A population of 30,000 — where the average age at death was 21 for women, 24 for men. So, you know, nothing’s changed and neither should we.

Hi Dean!

Possible. It had a population of 30,000 when Constantine chose it, and I doubt more than a third had already received baptism. I’m not much for demoting sees. I am for them doing their jobs, i.e. evangelizing.

No, and there is no reason to put Rome on hold. There is a Romanian bishop of Rome (+Siluan) and a Greek Metropolitan of Italy (+Gennadios). That their jurisdiction overlap (the EP is the one who has canonical jurisdiction here, btw) is the problem, not that B XVI isn’t at their head.

Hi Isa

Re: I’ve mused about the “Great and Holy Council” doing something useful about the diptychs

When I read the comment above, I thought to myself, “Like demoting some of these “patriarchates” and returning them to bishoprics?”

I wonder, do you think did Byzantium had more Christians in 324 AD than it does now? It was a simple bishopric then…

Just “musing”….

Best Regards,
dean

I have confessed Christ my whole life, and in 1944 I dedicated myself completely to Him. I was always confronted with material­ism—be it bourgeois or be it Communist. I measured the Christian Faith against Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and especially against the Talmudic Jewish faith. I compared Orthodoxy with Ca­tholicism, Protestantism and neo-Protestantism. I gave atheism a great fight….

I stayed approximately five years in total isolation, starving and naked. I stayed over fifteen years in common rooms—some smaller, others larger—in which I lived day and night, forced to take care of all bodily necessities in the room in a “tineta,” a kind of bucket. Sometimes eight people would be squeezed into a cell six-and-a-half feet square, sleeping two, three or four to a bed. Our bodies and souls were, every moment, rubbing against each other. The terror of the guards, hunger, cold and illness seemed easy to us compared to the terror that is created between men who are different, desperate and often degraded.

I did agricultural work for two years. It was slave labor, and we were hungry and naked. Although we worked in vineyards and vege­table gardens, we were starving because we were not allowed to taste even a little of the fruit or vegetables. I was hungry for over twenty years, often dystrophic because of malnutrition. My body was freezing during all those years in prison. I was beaten, tormented and tortured for years, unto the destruction of physical and spiritual resistance. I have known the awful domain of living beyond bearable limits. For years I was threatened with death. “My soul” was continually asked of me. I often offered my life and I preferred the prospect of death in or­der to save my soul, my conscience, and my integrity; and only God protected me from falling. There exists no man who can withstand all the tortures. Many years—about fifteen in number — I was terrorized with the prospect of “re-education” in order to “restructure me,” and “wash my brain.” I refused, not fearing death but fearing that’ I might break down. Only Divine Providence saved me. I suffered terror from the jailors, and terror even more ferocious from informers and assas­sin prisoners, who had sold themselves to the political powers. I knew demonized human beings, with demonic expressions on their faces, who performed demonic acts. I was surrounded in an atmosphere of collective demons, which oscillated between madness and criminality. I took care of men who were dying: some hopeless, some in a state of revolt, others calm. I saw “saints” who radiated light, dying in a heav­enly atmosphere. I listened to professors, scholars, literary men, and I learned more than in a university. I knew Communists and Jews in prison, and I also knew those who had been in power. I took care of the general who presided over the military court that condemned me. It was given to me to close his eyes. After he had served the rulers, he too had been flung into prison.

I have known the bourgeois and the Communist, both as a free man and as a prisoner. All of this I filtered through the Spirit of Christ in which I strove all my life to live. At the end of this bitter experience, only Christ remains alive, whole and eternal in me…

Now, a New Atheism is rising to ‘save’ mankind from God. They regard organized religion as a threat to world peace.

Sooner than later we’ll witness false miracles performed by means of demonic powers. “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if [it were] possible, they shall deceive the very elect..”
A Fakir’s “Miracle” and the Prayer of Jesus. By Archimandrite Nicholas Drobyazgin

I had completely forgotten that I was a priest-monk and, it would seem, had no business at all participating in such a spectacle. The spell was so powerful that both the mind and the heart were silent. My heart began to beat painfully in alarm. Suddenly I was beside myself. A fear took hold of my whole being.
My lips began to move and say: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” Immediately I felt relieved. It was just as if some mysterious chains which had bound me began to fall away. The prayer became more concentrated, and with it my peace of soul returned. I continued to look at the tree, and suddenly, as if pursued by the wind, the picture became clouded and was dispersed. I saw nothing more except the big tree, illuminated by the light of the moon, and likewise the fakir sitting in silence by the bonfire, while my companions continued to express what they were experiencing while gazing at the picture, which for them had not been broken off.

But then something apparently happened to the fakir also. He reeled to the side. The youth ran up to him in alarm. The seance was suddenly broken up.

Deeply moved by everything they had experienced, the spectators stood up, animatedly sharing their impressions and not understanding at all why the whole thing had been cut off so sharply and unexpectedly. The youth explained it as owing to the exhaustion of the fakir, who was sitting as before, his head down, and paying not the slightest attention to those present.
[…]
This phenomenon may be seen in Eastern Meditation” (even when it may be given the name of “Christian”), and perhaps even in those strange “gifts” which in our days of spiritual decline are mislabeled “charismatic..”

George:

Following abortive popular crusades in early 1096, the official crusader armies set off from France and Italy on the papally ordained date of 15 August 1096. (from Wikipedia).

Also, crusaders were often offered an indulgence in return for participation in a crusade.

You say that the crusades were justified. I wonder if the rise and growth of the Ottoman Empire was a natural reaction to crusades. Later, the Orthodox nations served as a shield for Western Europe against ottomans.

Eliot, the Crusades were called by the Byzantines, let’s not forget that. And they were justified. Depredations against Jews did happen, but mostly by the rabble. In the Rhineland, Jews were placed under the protection of the local bishops and many thousands were saved from the riff-raff. As for the supposed atrocities against the Muslims, they were par for the course in Medieval warfare. The Ridley Scott view of Outremer in his terrible movie The Kingdom of Heaven was laughable. The Muslims gave as good as they got and they were anything but tolerant to the Christians, native or otherwise.

Otherwise, your critique about ultramontanism, papalism, etc., is right on the money. Unfortunately, many in the Ecumenical Patriarchate are veering dangerously down this same path. I wonder, what causes such supremacist over-reach?

Alexis: Indeed, they work very hard to confuse the youth especially…
Christ Has Risen within Your Heart! – by Father George Calciu

Perhaps yesterday, when Communism tried to wrench any faith from your heart and to form you into a mere cog in the gears of the social machinery, you, out of a spirit of youthful revolt had more Christ in your soul than you have today.

Today you are attacked from all sides with the sound of the rhythmic drumming of all the anti-Christian organizations, which wish to create an amorphous mass out of the world’s nations, easily led to their intended destination. So it happens in the political world – a few individuals are anointed in secret and installed to govern all people from positions of international power. They determine which nations have the right to bear children and which must abort them; they substitute themselves to God and sketch the destiny of nations according to their pleasures and interests. Whoever does not submit shall perish!

This totalitarianism is expressed, more and more, even in the life of the Church, through Masonic-style ecumenical international organizations, which actually impose a new religion, a new liturgy divested of sacredness, the Holy Mysteries, and ritual, like a modern theatrical production.

These so-called religious theaters – which you see gathered in all the public marketplaces, led by some of the Western youth – represent the desanctification of Christianity and the Liturgy. Unfortunately even some Orthodox clergy have taken part in the de-sacramentalization of the Liturgy, as in the case of the brochure Reconciliation – the Gift from God and the Beginning of New Life, edited in Iasi, in 1995, where among the editors is found an Orthodox priest (of course, not without the approval of his hierarch). This work, in its liturgical part, is an attack on the sanctity of Orthodox Liturgy and a negation of its Mysteries.

How can you not stand, like Mary, in front of an empty tomb? All these attacks are pointed against you, young men, especially against you, because you are more deprived of protection and you are more sensitive to injustices. Your attackers want to tell you that you are an empty tomb if you no not submit to them.

However, it is written: Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are from God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world (I John 4:1).

Who can test today if the spirits come from God when the Orthodox and catholic priests themselves preach an anti-Christian Messianic message, similar to the sects established by rebels against the Church? Who protects you from straying, my younger brother? Who is to enrobe your heart with the presence of true Christ and not with the false christs of this age.