I’m still interested to learn why it is those who have no intention of avoiding ongoing misdoing nevertheless seek church sacraments or relationships with high church officials. I understand why church people would reach out to them, just can’t puzzle why they, knowing they are going to continue to be mobsters, knowing they intend to continue to bother the boys, and so on, nevertheless want to have church relations. Maybe they hope for a miraculous ‘way out’? Best guess I have.

George, I’m all for what you’ve written except as you note in the case of the actually disabled.

When there are enough poor people in a democracy we risk political exploitation of idle to enlarge an unsustainable idle class until general catastrophe teaches the lesson.

We must get better at learning where a helping hand ends and enabling the poverty cycle begins. I think providing loosly restricted charitable cash and cash equivalents enables the poverty cycle. As I’ve gained working insight into extremely low-income trailer park life I think one ‘policy shift’ would accomplish much improvement:

Careful thinking to provide the basics of sustaining life but NO cash or cash equivalents, shifting only to time limited cash and cash equivalents to those who sustain earnest job seeking and vocational education with childcare and transportation.

Food, not foodstamps.

Daycare, not money for daycare.

Bus passes, not money for bus passes.

Limited energy for heat/rent, not money to pay the rent / heat.

Cash you earn gets you what you want. The charity of others gets you what you need.

Harry, it’s not just that there will be an increase in cheerful giving, this type of charity is good for those who receive it. Because they have to work for it, they too are accountable. Compare the type of poverty pre-Welfare with that post-Welfare. It was simply impossible to live improvidently if you were poor. It was simply next-to-impossible to find the type of immorality that is common in most American inner cities today.

This even applies to the “religious” who sponge off the state. I always wondered how these renegade Mormon cultists could have 5+ wives and 20+ children while living in the desert in Arizona. It’s because the first wife is the legal one but all the other ones are simply the brood-mares of illegitimate children (albeit “married” in the eyes of the cult in question. So they all receive AFDC, WIC, Medicaid, the full gamut of what we entitle “Welfare.” This same phenomenon is going on in Western Europe where Muslim immigrants are allowed to legally bring in their second and third wives and all of them live on the dole. This is also happening in Israel where the ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews refuse to work but study Talmud all day and then go to the beach (and also have 6 or more children). I’m sure that there are other examples we can think of. None of this behavior could be possible without the state providing a safety cushion which will mitigate the effects of the bad choices and/or immorality in question. (BTW, being in the health profession, I saw how AIDS added exponentially to the cost of medical care in the US during the 1980s.)

Bottom line: Paul was right in Thessalonians, those who will not work should not eat. Parish relief in the 19th century was always contingent upon work or making good-faith efforts to find work. The only exception was for widows and orphans who could not work. Marvin Olasky wrote an excellent book about this called The Tragedy of American Compassion. The best types of welfare are those which expect something out of the recipient.

George, exactly right. You’ve captured why I’ve joined my local Rotary International club. They take care of money very carefully and I know just how many polio vaccines I’ve bought, just how many latrines I’ve helped build in villiages, just how many drinking water wells I’ve helped to dig in India. To this day all I know about the money taken from our parish over the years and sent out is that I’ve had to pay for each and every ‘diocesan’ and up event I’ve ever been to, and there are exactly ZERO new faces at the parish because of anything those outside the parish did with the money.

Over so many years those who have expressed the views you have stated have simply whined to those who are responsible for the results and the only thing that’s happened is more gray hair and less people and less money. How long is whining to the misdoers for changes leading to a good outcome not totally nuts. Been tried, failed, now what?

Harry, of course what you say is true. That’s why I believe in (no particular order):

1. locality (that means we elect real bishops)
2. transparency (we see the books)
3. accountability.

None of this will ever happen in the colonial eparchies. It didn’t even happen in the OCA as you point out. At least for awhile. I personally think that there’s more accountability in religious/charitable organizations than there are in governmental agencies or NGOs like the United Way. Consider: you can’t opt out of paying your taxes because monies are being directed to Planned Parenthood. But you can opt out of paying your tithes to your church if you don’t agree with its policies. This is one reason that churches tend to be more on the up-and-up here in America than in Europe where they are state-supported. Where malfeasance occurs, then you see the drying up of giving.

As for the governmental agencies out there, those provocateurs that dressed up as a pimp and prostitute proved that there’s major malfeasance going on in ACORN. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Where am I going with this? I guess if people find out that Church A is juggling the books regarding its contribution to Charity B, then the people of Church A can impeach those responsible or vote with their feet and join Church C which likewise gives to Charity B. And btw, I don’t mean just churches being involved in social welfare. For those not religiously inclined, there are fraternities such as the Shriners, and other philanthropic organizations.

Seriously with the opacity we have in high church finance exploitation of crisis to generate internal paychecks, look at the OCA’s 9-11 releif effort that only got to the victims after it was exposed by laity that the OCA wasn’t on the ‘thank you’ list as it never donated the money it collected.

It is the nature of our high leadership that they conflate ‘personal piggy bank’ and ‘church’ and ‘me’. If they identify a need different than the one explained when asking for money they do not see a problem using the money given with one expectation for whatever their new purpose might be. Very well-off people have changed trusts and wills as a result of how they see donations used while alive– and the misdoing church leadership doesn’t know a thing about how much they’ve lost.

Case in point, look at the Antiochians shambolic ‘three card monty’ ‘bishop today, errand boy tomorrow’ Lost-In-Translation-Shazaam-Presto festival.

You’ve written of the GOA’s issues already.

Still I wonder about the question upstream: why do mobsters seek church sacramental services while having every intention of continuing to do crimes? Why do those who feel their intentional ongoing misdoing is excused because of their somewhat justified belief about similar in higher church office want nevertheless to continue in the church?

Think about it: the hospital was the creation of the Medieval Church. All of the first universities were founded by the Church even here in the US). Welfare was provided by soup kitchens, orphanages, the parish dole, etc.

The US Constitution actually enshrines this separation. It has no provisions for caring for the individual or clssses of people. Just for providing those things that government is expected to provide for –defense, courts, etc. How much of the Federal budget is devoted to these eleemosynary functions? Things have gotten so out of hand that we are in danger of collapsing our society.

I know this sounds simplistic, to expect the various churches to step into the breach and reclaim that which is rightfully theirs, but look at all the churches that still do these things. That’s why I get so depressed when i think about the Orthodox Church in the US today. We do almost none of these things. Instead we have bishops who dun the Philoptochos to give money so they can build retreat centers to please their vanity, or Old World patriarchs who siphon off money to maintain their existence in some third-world hell-hole.

In today’s world our taxes (mostly involuntary) provide a great deal of what tithes were collected to do back when the civil authority either couldn’t care less or didn’t do much for the taxed people, beyond military activity which often was predatory and aimed to repress the locals as to defend them.

Now by virtue only of being born a child gets fed and housed and even protected from incapable parents. Unheard of for the civil authority to do that for most of the church’s history. Even the mom gets support. Mentally ill and handicapped don’t have to work and are maintained and not simply left to die. ‘Social Security’ by the civil authority? Providing at government expense late life support for more years than most lived their entire lives back when the church canon was accepted? The choirs of the saints no doubt stand awed by the improvement over against life as they knew it.

My central theme is that the rules of the church were crafted to meet and sometimes oppose and impact the nature of the civil authority of the day, the lifespan and demographics of the day. Much of that has changed a very great deal in the last 100 years and most all of it for the better and then some.

Can anyone show anywhere that in the crafting of the various canons and whatnot to do with tithing there was the slightest whif of a hint of a memory of a dream of such provision as we see today by the civil authority for the people? 90% of the spirit of what tithing was for is accomplished by the payment of taxes today and its use through the votes of the people directing the civil authority toward ‘social services’.

Quite a reasonable case could be made that through taxation each of us gives well in excess of a tithe for the purposes tithing was created — except financial support of the parish.

So I’m all for giving tithes to accomplish the purposes set forth for tithes in the church Traditions– in the modern context with the government doing much of that through taxation and what with the she-nan-i-gans we see in church finance — it isn’t clear giving the tithed portion entirely to the local parish, seeing as how much of it is diverted unaccountably, accomplishes the spirit of what tithing was set up for.

But getting back to your point, marriage is crucial to rounding out a human being. Go to http://www.spectator.org and read an excellent piece there about marriage supposedly going out of style. It seems that in this recession, the hardest hit are the singletons. Why? Because they don’t have the experience in accommodation, tact, compromise, and resourcefulness that married people do. From a green eyeshade point of view, you would think that greedy capitalists would rather have single people with no attachments toiling for them but its precisely the opposite that’s the case.

What am I trying to say? Maybe this: that in a parish situation we are all trying to work out our salvation. The priest no less than the parishioner. Therefore, it’s a terrible idea to put a single man (especially if he’s heterosexual) in a situation where he pastors a congregation. Instead, we should encourage married men for this office and that means paying them a decent salary unbegrudgingly. If we want them to lead us in prayer then we’ve got to make it happen for them. And not with food festivals but with tithing, actual tithing.

There’s a big point that’s missing: as I’ve said before, the laity share a lion’s share of the blame for this situation on so many levels. First, because they think “celibate” priests are cheaper; second, because the really rich laymen prefer compromised men in the hierarchy whom they can manipulate; and third, because a known (or suspected) homosexual in the priesthood “excuses” sinfulness on the part of the laity.

I’m sure there are other reasons, but unless and until the laity start demanding more –and this means of themselves–then it’ll just be the same old same old.

Eliot: I’m actually more sympathetic than I suspect most might think toward those who have feelings for their sex that was intended for the other. I feel analogous to the father character Tevye in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ when that character said while praying to God ‘It’s no sin to be poor, but it’s no great honor either’. The idea of restricting the priesthood to those who have never known fatherhood/parenthood wasn’t intended by the Roman Catholic celibacy party either– remember, remember, remember before 1900 give or take 20 years there were so many, many, many men who became celibate clergy after their wives died. Men who lived past their twenties outnumbered women 2 to 3 to 1. And as many lived less than 5-6 years as more. What sense did remarriage make? They would almost certainly father children they’d never live to see reach 10 years old. So a pious man being celibate as a widower priest as well was a very good idea for everyone.

Now only 100 years ago or so the rules the gays don’t change favor only never married as high clergy in our church or all clergy in the RCC. I’m sure many of them can’t believe ‘their good luck’. They get to wear dresses and nobody complains, they don’t have to marry a woman they don’t love anyhow, they dont’ have to father children, they get to sing and perform and have everyone respect them without really having to know them well first, and everyone makes excuses for their mistakes. Amazing! Security! Safety! Permission! So long as they are discreet… And with the laws protecting them now not even so discreet anymore.

Will these men let the reason for all this survive by having their minds and their humanity triumph over their accidents of birth as they age? Or will there be turmoil and dwindlement and convulsion unnecessary and all laid at their door? Do they have what it takes to actually care, do their accidents of birth/youth limit their ability for what amounts to institutional empathy and responsibility? So far seems like catastrophe is on the agenda. Respected ’empty nester’ clergy and men who’ve proven they can sustain a marriage and family for decades must be admitted to the episcopacy and clergy respectively. Right soon! Not too late but getting close, real close.

There we have a church that we have seen can be so very clear and very firm on the things it likes (papal universal primacy), so therefore knows full well how to be clear.

They were indeed very firm when they imposed clerical celibacy. There was resistance to compulsory clerical celibacy in 11th century. Even accusations that the celibacy party is being sodomites. On The Present Crisis in Roman Catholicism

Deeming the innovation of clerical celibacy as damnable, he used a new argument against it – that since baptism cleanses from sin, to call priests’ sons unclean insults the sacrament of baptism.

He also openly accused the celibacy party of being sodomites. As in the older generation as we have seen above, he was not the only writer of the new generation to see in the whole celibacy issue a plot of homosexuals against heterosexuals. Notably, Serlo asked the very relevant question of why the celibacy party were so liberal about homosexuality. A poem of that period, though not by Serlo reads: ‘No dumb animal is drawn to this evil … you are driven by a lust which all of nature abhors’

Strange isn’t it? There we have a church that we have seen can be so very clear and very firm on the things it likes (papal universal primacy), so therefore knows full well how to be clear. So they know, they know full out well this doing is not less than intentionally misleading puffery, meant to seem like the problem is being corrected in order to retain the loyalty of people. But we see they have no intention in reality of making the changes required to actually be who they would have people think they are when the people note the church rank and title.

We need to add the married to the ranks of the clergy, and to the episcopacy, along with those actual monastics who don’t need to do as Bill Clinton did with the meaning of “is” to live as the rank they hold would have people believe.

Only a little while ago in church history terms the clergy counted so many whose wives had died. Now they are gone and we retain the rules as if nothing changed. Women live longer than men! Widowers of working age are gone from the world. Wake up! Think again!