Month: November 2009

George Michalopulos, occasional contributer (well, a bit more than occasional) to the AOI blog wrote a review of David Bentley Hart’s new book “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies” that is posted on the OrthodoxyToday.org site. Hart takes a close look at the new atheist’s arguments and dismantles them one by one, especially the old shibboleths like the Inquisition, the burning of the Alexandrian library, Galileo, and more. Michalopulos writes:

Hart dispatches the secularist critiques of (among other things) the Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, and the Christian burning of the famous Library at Alexandria. In the interest of brevity, I will only say that the Inquisition was set up by the Roman Catholic Church to stop the promiscuous torture and execution of people condemned of heresy and witchcraft by the state. In this respect, the Church largely succeeded. As for Galileo, Hart plumbs the historical record and proves that he was a prickly character who needlessly and with malice often provoked his many academic enemies. More to the point, his own astrophysical theories were not in themselves correct as his inquest pointed out…Indeed, it is Kepler’s system of celestial mechanics which we use today.

As to the famous burning of the Alexandrian Library by supposedly superstitious and bigoted Christian mobs in A.D. 390, Hart destroys this myth with an alacrity that enlightens as well as educates us about the intricacies of the early Christian age. It is little known that the Library had in fact been burned down many centuries earlier, most probably – and inadvertently—by Julius Caesar’s legions, during the dictator’s war against Pompey in the year 48 B.C. This is a stunning revelation, as Caesar died in 44 B.C., a good forty years or so before Christ had even been born (and almost a good century before the creation of the Church). So how did this myth take hold? The answer lies in the internecine conflicts that took place between Greeks and Jews, and later between pagans and Christians in Alexandria, quite possibly the most cosmopolitan and most violent city in the Roman Empire.

Michalopulos offers a good summary of the debt science owes to the Christian world view (a point well known among historians of science): Continue reading →

Sandro Magister offers analysis of an interview with Cardinal Kasper in “L’Osservatore Romano” on November 15 in which the cardinal discusses Anglicans heading to Rome and the reaction of the Orthodox.

In Cyprus, the news that the Catholic Church is ready to incorporate groups coming from Anglicanism also put the Orthodox on alert. Their fear is that a “Uniate” Church of the Anglican rite will be established and added to the “Uniate” Churches of the various Eastern rites: these are Churches obedient to the pope of Rome but in everything else the equals and rivals of the Orthodox.

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“In Cyprus, in order to avoid misunderstandings, I immediately told our Orthodox counterparts that this is not a matter of proselytism or a new Uniatism. […] Uniatism is an historical phenomenon involving the Eastern Churches, while the Anglicans are from the Latin tradition. The Balamand document of 1993 is still valid, according to which this is a phenomenon of the past that took place in unrepeatable circumstances. It is not a method for the present or the future. The Orthodox were mainly interested in understanding the nature of the personal ordinariates for the Anglicans, and I clarified that this is not a matter of a Church ‘sui iuris’, and therefore there will not be the head of a Church, but an ordinary with delegated powers.”

In simpler terms: while a “Uniate” Church has its own structured hierarchy, with a patriarch and territorial dioceses, none of this will apply to the former Anglican “personal ordinariates,” which will provide pastoral care for the faithful but without their own ecclesiastical territory, a little bit like the military ordinariates.

Read Anglicans and Orthodox — Cardinal Kasper Between a Rock and a Hard Place on Chiesa

Update (Nov. 17): Italian Mayors Order Crucifixes Put in Classrooms in Revolt against European Court Ruling. Polish president and Greek Orthodox Church also hit out at decision against crucifixes in classrooms (Source: LifeSiteNews.com)
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From the Zenit news service:

ATHENS, Greece, NOV. 16, 2009 — The leader of the Greek Orthodox Church is ready to convoke an extraordinary synod to strategize how to combat a European Court of Human Rights decision that ruled crucifixes in schools are a violation of rights.

“Majorities also have rights,” Ieronymos II said in a statement that L’Osservatore Romano reported today. Continue reading →