If thou seest a handsome woman, pass her by!

For let not the mouth only fast, but also the eye, and the ear, and the feet, and the hands, and all the members of our bodies.

Let the hands fast, by being pure from rapine and avarice.

Let the feet fast, by ceasing from running to the unlawful spectacles.

Let the eyes fast, being taught never to fix themselves rudely upon handsome countenances, or to busy themselves with strange beauties.

For looking is the food of the eyes, but if this be such as is unlawful or forbidden, it mars the fast; and upsets the whole safety of the soul; but if it be lawful and safe, it adorns fasting. For it would be among things the most absurd to abstain from lawful food because of the fast, but with the eyes to touch even what is forbidden. Dost thou not eat flesh? Feed not upon lasciviousness by means of the eyes.

Let the ear fast also. The fasting of the ear consists in refusing to receive evil speakings and calumnies.

“Thou shalt not receive a false report,” it says.

Let the mouth too fast from disgraceful speeches and railing. For what doth it profit if we abstain from birds and fishes; and yet bite and devour our brethren? The evil speaker eateth the flesh of his brother, and biteth the body of his neighbor.

Because of this Paul utters the fearful saying,

“If ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another.” Gal. 5. 15.

Thou hast not fixed thy teeth in the flesh, but thou hast fixed the slander in the soul, and inflicted the wound of evil suspicion; thou hast harmed, in a thousand ways, thyself and him, and many others, for in slandering a neighbor thou hast made him who listens to the slander worse…

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Saint Edmund, King and Martyr of East Anglia

A first approach to the indigenous Orthodox Saints and Martyrs of the Ancient Church who lived and who propagated the Faith in the British Isles and Ireland during the first millennium of Christianity and prior to the Great Schism is being attempted in our website in our desire to inform our readers, who may not be aware of the history, the labours or the martyrdom of this host of Orthodox Saints of the original One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of our Lord.

“The Church in The British Isles will only begin to grow when she begins to venerate her own Saints” (Saint Arsenios of Paros †1877)

The holy and right-believing King Edmund the Martyr was a king and martyr of East Anglia in the ninth century. He succeeded to the throne of East Anglia in 855 as a fourteen year old. He died a martyr’s death battling the “Great Heathen Army”, a large army of Vikings that pillaged and conquered much of England in the late ninth century. He was venerated early and became popular among the Anglo-Norman nobility. His feast day is November 20.

Edmund was born in 841. Early accounts and stories provide a cloud over who is his father. The sources considered the most reliable represent Edmund as descended from the preceding kings of East Anglia. When King Ethelweard died in 854, it was Edmund, while only fourteen years old, who succeeded to the throne.

Little is known of Edmund’s next fourteen years. His reign was said to be that of a model king. He was said to have treated all with equal justice and was unbending to flatterers. He was said to have spend a year at his residence at Hunstanton learning the Psalter which he was able to recite from memory.

The sources’ description of his martyrdom vary. The Danes of the Great Heathen Army advanced on East Anglia in 869 and were confronted by King Edmund and his army. While Edmund may have been killed in battle, popular traditions are that Edmund refused the heathen Danes’ demands that he renounce Christ or that he could hold his kingdom as a vassal under heathen overlords. Both stories date from soon after his death and it is not known which may be correct.

According to an early biographer, Abbo of Fleury, Edmund chose, in the manner of Christ, not to strike arms with the heathen Danes and was captured and taken to Hoxne in Suffolk. There he was beaten and then tied to a stout tree where he was again beaten. Hearing Edmund’s calls to Christ for courage, the Danes further attacked him, shooting many arrows into the bound king who showed no desire to renounce Christ. Finally, he was beheaded on November 20, 869.

Edmund’s body was interred at Beadoriceworth, the modern Bury St Edmunds. This place became a shrine of Edmund that greatly increased his fame. His popularity among the nobility of England grew and lasted. His banner became a symbol among the Anglo-Normans in their expeditions to Ireland and to Caerlaverock Castle. His crest was borne on a banner at the Battle of Agincourt. Churches and colleges throughout England have been named after St Edmund.

In recent years, moves were made in England to restore St Edmund as the patron saint of England. Edmund had been replaced by St George as the patron saint through King Edward III’s association of St George with the Order of the Garter. The attempt failed. However, St Edmund was named the patron saint of the County of Suffolk in 2006.

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Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral

The “Scandinavian countries[1],” are usually thought of as being Lutheran, and this holds true when speaking of the nation of Finland, which has just over 80%[2] of its inhabitants professing the Lutheran faith. It usually comes as no surprise that Lutheranism is an official state religion. What often does come as a surprise however is the fact that Finland has a second state religion. Orthodox Christianity is also an official religion of Finland, although The Finnish Orthodox Church claims just over 1% of the population, around 60,000 adherents. How did this relationship between Orthodoxy and Finland come to be?

Christianity came to Finland in the 13th century, both from the Roman Catholic West (Sweden) and the Orthodox East (Novgorod), although recent archaeological evidence has pointed to the earliest Christian influence coming from the East[3]. The Orthodox mission was centered chiefly in the region known as “Karelia,” a strip of land that extends from the White Sea Coast to the Gulf of Finland.

The Orthodox influence resulted in the establishment of two monasteries, Valamo (or Valaam in Russian) and Konetvitsa, both on different islands in the large Lake Laatokka (Ladoga in Russian). Valamo was traditionally thought to be founded in 992, although modern research has made the window of late 12th to late 13th cent more likely. It was founded by Saints Sergius and Herman. Sergius is said to be an Athonite monk, who brought hesychastic style of spirituality and monasticism to North Western Europe. Less is known about Herman, who was either a contemporary and partner, or a spiritual heir. He preached the Gospel throughout Karelia and was either a Greek, or of Karelian descent himself.[4] What is known, is that Valamo became an important center for both spirituality and mission; sending missionaries to such faraway places as Alaska.

Konetvitsa Monastery, founded on the island bearing the same name, was begun by St. Arseny, who was a Russian Monk, but who had spent at least some time on Mount Athos, bringing the Hesychast tradition from there to Karelia. Like Valamo, it too became a place of spiritual pilgrimage.

There was also mission work in the far north among the Skolt Sami (sometimes referred to as “Laplanders”) by St. Trifon in the 16th century. Between 1533 and his death in 583 he established the Monastery of Petsamo, and planted the Orthodox faith in the region. The monasteries, particularly Valamo would become very important in the history of the Orthodox Church in Finland.

But the next centuries were not to prove to be peaceful. Caught between the two powers of Roman Catholic Sweden and Orthodox Russia, Finland would become the battleground of East and West, Orthodoxy and Catholicism. There were two crusades out of Sweden into Finland in 1239 and 1293, which resulted in most of Finland converting to Roman Catholicism. The middle of the 13th century would prove to be important, as Western expansion was halted and Russia would have dominion in Karelia for years to come. But by 1400 there were seven well organized parishes in Karelia.[5]

The first bishop was appointed for Karelia in 1595, but did not make that big of an impact at first as the bishops would dwell in Novgorod, thereby stunting their ability to lead. It wouldn’t be till the beginning of the 20th century that the Karelian church would be governed by a local bishop; the new see of Viborg.[6]

In the 17th century the situation changed, as Sweden, which had recently dropped their Catholicism in favor of Lutheranism, occupied Finland and attempted to drive Orthodoxy out of Karelia. The Swedes burned Valamo and Konevitsu to the ground, and any monks (or peasants) who did not flee, were killed. The Swedes inacted restrictions, that did not allow them to receive priests from Russia, and the people were forced to learn Lutheran theology. About two thirds of the Karelian population escaped these persecutions by fleeing to Russia. Those who were left survived much persecution and pressure, but as time went on, the Swedes became more and more tolerant.

Most of Karelia was captured by Russia under Peter the Great in the 18th century, and by 1809 the entirety of Finland, which was organized as a Russian Grand Duchy. This not only gave the Orthodox Church freedom, but reestablished ties with the mother church in Novgorod. Valamo was reestablished in 1719, and a new church consecrated. Konetvitsu experienced the same rebirth. The Czars themselves paid for much of the rebuilding of the burned out parishes. During the 19th century the Orthodox population of Finland grew to ten times its size. But there was more struggle to come.

By the end of the 19th century, there was a great struggle in Karelia and Finland to nationalize the Church. They began to celebrate the Liturgy in Finnish and translated not only liturgical texts, but spiritual works into the Finnish language. In 1892 a separate administration for the Finnish church was set up under the diocese of St. Petersburg, which very shortly became the Orthodox diocese of Finland. After the Russian revolution of 1917, The Finnish state declared independence; thus the Finnish Church effectively became autonomous and officially so declared by Patriarch St. Tikhon in 1921. In 1923 the Orthodox synod of Finland petitioned to be taken under the protection of the Ecumenical Patriarch, which was granted making it an autonomous archbishopric under the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Throughout the history of Finland, most of its Orthodox Christians were located in Karelia. But during WWII and after, many Karelian residents fled deeper into Finland as Karelia became a battleground, and then most of its territory was conceded to the Soviet Union. Valamo, once counting over 1,000 monks in its brotherhood, was abandoned as all of Lake Laatokka came under Soviet control, and an estate near Heinävesi was established as “New Valamo.” Eventually the monks were joined by monastics from Konetvitsa and Petsamo. New Valamo along with its sister Convent of Lintula, which is located nearby, have become important institutions in the modern Church in Finland. Because of the migration, Orthodox churches sprung up all over Finland, resulting in the Church being divided into two dioceses in the 1950s.

The Church of Finland experienced a decline in members and attendance after the War, but in recent years has experienced much of resurgence, as modern Finns search for something lasting and meaningful, as Finnish society deals with life in the modern consumerist age. The diocese of Oulo was added in the late 1970’s to the two existing dioceses: Kuopio in the Finnish Orthodox heartland of Karelia, and the Capital district of Helsinki. The Finnish Church was very optimistic that it would receive autocephaly when the book Orthodoxy in Finland: Past and Present came out in 2nd edition in 1982. Unfortunately they are still waiting for it.

Currently the Church is headed by Archbishop Leo the bishop of Karelia and all Finland, He is assisted by an auxiliary, Bishop Arseni of Joensuu. Metropolitan Ambrosios of the Diocese of Helsinki and Metropolitan Panteliemon of the Diocese of Oulu sit on the Holy Synod with Archbishop Leo. They are assisted in governing the Church by a body known as the “central synod” or “Church Assembly,” which includes not only the bishops, but 11 rectors, three cantors and 18 laymen and women. The Orthodox Church, by virtue of its being a “state church,” can levy taxes on those who live in a particular parish and identify themselves as “Orthodox.”

The Finnish Orthodox Church not only celebrates its “fixed feasts” on the Gregorian (or “new calendar”) as many Western countries do, it is unique among Orthodox churches in the world by the fact that it celebrates all the moveable feasts according to the Western Paschalion.

For 70 years the Church of Finland had a full-fledged seminary (1918-1988), but since 1988 those preparing to serve the Church have been largely trained at the University of Joensuu, which has a department of Orthodox theology. The seminary that is attached to the Archbishops chancery in Kuopio, does provide the liturgical training and spiritual direction, under the guidance of the archbishop. Along with the seminary, there is a Finnish Orthodox Church Museum attached to the Church’s headquarters there in Kuopio.

Finnish Orthodoxy is a gold mine waiting to be explored. There is unfortunately a dearth of reading material in English on the subject. The best book on the subject, Orthodoxy in Finland: Past and Present, a collection of essays edited by Viekko Purmonen, is outdated, its most recent edition being 1984. Among the many topics that could be explored: the Orthodoxy of the Skolt Sami people whose Orthodoxy dates to the early 16th century, the ramifications of Orthodoxy in Finland being a “state church,” the synergy of the Orthodox faith lived out within the unique culture of the Finns.

The Finnish Orthodox Church has faced a lot in its history. At present it is an “official state church;” it’s a pretty independent autonomous church in the patriarchate of Constantinople; they have a monastery with a rich heritage; they are not subject to “cross jurisdictions” (two little Moscow Patriarchate churches in Helsinki don’t count.) Perhaps it is time for autocephaly.

Biblography

Purmonen, Veikko. Orthodoxy in Finland: Past and Present. Kuopio, Finland: Orthodox Clergy Association, 1984

Ramet, Pedro. Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988

Oorni, Soili. Autocephaly and its Meaning for the Finnish Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, 1986

Kirby, David. A Concise History of Finland. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006

[1] Finns don’t view themselves as “Scandanavian.”

[2] All stats taken from the Finnish Orthodox Church website. Retrieved 4/15/09

[3] Kristinuskon Varhaisvaiheet Suomessa. Retrieved 4/25/09 (translated by translate.google.com)

[4] Veikko Purmonen, Orthodoxy in Finland: Past and Present, 2nd Ed. Rev. and enl. (Kuopio, Fin: Orthodox Clergy Association, 1984) 15

[5] A Parish in the Finnish/Karelian context seems to be a little different than the way it is thought of in the US. A Parish can include several churches and chapels.

[6] Pedro Ramet, Eastern Christianities and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1988)268

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Rev Fr Thomas John presenting an Icon to Metropolitan Abba Seraphim on behalf of the OBL Forum

Interview with His Eminence Metropolitan Abba Seraphim of of Glastonbury- Primate of British Orthodox Church (Under the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate)

Interviewed by George Alexander on 18 January 2010 at Cochin, Kerala, India during the OBL Forum Delegation Meeting with Metropolitan Abba Seraphim.

British Orthodox Church

The British Orthodox Church is a local church, anxious to bring the Orthodox faith to the people of our country. We work closely with the other Orthodox churches but our ministry is for British people who desire to become Orthodox. Our particular mission is to bring Orthodoxy to our people.

His Eminence Abba Seraphim

I am entirely of English descent. I was bought up as a nominal Anglican but I converted to Orthodoxy when I was about 16. My mother’s cousin was the previous Metropolitan of the British Orthodox Church who introduced me to Orthodoxy when I first met him in my teens. Eventually I was ordained by him and eventually succeeded him. Between us we have looked after the Church for the past sixty-six years. I was trained as a school master, in my early days teaching English in secondary schools.

What attracted Your Eminence to Orthodoxy

I wasn’t happy with the Anglican Church; its reformed nature is not consistent with the Apostolic Tradition. I was looking for a church with an authentic Apostolic witness. I was initially attracted by the Roman Catholic and sometimes attended mass with my friends, but I never wanted to join them, since to me they appeared ‘foreign.’ There was something alien in the Catholic spirituality to me. When I come to Orthodoxy I discovered the richness of the Apostolic tradition in its fullness and it didn’t bother me that there would be services in different languages. Its catholicity seems to be expressed in the fact that it encompasses people form the ice-bound northern Russian Steppes to the warm shores of Kerala. Orthodoxy certainly possesses true catholicity, although sometimes our mentality may appear to be narrow.

BOC relationship with Sister Orthodox churches and other Non-orthodox Churches.

We work actively through the Council of Oriental Orthodox Churches in the United Kingdom. This also participates in a Forum with the Roman Catholic and also with the Anglican Church, which each meet every six months. These Forums are there to reflect at local level the main international dialogue. They are not the big theological debates at international level but work at the local level to find ways of cooperating and witnessing together.

On Eastern Oriental Orthodox Dialogue

This is the most promising of all dialogues because already we have reached agreement that we share a common faith and tradition. Diversity is desirable. The Oriental Orthodox Churches each have wonderful local traditions and diversity. We also enjoy very good relations with our sister Eastern Orthodox Churches. In our ECL delegation we have our dear friend, Archimandrite Deiniol here, who is the director of the Wales Orthodox Mission of the Ukrainian Archdiocese within the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Even though we are not in formal communion we work as if we are one. We cooperate in many areas.

British Orthodox Church and Indian Orthodox Church Relation

I am impressed by the high educational standards of the Indian Orthodox Church. Your seminaries promote Orthodox scholarship and education and this is reflected by the clergy I meet. In the United Kingdom we actively co-operate: our priests and people attend Indian Orthodox Church services in Britain and we have made available some of our church building for Indian Orthodox use. We are delighted to have among us Dr. Mathews Mor Themotheos as the Metropolitan of the UK Diocese of the Indian Church, who is also the Chairman of the Council of Oriental Orthodox Churches in the UK. I would like to have closer relation with the Orthodox Theological Seminary at Kottayam. A number of our clergy are good academics and it would be interesting to have some formal interchange. We would love to work with any one who has a wide Orthodox vision. In some ways there is a common history between BOC and IOC since we both originate from the Syriac Orthodox tradition. Both churches are looking to present Orthodoxy to our people in our own culture and there is an inherent mission in that.

BOC Clergy Training

Unfortunately we don’t yet have our own seminary. Several of our clergy have studied at secular universities or part-time at Anglican Theological seminaries. We have priests with good educational standards, but we find it difficult in finding new priests. There are a number of good converts in BOC, but if their wives are not Orthodox they are not eligible. We can ordain them only if their wives are also Orthodox. We have the old-fashioned system monitorial system where potential ordinands are attached to one of the senior priests or to me, as the bishop. In that way and through guided study, they are prepared for their roles as deacons and priests. I am the only bishop and was consecrated in 1977, succeeding my elderly cousin when he died in 1979.

Converts

All our members are converts, but it is not that easy to be an Orthodox Christian. People must have a full commitment to the Orthodox life in all its aspects. You can’t become Orthodox just because you have a problem with the Anglican Church or you want to change your denominational affiliation. There must be a total commitment to the Orthodox faith and tradition, a commitment to serve and worship the Lord in the Orthodox way.

BOC Relations with Coptic Orthodox Church

We are the same church and I am a member of the Coptic Holy Synod under His Holiness Pope Shenouda III. We have three Egyptian Coptic Bishops in the United Kingdom (Bishop Antony for the Coptic Orthodox diocese of Scotland, Ireland & North-East England; Bishop Missael of the diocese of Birmingham, in the Midlands and General Bishop Angaelos at the Coptic Centre in Stevenage, just outside London). We are very close. After their ordination several of our BOC clergy spend their “forty days” training with Coptic clergy. We also give our support for Coptic Christians suffering problems for their faith and visit the mother church frequently

On Eastern Christian Links

Eastern Christian Links (ECL) – “Reconnecting East and West” is an ecumenical Christian initiative founded in 2004 by Nicholas Crampton, a Norfolk lawyer to encourage local Churches to explore the history, liturgy and traditions of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches. He felt that may Christians in the west have limited knowledge of the Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Churches. I am a Patron of Eastern Christian links. He wanted to make people more aware, so he approached his local Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops and he approached me. We all gave our blessing to this ecumenical project and I helped lead our first trip abroad was to South-Eastern Turkey, where we encountered Greek, Armenian and Syrian Orthodox Christians. We found that we could share these spiritual experiences, even though we are from diverse backgrounds. That is valuable.

The Kerala Experience

It has been wonderful. I had read a lot about Kerala and the Indian Church in books and met clergy and faithful in England, so in that way am familiar with the history of the Indian church, but it is not the same as experiencing the life of the church on its own soil. I am indeed fascinated to see and meet the Indian Church in all its richness and vitality. It had always been my desire to pray at the shrine of Saint Gregorios at Paramula and that was something precious and memorable. This has been a true pilgrimage.

On Orthodoxy Beyond Limits Forum

I am always excited by anything that promotes Orthodoxy. The work of OBL crossing the boundaries and promoting unity between the two families is something very close to my heart. We had talks in Stockholm on how we could push forward the dialogue between our two Orthodox families. It is sometimes frustrating that we are not moving as quickly as we might wish, but these things are in God’s hand. Its is good that the OBL work is coming from the ground level, from the bottom up. I think it is very important because the dialogue papers all talk about going back and telling our people. I see that is beginning to happen especially among the educated youth in the Church. I hope it will be one of several vehicles to that promotes Orthodox Unity.

George Alexander
Chief Coordinator- Dept. of Public Relations &
Spokesperson-OBL Forum
www.theorthodoxchurch.info