Month: December 2010

HT: Theology and Society

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia today (December 6, 2010) cited statistics that 23,000 Orthodox Churches have been restored in Russia since 1990, according to the Interfax-Religion website.

“No other country has ever seen anything like that,” he said.

“The world should be aware of Orthodox Russia’s potential — we are capable of performing a great feat of recreating the destroyed and desecrated things out of oblivion,” Patriarch Kirill said.

In 1991, the former Soviet Union had 7,000 active churches, whereas the current number of churches has reached 30,000, he added.

Austrian MP Ewald Stadler speaks to the position of the Turkish Ambassador and tells off some of his colleagues.

During this, he addresses the lack of outrage when Catholic Archbishop Luigi Padovese was killed in Turkey and mentions the priests who have been killed.

Stadler is certainly not an indifferent Catholic!

Source: USA Today

NEW YORK — Towers are rising again at the site of the World Trade Center, a place of devastation turned into a construction hub. But the cross-topped belfry of St. Nicholas Church isn’t among them.

Nine years after it was destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the little Greek Orthodox church that stood across the street from the twin towers is farther away than ever from being rebuilt.

Slow progress toward a new home halted last year when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which controls the Ground Zero site, broke off discussions with the church over where and how a new church would be built.

On Sunday, the eve of St. Nicholas Day, 70 families of the congregation gathered near the site to light candles and pray for a way to rebuild their spiritual home amid the office towers and memorial plaza taking shape. “It’s not a political statement. This is our place, and we belong there,” says Mark Arey, a priest and director of interfaith relations for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Read the entire article on the USA Today website.