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Ecumenical Patriarch releases agenda for Mississippi Symposium

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The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese released the schedule for Ecumenical Patriarch Batholomew’s visit to the United States in October. Separately, a detailed agenda for his upcoming environmental symposium has been posted online.

The patriarch’s “Symposium VIII — Restoring Balance: The Great Mississippi River” offers a rare opportunity to present Orthodoxy’s distinctive, sacramental understanding of the stewardship of Creation to America and the world. And this trip, which will involve about 200 participants in all, will no doubt generate a huge volume of media attention. We will be following the symposium closely here on the Observer.

If the text accompanying the agenda is any indication, the work of the symposium will be heavily inflected by an environmentalist ethic that looks at humanity primarily as a source of pollution and largely ignores the benefits of balanced economic development that does not degrade or abuse Creation. There is the utopian dream of returning the Earth to its pristine, pre-industrial state. Example:

But the fate of the Mississippi waters is more than one aspect of global warming. It is also, very acutely, an ethical crisis. The exploitation of the great river – its pollution, the disastrous confinements of its course and the draining of its wetlands – is starting to produce catastrophic human and natural consequences. But it is not clear that the lessons of the Katrina hurricane have been learned. Development for short-term gain rushes ahead, especially in the Delta itself.

The Mississippi is a challenge not only to human responsibility for the environment, but to democracy. Many people know what should be done: a curb on development and a massive, costly programme to restore the river to something like its ancient health. But few are ready to vote for it. That is the real Mississippi crisis.

The Symposium agenda writer also notes, about a Day One stop in Memphis at the National Civil Rights Museum, that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial equality has been only partially realized with the election of President Barack Obama. “Yet fulfilling the dream of economic justice and what is termed today ecojustice, which is of particular concern to the Symposium, has not been realised,” we are told. Continue reading →

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The Perplexing Problem of Obtaining an Accurate Census of Orthodox Faithful Living in America

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Hartford Institute for Religion Research

HT: Orthodox Christian Laity

A Quick Question

How many Eastern Orthodox are there in the USA?

The quick answer: Far less than usually reported.

The longer answer: According to a recent study of Orthodoxy in the United States, the real membership (number of adult adherents and their children) in all Eastern Christian Churches in the USA can be estimated at about 1,200,000 persons. This figure is considerably less than the commonly accepted estimations, which range as high as over four million.

The greatest disproportions between “claimed” and actual memberships were found in the two largest Orthodox jurisdictions:

Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (typically claimed 1,954,500* members versus 440,000 actual adherents)

Orthodox Church in America (1,000,000* versus 115,000 actual adherents)
* membership figures are from the Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches, National Council of Churches, 2000.

The most likely reason for this discrepancy is the common practice of equating Church membership with the total number of representatives of a corresponding ethnic group including second and third American generations of the original immigrants, independent of these persons actual relationship to the Orthodox Church.

Continue reading →

Our Freedom Never Fully Realized

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In 1981, the Very Rev. Leonidas C. Contos delivered a lecture titled “2001: The Church in Crisis.” Fr. Contos said the title was chosen because the American Orthodox Church had been in a crisis “for a very long time” and he wanted to fix a reference point for speculations on what the Church’s situation might look like at some future date. That date has come and gone, but Fr. Contos’ reflections are now, just as they were nearly three decades ago, worthy of our consideration. Few have written so honestly and so intelligently about the problems of American Orthodoxy. Fr. Contos questioned the use of the term “diaspora” and said this:

For so long as we are conditioned, in our polity and in our cultural life, by the diaspora complex, however subconsciously, we will be inhibited in the fullest realization of our ‘church-hood.’ More importantly, so long as we are perceived from without as a diaspora—a branch, an offshoot, a transplant, an emigration—by the Mother Church (and, if the truth be told, by the Mother Country), our maturity will never be acknowledged; our uniquely formed destiny in the West, never adequately comprehended; our freedom to shape our future as the Orthodox Church in this hemisphere, never fully realized.

On the Ecumenical Patriarchate, it was Fr. Contos’ opinion that “there is one fate that could be worse than the expulsion of the Patriarchate from Turkish soil. And that is that it should remain there … ”

Fr. Contos

Fr. Contos (1920-1995) was the president of Hellenic College/Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology from 1966-1971. Later, he was a professor of Orthodox studies at the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, Calif. The late Archbishop Iakovos appointed Fr. Contos to be the official translator of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese where he was responsible for providing new liturgical texts.

At his funeral, the Rev. Spencer Kezios eulogized Fr. Contos as “a scholar, a humorist, an intellectual, a gentleman, an artist, an author, an orator, a musician, a theologian, a husband, a father and a grandfather. He was a gifted man. Lesser men were intimidated by the enormity of his talent. Honest men were inspired by it.”

I am reproducing here two passages from his talk, one of the Patriarch Athenagoras Memorial Lectures, which focus on what Fr. Contos calls the “crisis of canonical integrity” and the resulting identity crisis that has afflicted Orthodox Christians in this country for as long as anyone can remember.

The following text is from “2001: The Church in Crisis” by Rev. Leonidas C. Contos:

If it is incumbent on the Church to recover the mind of the Fathers with respect to tradition and with respect to the theological vocation, it is positively the mandate of history, where history has now brought us, to achieve this in the crucial matter of her canonical integrity. If you will consider this word, which is very carefully employed, you will appreciate that it has little to do with honesty—through surely honesty with yourselves is always very much at issue—but rather it has to do with soundness, wholeness. And it is here that we seem to find the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with the past.

That past is dominated by the fact that on the heels of its worst persecution, the Church suddenly came under the protection and favor of the very state that had so long tried to stamp it out as a pernicious heresy. With imperial aid what had been a minority sect succeeded in suppressing all its powerful rivals. (It had been suggested that otherwise it is not inconceivable that Mithra might today have churches on Broadway.) But the new imperial religion, which Christianity soon became, paid such a price for its victory that historians have described Constantine’s contribution as a ‘fatal gift.’ Certainly, its consequences were momentous, as have been the consequences of the transfer of the capital from Rome to Byzantium.

The main point, however, is not that the union of Church and empire created a lasting confusion of the things that are Caesar’s and the things that are God’s. What was of more far-reaching significance was that the absolute condition for the surrender of the Church’s independence to the empire was acceptance by the empire of the Church’s faith.

That unique and universal ‘theocracy,’ whatever its virtues or its faults—and it possessed many of both—perished in 1453. What did survive, under the Ottoman concept of the religion-nation, was the imperial tradition. Under the Patriarch of Constantinople it took the form of an ecclesiastical ‘imperium,’ so to speak, with its ecclesiological presuppositions thrown into a chaos from which Orthodoxy has yet to emerge and which, it would almost seem, it is loath to acknowledge. Continue reading →

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Pope and Patriarch meet in Jerusalem

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Pope Benedict XVI paid a visit today to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilus III. The pope, according to the Catholic News Agency, “spoke with the patriarch of his gratitude for efforts to achieve greater unity between their Churches and asked the Christians of Jerusalem to raise a generation dedicated to the faith.”

Pope Benedict began his speech to those assembled by calling to mind the past meetings between his two predecessors and the Orthodox patriarchs of their time.

“These encounters, including my visit today,” he said, “are of great symbolic significance. They recall that the light of the East has illumined the entire world from the very moment when a ‘rising sun’ came to visit us and they remind us too that from here the Gospel was preached to all nations.”

Here is the full text of the speech from Vatican Radio:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

It is with profound gratitude and joy that I make this visit to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem; a moment to which I have much looked forward. I thank His Beatitude Patriarch Theophilus III for his kind words of fraternal greeting, which I warmly reciprocate. I also express to all of you my heartfelt gratitude for providing me with this opportunity to meet once again the many leaders of Churches and ecclesial communities present.

This morning I am mindful of the historic meetings that have taken place here in Jerusalem between my predecessor Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I, and also between Pope John Paul II and His Beatitude Patriarch Diodoros. These encounters, including my visit today, are of great symbolic significance. They recall that the light of the East (cf. Is 60:1; Rev 21:10) has illumined the entire world from the very moment when a “rising sun” came to visit us (Lk 1:78) and they remind us too that from here the Gospel was preached to all nations. Continue reading →

Metropolitan Alexios Prays for Unity at Roman Catholic Service

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Archbishop-emeritus John F. Donoghue, left, and Metropolitan Alexios, right, join Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory for a final blessing of the congregation. (Photo by Michael Alexander)

Alexios, Greek Orthodox Metropolitan of Atlanta, joined Roman Catholic Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory on May 6 for an “Evening of Prayer and Unity” service at Atlanta’s Cathedral of Christ the King in honor of the Jubilee Year of St. Paul. Archbishop Gregory graciously welcomed Orthodox Christians to the service. “Our Orthodox brothers and sisters represent a fraternity in the Lord that we cherish and long to strengthen in the Holy Spirit,” he said.

According to The Georgia Bulletin, a diocesan newspaper, the “prayer service blended together Eastern and Western traditions with song, prayer and words of wisdom from shepherds of each of the churches.” The paper said that members of the Choir of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation in Atlanta and the Chanters of the Cathedral of the Annunciation then sang “Phos Hilaron.” The Cathedral Choir of Christ the King also sang the hymn, this time in English, “again linking the two traditions together in Christ.”

Metropolitan Alexios, in his remarks to those at the prayer service, issued a plea for unity:

“Thank you for taking the initiative (to call for this service),” Metropolitan Alexios told the archbishop. “The spirit of St. Paul is with us this evening.”

He thanked the clergy and laity present and said the event was an important step in bringing the communities together. “The thing that has separated us is not the faith,” he said, indicating that the reason was a political issue and a weak moment in the history of the two churches.

But all of these things that are happening now, he said, are signs that the two churches have to do something together. “I pray for a unity … to let the spirit of understanding, the spirit of the Lord prevail,” he concluded.

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