It’s up to us to wrest back control from the State those things which properly belong to the Church. By this I mean charity, philanthropy (this includes hospitals), and education.

Most of all education… It is an act of mercy to educate, to give people spiritual food, to teach them about the dignity of humanity, the eternal soul, and the mercy of the loving God. The decay of our contemporary world is due to our one-sided materialistic education system and to the influence of the media. For a human to be whole, he needs to be given the right and the opportunity to know about both the material and the spiritual world. There is no conflict between faith and reason. Deprived of the spiritual component, life becomes, when placed under the microscope of our human reasoning, aimless, and death hopeless.

IMHO, the state has taken way too power unto itself –always to “help” the poor–and we have very little to show for it except the intergeneration transfer of poverty and people who don’t need charity gaming the system at the expense of those who do (i.e. people like you).

This is why I’m so distressed that a genuine good-guy bishop like Savvas can write enconia to the statist Left as represented by Obama. What is the purpose of the Church once the State takes on all charity? Pretending to dress up like a Byzantine court and erforming complex rituals? It was Schmemann I believe who said that Jesus didn’t die to give us pretty rituals.
But I digress. It’s up to us to wrest back control from the State those things which properly belong to the Church. By this I mean charity, philanthropy (this includes hospitals), and education. Not only has the State made a hash of things, but it’s only exacerbated the problems and from a fiscal standpoint, this is why our debt is growing exponentially. Because we have chosen to make an idol of the State, we are literally at the breaking point. The collapse will be horrible.

Please forgive me for the preachiness of the above, but I wanted to stress to you that for many of us on the Right, we’ve come to these conclusions based on a careful reading of Scripture (which has a lot to say against the mixing of Church and State) and history. For those of us in America who are Constitionalists, we think that the Federal Govt should be restrained to what it says in our Founding Document: the defense of the land (this includes protecting our borders), the coining of a common currency, treating with foreign powers, and not too much more than tbat.

You initial posting is packed with unexamined assumptions. I won’t unpack them here. Your response to my complaint that it reads like a moralistic screed is simply more of the same, albeit in less polemical terms. Further, your implicit conclusion that disagreement with your assumptions amounts to a lack of compassion remains. In fact, you buttress (but don’t explain) the initial assertions with the claim that the Church Fathers endorse your view.

Sorry, but I don’t accept drafting the Fathers into service to the American compassion industry as legitimate. Jim Wallis type socialism doesn’t play well here. Neither do charges that disagreeing with socialist ideology is somehow anti-Christian. There is a world of difference between true compassion and manufactured compassion. Manufactured compassion debilitates human character. It makes man a dependent slave.

You need to break open the matrix of ideas through which you see the man and society. Start with this: Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

Now, please think the next part through:

Don’t make the mistake of reading this response as “shutting you out.” I am not shutting you out. I am taking your ideas seriously and I am not letting my response to them be clouded by false virtue. Take that as a sign of respect because it is. Failing to point out that you blur the line between manufactured compassion and true compassion would be the failure, not my refusal to coddle your ideas simply because you hold them in sincerity.

Father bless—

First, I intended to sign off with a name, but forgot; I am Leo Peter (sometimes just Peter).

With every respect for your Priestly office, please understand I am being utterly sincere — I’m not much of a politician, obviously — when I say I don’t understand what you are saying. As I have always been under the impression the words moralistic and scolding mean in common United States English usage — and I have a degree in English, and it is my first language — there is little else on aoiusa.org, if rather one-sided. Since it presents itself as an Orthodox site, I don’t understand what’s wrong with bringing the Fathers into what I think has actually been one of my more direct, on-point, even personal Comments here. Certainly we don’t believe anybody is infallible except God Himself, and even some Fathers have made mistakes, but I’ve actually been familiar with Patristic Economics (so to speak) longer than with Orthodoxy in general, and I have never encountered solid o/Orthodox t/Theological argumentation against them, yet. I have loads of graduate work in Religion, including an M.A., though admittedly not from an Orthodox institution, as I became Disabled before converting to Orthodoxy.

To explain myself a little more… I really don’t come here looking for trouble, just Orthodox Church news, especially about the Chambesy Process. It’s been clear pretty much from the start that we represent different approaches to politics/economics/etc. But sometimes I just feel the need to share some information in hopes of bringing (what I consider to be, of course!) some enlightenment to this or that discussion, factual correction, or other help; you may have noticed I don’t broadside on every post — just ones that I in my probably-not-so-humble opinion believe a contribution might mean something. I also stay away from personal Church politics — BARTHOLOMEW, Schaeffer, molestation, DEMETRIOS, whatever.

In this particular case, I thought that along with all the above, speaking as a Disabled person, a poor person, a working class person, an Indigenous person, a person at risk of homelessness, etc., a Comment from such a person in a discussion as to whether the current economic system is helping me and my people (so to speak) might be uniquely informative. If it’s not welcome, I have other concerns in my life I need to attend to. But to accuse me of things I don’t understand myself as being guilty of when it seems we may be using the language differently, concerns me. Maybe I’m still too much with my Passions; OF COURSE I am. But I would like to know, if I’m mistaken about something I’ve said in a Comment here, because one thing I’ve had time for since becoming Disabled is learning Right Belief and Life, or beginning to. I guess I just look for more explicit Orthodoxy from an American Orthodox Institute; America’s already heard plenty from heterodox preachers, economists, political activists and candidates and officeholders, and look at the mess we’re in.

So, Father, if you or anyone can help me, so to speak, I just might appreciate it. Shutting me off only shuts me up, here. True, you aren’t my pastor; this isn’t my parish; but you have thrown open this site for Comments without prior moderating, presumably relevant questions and dialogue too, at least among the participants here who do so as I observe. It’s possible, even given the above, that I’ve misperceived your purpose here; that’s a very real possibility too, for reasons I wish to keep private for now. If I have, I beg forgiveness. And I wish a Good Fast to readers on the Old Calendar.

Sincerely,
Leo Peter

I realize analysis such as this won’t make me the best Orthodox missionary to the comfortable, but I can’t reconcile myself at this time, so it may be just as well that God seems to have closed off that career to me! I don’t say this with pride or smugness, either, but deep sadness and conflictedness. Lord have mercy on me, on my fellow poor and oppressed (and those even worse off) and Indigenous, disabled and work-injured, and on all of us.