Month: June 2009

On the Roman Catholic site AsiaNews, Nat da Polis files a report on the Fourth Pre-Conciliar meeting of Orthodox hierarchs who assembled last week in Switzerland to discuss the problem of the “diaspora.” Da Polis views the pending trip of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul as a “significant step” in sorting out the disarray. Story follows.

Historic Orthodox decision, migrant communities to have their own bishops’ conferences

Istanbul (AsiaNews) – The first of two meetings scheduled for 2009 was held in Sabezy [Chambésy, Switzerland, ed.] to prepare the much awaited Pan-Orthodox Synod. In agreeing to set up Bishops’ Conferences for Orthodox Diaspora communities, the meeting reached a historic decision.

According to existing rules, Orthodox believers living outside their country of origin fall under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. However, the large-scale migration that followed the collapse of the Iron Curtain generated quite a few problems to those who are in charge of Orthodox life in the Diaspora because of the very close association of the Christian message to the ethnic origin of the faithful, a situation that has often been misunderstood or exploited with political and economic repercussions.

By a unanimous decision, Orthodox bishops’ conferences will be set up in the Diaspora and come under the chairmanship of the oldest metropolitan in Constantinople. If he is absent, then he will be replaced according to the canons of ecclesiology. The creation of new bishops’ conferences will thus reflect the new circumstances that have emerged in the Diasporic world.

All decisions will have to be based on the principle of unanimity of all Churches, each of which will be represented by their own bishops. Members in bishops’ conference will be bishops recognised by all Orthodox Churches. Constantinople will remain the coordinating centre for all the conferences.

A clear signal of the new situation came when it was reported that Kyrill, the new Patriarch of Moscow, will make his first foreign trip to Constantinople on 4 July.

The proceedings, chaired and skilfully directed by the Metropolitan of Pergamon Ioannis Ziziulas, [Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, ed.] took place in a calm and constructive atmosphere, like never before, and were permeated by a desire to finally set a common path for Orthodoxy as a whole in the face of the challenges of today’s world. Continue reading →

More on the episcopal assemblies announced at the pre-conciliar meeting last week in Switzerland:

“Anti-monopoly” proposals of the Moscow Patriarchate are taken into account in Chambesy

Moscow, June 15, Interfax – The Fourth Pan-Orthodox Pre-Council Conference in Chambesy (Switzerland) has agreed in its final decision to the need of equal management of the Orthodox Diaspora which was highlighted by the representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate before the meeting.

The Conference decided to create new bishop assemblies within the regions of Diaspora (Orthodox communities living outside of the area of local Orthodox churches) to include all canonical Orthodox bishops governing the communities of such regions.

“The decisions by such bishop assemblies will be made in conformance with the consensus of the Churches represented therein. The powers of Episcopal assemblies neither allow the interference into the eparchial jurisdiction of each bishop, nor limit the rights of his Church,” the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate reports of the decisions of the Pan-Orthodox Pre-Council Conference. Continue reading →

In part five of the “On the Road” series, Steve the Builder stopped in front of whore house in the middle of the Nevada desert. Sex and death are inextricably intertwined in the human being. That is why the Playmate Ranch is the perfect icon of our fallen humanity.

Listen here:

(HT: Orthodoxy Today)

The State of Kansas vs Frank Schaeffer in the Murder of Dr. George Tiller

By George C. Michalopulos

Recently, the notorious abortionist Dr George Tiller was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kansas. The killer was a man who appears to be a dysfunctional loner with grave psychological problems. Nobody in the pro-life movement has stepped forward to applaud him or his actions; routine condemnation has been the order of the day.

One man however, has bravely stepped forward to take responsibility for this act. Frank Schaeffer, a self-described former member of the “Republican Party hate machine,” a group that included his father Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan among many others, recently offered a mea-culpa in the left-wing journal The Huffington Post. Schaeffer believes that his life’s work as a young man in the Evangelical movement directly led to this incident because he helped create a “climate of fear” with his documentary (Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) and other work that made such atrocities like Tiller’s murder inevitable. As such, he puts himself in the pantheon artists like J. D. Salinger and Jodie Foster, whose ouvre inspired the murder of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

On closer reading however, Schaeffer’s credibility is suspect from his first paragraph. He states that he “got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of [his] former hate-filled rhetoric.” Actually, he did no such thing. Sure, he may have abandoned the Evangelical Right, but as a new convert to Orthodoxy, he helped create an “Orthodox Right.” As for his abandonment of “hate-filled rhetoric,” one can read his various books and writings or view any of the numerous books and DVDs he produced since that time. There is more than enough venom against the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and secular humanism in the Schaeffer canon to choke a horse.

To be fair, it is possible that Schaeffer’s recollection of the “mid-1980s” extends to the years 2000-2002, in which he traveled the country barnstorming Orthodox Churches, telling them that America was going to hell in a hand-basket. One of his bugbears was abortion and the degradation of man. The other was the threat of Islamo-fascism. I first heard the term “Islamo-facism” in 2002 and it was from his lips. Schaeffer’s grave disappointment in President Bush actually started then, when he rightly saw Bush’s phrase that Islam was as a “religion of peace” as a sham. I got the impression sitting in the pews at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma that in Schaeffer’s mind, Bush should have taken up the Cross instead of placating the Islamic masses who were “an implacable enemy” of our civilization. Continue reading →