Orthodox Church

The Crumbling of America and the American Orthodox Church

The real institutional danger facing Orthodoxy in American arises less from malfeasance and more from reasonably well-intentioned individuals making decisions without a sense of their own limits and the frailty of the Church as a social institution.

On Holy Saturday, Peggy Noonan published an interesting and important editorial in the Wall Street Journal (The Catholic Church’s Catastrophe).  She writes that often leaders of  “mighty and venerable institutions” can, over time, “become blithely damaging” to the very institution they serve.  This happens when we—and as a priest I need to include myself in this—allow ourselves “to think of the institution as invulnerable—to think that there is nothing [we] can do to really damage it, that the big, strong, proud establishment [we’re] part of can take any amount of abuse, that it doesn’t require from its members an attitude of protectiveness because it’s so strong, and has lasted so long.”

This has happened, she goes on to say, in “the past decade on Wall Street.”  Ironically it was “those who said they loved what the street stood for, what it symbolized in American life” who “in the end tore it down, tore it to pieces” by their indifference to Wall Street’s institutional vulnerability.  To be sure those who destroyed it “loved Wall Street” but their actions nevertheless “killed it.”

Moving from business to politics Noonan points out the same thing has “happen[ed] with legislators in Washington who’ve grown to old and middle age in the most powerful country in the world, and who can’t get it through their heads that the actions they’ve taken, most obviously in the area of spending, not only might deeply damage America but actually do it in.”

Continue reading →