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The Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago says the government can define and sanction marriage on its terms but that he’ll no longer act as an agent of the government by signing civil licenses. (Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune)

By Manya Brachear Pashman
Chicago Tribune

Source: The Chicago Tribune

The Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon is getting out of the civil marriage business.

The Orthodox Christian priest on Chicago’s North Side says the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalizes same-sex matrimony reinforces his recent decision to no longer sign licenses that make marriages valid in the eyes of the state and now the nation.

That doesn’t mean Reardon won’t do weddings. On the contrary, he gladly will bless the union of a Christian man and woman and perform the sacrament of marriage. But those couples must go to a courthouse if they want to be legally bound. He says he can no longer in good conscience serve as an agent of the state.

“The strange situation in the United States is clergymen not only act in the name of the church, they also act in the name of the state,” said Reardon, the pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago’s Irving Park community. “The clergymen wear two hats. I’m making a political statement in this sense: I’m accusing the state of usurping the role of God. What I’m saying is, ‘I don’t agree with you and I’m going to change the way I do things. I will not act in your name. … I will not render unto Caesar that which belongs to God.'”

The unusual protest has inspired other Christian clergy — Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant — to consider following his lead, a shift Reardon hopes will lead the nation to a different model of marriage, one that no longer deputizes clergy to sign marriage licenses and, in his opinion, effectively uphold the state’s definition of marriage.

In Illinois, couples typically go to the county clerk to apply for a marriage license no more than 60 days before they wed. Whoever officiates at the ceremony signs the license as a witness. The county then records the marriage. The couple also has the option of exchanging vows in front of a judge. That’s the only option now for Reardon’s parishioners if they want to be married in the eyes of the law.

Archbishop Blase Cupich, Chicago’s Roman Catholic leader, said in a recent interview that the idea has not come up among America’s Catholic bishops or Chicago priests, but he pointed out that a “two-tiered type of marriage” already exists in some places, including Europe. Regardless of who signs the license, he added, there’s already a clear distinction between the two in the U.S.

“Civil marriage doesn’t make people promise and keep the promise of permanence because of the ease of divorce,” Cupich said. “We ask people to be married until death do you part and we really mean that. … It’s important to recognize we already have a difference between civil marriage and church marriage because of the promises.”

Indeed, the government’s view of marriage as a legally binding contract already contradicts the Orthodox Christian understanding of marriage as a sacrament — blessing a union that already existed because it was created by God. And therein lies the problem, Reardon said.

“Government has no authority whatsoever to alter that,” Reardon said. “Whence a judge, magistrate or a justice of the peace does the ceremony, that’s just a legal act. As a priest I will no longer step in and serve in that function.”

Reardon, who was raised Roman Catholic and converted to the Episcopal faith, embraced Orthodox Christianity in the 1980s when Episcopalians began to change their prayer book and ordain gay clergy. He chose the Antiochian Orthodox Church because it was particularly open to converts. In fact, three-fourths of the members of the church in North America are American born, as are nearly all of Reardon’s parishioners. That’s not necessarily the case in the roughly two dozen ethnic Orthodox churches where many parishioners have immigrated to the U.S. from countries with a particular Orthodox patriarch.

But the theology of marriage is the same in all branches, said the Rev. Johannes Jacobse, president of the American Orthodox Institute. It’s considered to be much more than a partnership.

“We see the sacramental as the completion of the natural,” said Jacobse, also an Antiochian Orthodox priest. “We see marriage as a means of salvation, as a way one achieves salvation. It’s not just a contract or agreement. It certainly is that. But it’s more.”

Clergy on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate support Reardon’s boycott, though based on a slightly different rationale.

The Rev. Tony Jones, an evangelical author and proponent of same-sex marriage, has been advocating for a separation of religious and civil marriage since 2010.

“This social change happened a lot faster than anybody predicted,” said Jones, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. “When I declared that I would no longer sign marriage licenses and encouraged other clergy to do the same, it was an attempt to actually buy the church some freedom to say we can sacralize a same-sex union and we don’t need the state to legalize it.

“The other reason I did it was on behalf of people like Father Reardon,” Jones added. “I thought it would buy conservatives some time and some latitude and they could say the government can do whatever the government wants to do regarding marriage and weddings. But in our church we’re going to have a different standard.”

He said most clergy members he has surveyed agree in principle that they should not serve as arms of the government, but signing that certificate has become so much a part of the American marriage ritual that it’s difficult for them to see an alternative.

Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, said he doesn’t foresee such a boycott in Chicago. He even questions whether it’s legal.

“I can’t imagine any of our priests doing that,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet and I don’t anticipate it happening to make a political statement,” he said.

Jacobse said Reardon is the first Orthodox priest to take such a strong a political stand. But the recent Supreme Court ruling has sparked a discussion among other brethren, he said.

“It was a bold move on Father Patrick’s part,” Jacobse said. “A lot of priests are wondering and asking the same thing. To remove all conflict between the church and the state is to go the path that Father Reardon has chosen to go on. I anticipate more priests are going to go that way.”

Reardon emphasizes that he does not discourage couples from seeking licenses and legitimacy in the eyes of the law. But having that certificate will no longer be a condition of getting married at All Saints.

“If you want the tax advantages of marriage recognized by the state, you’re going to have to do something else about it, like go down to a justice of the peace,” he said. “If you don’t want that, that’s perfectly OK. I’m not going to require that at this parish.”

The SCOTUS decision to legalize gay marriage reveals that the corruption of American cultural gatekeepers and institutions is nearly complete. This ruling legitimates the homosexual agenda which at bottom is not about civil rights but the inversion of the moral bedrock of Christian civilization. Religion is the ground of culture wrote philosopher Russell Kirk and when religion changes so does the culture.

The decision codifies into law a definition of the human person that strikes at the heart of the Christian understanding of who God created man to be. All persons and institutions will be judged by the litmus test of homosexuality. When the cultural transformation is complete, the assault on the Church will begin. It will come sooner than we think.

Dostoevsky warned of just such transformation to his fellow Russians when the gatekeepers of Russian culture embraced a vision of man contrary to the received moral tradition, in his case Russian Orthodoxy. He saw a great darkness that would come as a result of their corruption. He was correct.

The conservative judges on the Court recognize the same thing. Judge Anthony Scalia wrote:

Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

Gay marriage has never been about marriage. Gay marriage has been about the moral sanctioning of homosexual couplings. It was and remains the wedge issue for the legal codification of homosexual behavior and the overthrow of cultural norms by using the coercive power of the courts. At bottom it is a revolt against Christ and Christian civilization.

Dark days are ahead. There will be no compromise with the forces that will be mobilized against Christians and Christianity as a result of this ruling. Liberty has lost, and next comes the attempt to extinguish the Light that illumined it.

(For more see my essay: Homosexual Marriage at the Dusk of Liberty.)

Source: Acton Power Blog

The latest monograph from the Acton Institute, The Cure for Consumerism by Rev. Gregory Jensen, will be available for free starting this Wednesday, June 10, and ending Friday, the 12th, at midnight. This is the second monograph in the Orthodox Christian Social Thought Series.

Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a rapid growth of human flourishing, but critics of the market economy have argued that these improvements have led to consumerism and rampant materialism.

This monograph will explore the possible cures for consumerism. Can society actively choose to consume less? Does our economic system need a complete overhaul?

Rev. Jensen will explore these possibilities, synthesizing insights from the spiritual tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church with modern social science. This monograph will offer practical solutions to consumerism, putting both faith and economic freedom to work for the common good.

To read a sample or to learn more about The Cure for Consumerism, be sure to visit www.CureConsumerism.com. On Wednesday, you can get your free copy at Amazon.

Fr. Gregory Jensen

He blogs at Koinonia and the American Orthodox Institute. In 2013, he was a Lone Mountain Fellow with the Bozeman, Mont.-based Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC).

A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying “You are mad, you are not like us.” —St Anthony the Great (d. AD 356)

“What is truth?” —Pontius Pilatus to Christ only hours before His execution (John 18:38).

Bruce Jenner’s public transition to his female alter ego “Caitlyn” on the cover of Vanity Fair received widespread praise in progressive circles. President Obama took the time to hail Jenner’s “courage” in coming forward and sharing her story. What is clear as one reads of the fawning coverage of Jenner’s transition to becoming, apparently, a woman is that the West has become so dedicated to the Enlightenment value of the absolute will of self that it has abandoned adherence to both morality and reason, deifying the individual will and setting it above all things.

There is no room for dissenting views in an intellectually totalitarian society, and that is what we are rapidly becoming. Anyone who sensibly and politely dissents from calling Bruce Jenner “Caitlyn” will be labeled a hater, a bigot, an intolerant ass worthy of public condemnation and ostracizing. We live in an insane time when crazy things like mutilating the body in order to accommodate spiritual illness — and that is precisely what this phenomenon is — are considered normative, and normal reactions are considered hateful.

For a man to mutilate his body to “become” a woman — which is both biologically and scientifically impossible — is something every civilized society should condemn and reject as tragic, unnecessary, and profoundly destructive to the soul. Yet our society is ever more allergic to the very notion of there being a soul, an afterlife, an ultimate account, a God. Christians, and conservatives of every and even no religion, urge the far simpler, easier path — for a person who thinks himself or herself “transgendered” to do the sensible thing and begin to reconcile his or her sadly disturbed, confused mind to his or her natural body. This can and should be done through appropriate channels of guided, professional spiritual and psychological healing.

The inescapable reality is that Bruce will forever be Bruce. His DNA will forever be male. No amount of “corrective” surgery can change that. All that will be female in him is a kind of facade, the plastically and surgically applied exterior appearance. Bruce, even posing as Caitlyn, will never be able to have a womb, that thing which truly separates women from men. This 65 year old grandfather will never be able to give birth, no matter what he does to mutilate his body into resembling that of a woman. If he goes through with full “gender reassignment surgery”, or “gender harmonization surgery”, as it is now being called, Bruce will have grafted, fake female genitalia in the spot where his male genitalia were sliced and mutilated.

In every way, should Bruce choose to go through with the surgery, his body would become a mutilation. He needs our fervent prayers that God protect him from such a tragic path. If he tragically decides to take the extreme step, he will bear the ultimate responsibility, but so will the horrific, immoral plastic surgeons and pseudo-psychologists who encouraged his delusion, who encouraged him to mutilate himself rather than do the far easier, sensible thing and reconcile his mind and soul to his beautiful, natural, God-given body.

At the rate he is going, Bruce will have taken a profoundly hurting man, a man still physically whole, with a fully functioning male anatomy, and butchered him. Any sensible, thoughtful society would pity him, would pray for him to still find healing, and beg him not to go further down the path into madness. Yet we live in an insane society that praises him for being so brave, so true to himself, that he dares to risk all to be who he wants to be. We have elevated the self-will over and as a replacement of God. We are now a truly atheistic society in which we subordinate all things to the individual will.

The truth is, whether you’re a theist or not, either God or nature made Bruce male. No amount of plastic surgery can change that. Instead of trying to reason with Bruce, instead of encouraging him on the far easier path of reconciling his hurting mind and soul with his beautiful, God-created male body, we now live in a society that encourages and normalizes people who are sadly running from their true selves, running from any concept of ultimate Truth, running from and rejecting the very concept of there being a reality beyond the self will.

The idolization of the self-will is complete. Truth in our society is dead.

Ryan Hunter is pursuing his BA in History at Stony Brook University in New York. He is the University’s “Researcher of the Month” for June 2015. He plans to pursue a PhD in either Russian, British, or Byzantine history. His interests include Church history, theology, the Empire periods of most civilizations, and political theory. He has written widely for the Institute on Religion & Democracy’s blog Juicy Ecumenism. Read Ryan Hunter’s essays.

Gay Marriage and the Houston Gay Rights Ordinance

Source: Orthodox Clergy Association of Houston and Southeast Texas

We, the Orthodox clergy of Houston and Southeast Texas, are compelled by our responsibilities before God to speak out plainly against the rebellion against God’s created order that we see being waged on both the local and national level.

It is God who created the two sexes, and established marriage at the time of creation, as our Lord Jesus Christ tells us:

But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder (Mark 10:6-10; cf. Genesis 1:27; 2:24; 5:2).

The so called “Houston Equal Rights Ordinance,” is nothing of the sort; but rather gives a man who wishes to consider himself a woman, on a given day, the right to use women’s restrooms in the city of Houston. Such a man need not have even had a “sex change” operation, or even dress like a woman, since “gender” is considered to be a state of the mind rather than a biological fact. After the City council approved this unjust law, Christians of all races, denominations, and political affiliations organized a petition drive, which resulted in far more than the required number of signatures to get the issue on the ballot. But Mayor Annise Parker, disregarding the law, simply chose to disregard the will of the people and their right to vote in accordance with the law. She also used the occasion to unconstitutionally subpoena the sermons and private pastoral correspondences of pastors who were not even a party to a lawsuit that is seeking to force the Mayor to simply obey the law and allow the citizens of the city of Houston their right to vote. We wish to express our support for the fight against this unjust law, and the unlawful actions of Mayor Annise Parker, and we call upon her to cease ignoring the will of the people — which she clearly knows does not support her actions, or else she would not fear leaving the matter to them.

The question of “gay marriage” is also before the Supreme Court, and it is feared that they will impose “gay marriage” on the entire United States. We want our parishioners, fellow citizens, political leaders, and our nation’s judges to know that if this is done, it will be a violation of the letter and the spirit of the United States Constitution. More importantly, it will be an act of rebellion against “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” We have laws respecting marriage because only heterosexual relationships are capable of producing children, and those children are best provided for and properly raised within the context of traditional marriage. Homosexual relationships cannot possibly produce children, and so cannot possibly fit the meaning of the word “marriage,” neither should the state concern itself with recognizing such relationships. Homosexual couples also cannot provide both a mother and a father to a child, and so should not be allowed to adopt children.

The Declaration of Independence correctly states that our rights come from God, not from the state. The state can either justly protect those rights, or unjustly violate them. No government, much less an unelected court, can justly proclaim something to be a right which violates God’s natural order. The only way society can accommodate the demands of homosexual activists to call their relationships “marriage” and to allow everyone to pick which restroom they desire, is to ignore that men and women are different and have unique characteristics, and to pretend that there is no difference between a mother and a father. This can only be accomplished if we all deny that which we know to be true, and “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).

Let it be known that we will never recognize such laws or judicial decrees to be either right or just, nor will we be intimidated into silence, but will continue to obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29), and proclaim the whole council of God on these issues (Acts 20:27).

Signed:
V. Rev. Fr. Serge Veselinovich, Ss. Constantine and Helen Serbian Orthodox Church, Galveston, Texas
V. Rev. Fr. Dejan Tiosavljevic, St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church, Cypress, Texas
V. Rev. Fr. Gabriel Karam, Holy Forty Martyrs Antiochian Orthodox Church, Sugarland, Texas
V. Rev. Fr. Joseph Huneycutt, St. Joseph Antiochian Orthodox Church, Houston, Texas
V. Rev, Fr. Anastasios Raptis, St. Basil Greek Orthodox Church, Houston, Texas
V. Rev. Fr. John Whiteford, St. Jonah Orthodox Church (ROCOR), Spring Texas
Hieromonk John (Anderson), St. Cyril Orthodox Church (OCA), The Woodlands, Texas
Rev. Fr. Lubomir Kupec, St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church (ROCOR), Houston, Texas
Rev. Fr. Cassian Sibley, Life-Giving Spring Orthodox Church (ROCOR), Bryan, Texas
Rev. Fr. Michael J. Lambakis, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Houston, Texas
Rev. Fr. James Shadid, St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church, Houston, Texas
Rev. Fr. Richard Petranek, St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church, Katy, Texas
Rev. Fr. Demetrios Tagaropulos. Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Houston, Texas
Rev. Fr. Anthony Baba, St. Anthony Antiochian Orthodox Church, Spring, Texas
Rev. Fr. Symeon Kees, St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church, Houston, Texas
Rev. Fr. Benigno Pardo, St. Jonah Orthodox Church (ROCOR), Spring, Texas
Rev. Fr. Christopher Xanthos, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Houston, Texas
Rev. Dn. David Companik, St. Jonah Orthodox Church (ROCOR), Spring, Texas
Rev. Dn. Juvenaly Hale, St. Joseph Antiochian Orthodox Church, Houston, Texas

More names from the clergy association are likely to be added.