Month: December 2008

In “Orthodox bishop on hot spot,” Terry Mattingly looks at the improbable rise of Metropolitan Jonah — in the span of about 10 days — from newly consecrated assistant bishop of Dallas to head of the Orthodox Church in America. Snip:

If nationwide change is going to happen, said Jonah, it will have to grow out of respect and cooperation at all levels of the church.

“Hierarchy is only about responsibility, it’s not all of this imperial nonsense,” he said. “Thank God that we’re Americans and we have cast that off. We don’t need foreign despots. We are the only non-state Orthodox church. In other words, we are the only Orthodox church that does not exist under the thumb of a state — either friendly or hostile.

“So the church is our responsibility, personally and collectively, individually and corporately. What are you going to do with it?”

A quote from Catholic historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) in “Religion and the Modern State” (1936):

Religion gradually retreated into man’s inner life, and left social and economic life to the State and to a civilization which grew steadily more secularized. A man’s debt to religion was paid by an hour or two in church on Sundays, and the rest of the week was devoted to the real business of life — above all, the making of money. Such a division of life into two compartments — and very unequal ones at that — was not the Christian solution, nor could it be permanently successful. If religion loses its hold on social life, it eventually loses its hold on life altogether. And this is what happened in the case of modern Europe. The new secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world and to leave man’s inner life to religion; it claims the whole man.

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