Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Monastery of St. John of SF dedication (GOC of America)

Posted by Byzantine, TX

4 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 12, 2016 at 3:53 PM

    It breaks my heart that we hear nothing about our canonical Hierarchs striving to bring Old Calendarists back into the fold. Dialogue with all sorts of groups and factions exist, but not with traditionalists. May God have mercy on us and enlighten us!

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  2. maximusJuly 12, 2016 at 5:25 PM

    Why in the world would Old Calendarists want to join us when many hierarchs in the highest places are attempting to ratify a fragmented ecclesiology? Even the traditional Orthodox in the official churches that refuse the Phanar's brand of ecumenism are castigated as "fundamentalists".

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  3. John (Ad Orientem)July 15, 2016 at 9:35 AM

    In the roughly thousand years since Rome went her way, there have been only two serious and long standing schisms in the Church. The first being that of the Old Believers of Russia and the second the Old Calendarists. Both are the product of high handed actions by arrogant hierarchs lacking any sense of humility and respect for tradition. Sadly it is likely too late to heal the Old Believer schism. If we wait another generation it will almost certainly be too late to heal the schism of the Old Calendarists.

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  4. maximusJuly 17, 2016 at 5:09 PM

    If only things were so simple and one-sided. Even the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR admitted that they made serious errors in the Old Rite Schism. Russians in the know also better; Solzhenitsyn is a good example:

    "But I will make bold to call the attention of those assembled here to something else, to another sin of long ago, to the three-hundred-year-old sin of our Russian Church. I shall boldly repeat this word in full voice: IT IS A SIN. I call it this in order to avoid using a harsher word. This is a sin of which our Church and the whole Orthodox people never repented! This sin weighed upon us in 1917, it weighs upon us now and, according to the understanding of our faith, it may be the cause for God’s punishment upon us, for the misfortune that has overtaken us.

    I have in mind, of course, the RUSSIAN INQUISITION: the oppression and subjugation of an ancient and established form of piety, the persecution and disenfranchisement of twelve million of our brothers, co-religionists and countrymen, their cruel torture, the tearing out of their tongues, the pincers, the rack, fire and death, the confiscation of their churches, their being driven thousands of miles and further into strange lands. This was done to people who had never staged a rebellion, and who never took up arms in reply. It was done to solid and true old-Orthodox Christians, whom I not only refrain from calling schismatics, but I am even careful not to call them “Old-Ritualists” – for then the rest of us would be merely “New-Ritualists.”

    For the mere fact that they did not possess the spiritual agility to accept the hasty recommendations of the dubious and globetrotting Greek Patriarchs, and that they retained the two-fingered sign of the Cross, wherewith our entire Church of the seven capitols had crossed herself – for this alone we condemned them to persecutions that were just as bad as those dealt to us by the atheists in the Leninist-Stalinist times. And yet our hearts have never trembled with repentance! Even now in Sergiev Posad there proceeds a never-silent service of prayer amid a stream of believers at the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh – while we have thrown the liturgical books that the saint prayed with into bonfires as if they were devilish things. And this unrighteous persecution, so utterly destructive to the Russian root, the Russian soul, to Russian health, has continued for two-hundred and fifty years (not sixty, like the present one). Could not the present persecution have been given to Russia and to all of us as a return blow? During the past few centuries, various emperors have been inclined to bring the persecution of their faithful subjects to an end. But the high bishops of the Orthodox Church have whispered among themselves, and have insisted: Let the persecutions continue! (Letter To the Third Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad)

    And as far as the Old Calendarists are concerned, yes, they are definitely at fault for some of what has occurred but it certainly takes two:

    St. John Maximovitch: Patriarch Meletius IV arranged a "Pan-Orthodox Congress," with representatives of various churches, which decreed the introduction of the New Calendar. This decree, recognized only by a part of the Church, INTRODUCED a frightful schism among Orthodox Christians. (On the Patriarchate of Constantinople)

    St. Justin Popovich: The questions of the preparation and celebration of a new ecumenical council of the Orthodox Church is neither new nor recent in this century of the history of the Church. The matter was already proposed during the lifetime of that hapless Patriarch of Constantinople, Meletios Metaxakis - the celebrated and presumptuous modernist, reformer, and AUTHOR OF SCHISMS within Orthodoxy - at his Pan-Orthodox Congress held in Constantinople in 1923. (On Summoning of the Ecumenical Council)

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