This is abouot a month late, but my wife would never forgive me if I forgot to mention the Alamo. (She’s from Texas.)

Also consider adding the cemetery and monuments the French keep in immaculate condition at the WWII D-Day landing sites in Normandy. I’ve been in churches that were more poorly maintained than those many acres.

Equally impressive in a very different way is Peace Park in Hiroshima.

Well, I just wrote an editorial for Catholic Online (explaining the holy ground concept and why any memorial must remain Christian) and the Hellenic Voice to reach the GOA Metropolitans and others with the idea. If, and when, they pick it up I will publish it here.

Pearl Harbor, although I have never been there, is a great example. Also, I was just at the Gettysburg Battle ground, very Holy place and no church as well as the Vietnam memorial in Washington, DC.

So do we need a church for ti be holy?

Father,

I find myself in agreement with you we need to push the issue of an Orthodox Church. If not a Greek one maybe one of the other bishops will step up and do it but your right we need to push this trhough. It is Holy Ground and should be treated as such.

Alexis, Ground Zero may very well be providential. Not only was this a Greek church (named for St Nicholas), but it was endowed by the glorious Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II. If anything, the ONLY thing that should be built at Ground Zero is a pan-Orthodox church named St Nicholas. It should have two side-chapels: one honoring the martyrs of Sept 11 and another for Tsar Nicholas. Perhaps a community center can be built adjacent to it, a museum that runs videotape from that tragic day and publishes sayings from the Koran on its walls. The passages which justify murder.

We Orthodox have the moral high ground in this. It’s a shame that our bishops don’t see it. And it’s a damned shame that the Greek-American bishops are more concerned about getting Turkish passports. Can’t piss off the Muzzies now, can we? Wouldn’t look good at the next inter-faith conference where we’ll be feted, would it?

Thank you for this website, as I have just found it today. It focuses on real issues in a stern and sobering Orthodox manner. Most importantly, it challenges us to take a stand like those before us who were martyred for the one true faith. Continue the great zealous work! IC XC NI KA!

Córdoba (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈkorðoβa]; also Cordova; Qurṭuba قرطبة) is a city in Andalusia, southern Spain, and the capital of the province of Córdoba. An Iberian and Roman city in ancient times, in the Middle Ages it was capital of the Islamic caliphate which conquered and occupied Spain for nearly 800 years. During this time Cordoba was one of the largest cities in the world whose name continues to represent a symbol of Islamic conquest to many faithful Muslims around the world. Its population in 2008 was 325,453.

how does Fr. Andrew deal with the problems within the Church

I believe here is the answer:

When individuals nominally belonging to the Church are corrupt, it is precisely because they do not follow the Tradition of the Church, but rather the things of men.
If individuals are corrupt, it is for us all the more to pray for them, not to try to destroy the Church on account of them. When the Anti-Church operates within the Church, as it always has done and always will do, it does not mean that the Church Herself is corrupt. When Judas operated among the Twelve, it is did not mean that Christ and the Eleven were corrupt.

The Saints always saw each person as an image of God, unique and unrepeatable. St Arseny (Boca) said that “God loves the worst sinner much more that the holiest saint loves God”.

Certainly, those outside the Church are neither enemies nor irredeemably deluded. The example of St. Cyprian leaves no doubt about it.

The Lives of Sts. Cyprian and Justina
Cyprian was an evildoer

a friend of the demons, he performed all their works, causing evil to people and deceiving them. Living in Antioch, he turned many people away to every kind of lawless deed; he killed many with poisons and magic, and slaughtered young men and maidens as sacrifices for the demons. He instructed many in his ruinous sorcery: some he taught to fly in the air, others to sail in boats on the clouds, still others to walk on water.

Cyprian turned to Christ when he learned that the demons could not conquer maiden Justina because they saw on her a certain sign of which they were afraid.: “We cannot behold the sign of the Cross, but flee from it, because it scorches us like fire and banishes us far away.”

Having become convinced that nothing could conquer the power of the sign of the cross and the name of Christ, Cyprian came to his senses and said to the devil: “O destroyer and deceiver of all, source of every impurity and defilement! Now I have discovered your infirmity. For if you fear even the shadow of the cross and tremble at the name of Christ, then what will you do when Christ Himself comes to you? If you cannot conquer those who sign themselves with the sign of the cross, then whom will you tear away from the hands of Christ? Now I have understood what a non-entity you are; you are not even able to take revenge! Listening to you, 1, wretched one, have been deceived, and I believed your tricks. Depart from me, accursed one, depart! For I must entreat the Christians that they might have mercy on me. I must appeal to pious people, that they might deliver me from perdition and be concerned over my salvation. Depart, depart from me, lawless one, enemy of truth, adversary and hater of every good thing!

Cyprian had frightening power when the demons were serving him, but they were trembling before the sigh of the cross. The Saints have the power, given to them by God “to manifest Christ in the world”.
They are often miracle-workers and able to inspire tremendous confidence. Quite sure that one cannot be persuaded to turn to God by means of logic and argument. At best a shallow and short-lasting result…

It’s not the exhortations to read the lives or the Saints, and other calls to virtue I have an argument with. It’s reducing all creative effort in the culture to a “nationalist leaflet” or “gutter press.”* This simply is not true.

Further, how does Fr. Andrew deal with the problems within the Church? How does he reconcile his vision of absolute light within vs. absolute darkness without to the fact that sometimes authorities outside of the Church (secularists he would call them) force the Church to deal with its own failings and sin? Here the Church is judged by others because it lacked the integrity to judge (and therefore cleanse) itself. It’s tragic, but also necessary sometimes.

It is true that people exist who hate the Light and thus hate the Church. It is not true that everyone outside the Church is in abject moral darkness.

One final point. The Church does not exist to make Saints. The Church exists to manifest Christ in the world. Fulfilling that commission responsibly may bring one the trials that might make one a saint, but even this is accomplished through love of the neighbor, and many neighbors outside the Church are neither enemies nor irredeemably deluded.

*(I’ll bet when Fr. Andrew gets an abscess tooth he doesn’t ask his dentist about his faith, or demand that the researcher who developed the healing techniques be an Orthodox Christian. I’m sure the creative prowess in the culture serves him just fine in those situations.)

It is true that the morals still existing in our culture are rooted in Christianity. However, they were and are being plagiarized, deformed by rational-humanism. Concepts are being redefined (ex: marriage), moral values are being “reinterpreted”. The result of humanism is corruption of society, and corruption of the ‘human side’ of the Church. Humanism cultivates goodness-without God. In its extreme form, it promotes the destruction of all forms of religion because they consider god a delusion-something created by the human mind. The same human mind, more ‘evolved’, wants to annihilate all those who believe that there is a God or gods.

In the same article Fr. Andrew says:

If you wish to know what the Church is about, do not pick up a nationalist leaflet, or read the gutter press, but read the Lives of the Saints. In the same way, if you wish to live in the Church, do not imitate crude nationalists, or secular-minded journalists, but live as the saints. For the Church exists for this one reason only – to make saints. Any organization which does not do that, even though it may call itself a Church, is not the Church. And any individuals who do not have this as their aim, however weakly they may try to achieve it, do not belong to the Church.

The devil loves to engage people in ‘friendly dialogues’ in order to prevent them from having a ‘dialogue’ with God. The Apostles were sent to preach the Gospel and were told: “Do Not Worry About What To Say; The Spirit Of The Father Will Be Speaking Through You.”

Saint John of Kronstadt said “No matter how many times I prayed with faith, God always heard me and answered my prayers.” What can be said stronger than these words?

The Church is neither conservative nor liberal, both those attitudes are purely secular. Conservatism and liberalism are the two sides of the same secular coin. The Church is above secular attitudes, which are all more or less conservative, or more or less liberal. The Church is of the Tradition, that is to say, of the Holy Spirit, as has been received by the Saints of the Church. The Tradition is living, it is spiritually inspired, it is not mere human customs and inventions, more or less conservative or more or less liberal.

Is this really accurate? It presumes an unbridgeable chasm exists between Church and culture and implicitly counsels a radical disengagement with culture.

Now it is true that the terms conservative and liberal mean different things to different people. It is also true that reasonable people can reasonably disagree about many things, and that much discussion about religion, politics, and culture is contentious and ill defined.

But is it true that the distinction between Church culture and secular culture even exists; that the distinction between sacred (Church in this case) and secular is at all congruent with real life and experience, even for the secularist? I don’t buy it. The Church cannot be separated from culture because culture grew from the soil of Christianity. The Communists tried to erase the historical memory of Christianity and all they accomplished was the worst sort of poverty of the soul that impoverished culture on all levels, economic, sociological, artistic, familial, and so forth.

Moreover, the author misunderstands secularism. He thinks of secularism as a fixed and permanent cultural state. Secularism is really a movement, and our current epoch is equivalent to a layover between two cities (this trip takes a few centuries, not hours). Thus, positing that the Church somehow exists above secular culture, and that any political or sociological distinction thereby ought be tossed into the the dustbin of irrelevancy, in fact posits a Church that in the end will having nothing at all to say to the culture, or if it does, won’t be able to engage culture in any meaningful way.

I understand the author is saying that you cannot define the Tradition in contemporary political/cutural categories. That’s clear. Yet secularism, even atheism, could only have arisen in a culture shaped by Christian morality, sensibility, etc. Secularists are profoundly shaped by Christian thinking despite their denials. It would be far better (more truthful actually) to recognize this and engage it, rather than posit an ecclesiology that counsels that the present culture has no real value because it does not conform to the Tradition.

Thus, if the sacred is so far above the secular (if the Church is so far above culture), you essentially argue that the religious ideas that shaped culture no longer have any redemptive value either, not in any real sense anyway — which is exactly what the Marxists believed. The author, it seems, sees Church and culture in very secularized terms. And, if the Marxist vision holds here, the only possible interaction between Church and culture is one of power, which may mean the Church unwittingly accedes (and perhaps even contributes) to its own persecution.

The ideal of man, either as an individual or as a community of beings in the image and likeness of God, cannot be those famous ‘standards’ of Europe, Euro-America, globalism, or whatever else. All this is paraphrased only a little differently from what the Marxists tried to impose on us, when everything was turned into certain ‘classes’ and certain ‘movements’, mass ‘happiness’, mirages and abstractions, the results of which we have seen and felt in our own skin. As a clever man from Novi Beograd said at the time: ‘The working class has abolished the worker. We, the workers of Novi Beograd, want a church. We collected countless signatures in one of the tower blocks in Novi Beograd during the sixties. But they would not let it happen. The Communist Party would not have it! The obstacle was a few people, the upper echelons, who decided our fate, supposedly ‘in the name of the people’ and in the name of the working class’.

Fr. Andrew Phillips:

The Church is neither conservative nor liberal, both those attitudes are purely secular. Conservatism and liberalism are the two sides of the same secular coin. The Church is above secular attitudes, which are all more or less conservative, or more or less liberal. The Church is of the Tradition, that is to say, of the Holy Spirit, as has been received by the Saints of the Church. The Tradition is living, it is spiritually inspired, it is not mere human customs and inventions, more or less conservative or more or less liberal.

Jr. John, you say… “We need to face the fact that America is a pretty liberal place and that the ascendency of what has been sold as conservative is relegated off the center. What I don’t understand is why culturally liberal Americans are not more jealous of what we have built here in the West..What sane liberal would want Sharia in effect in his city or state”

Aside from the fact that the most liberal folk may not be sane, many on both the right and the left are not social liberals, they are statists masquerading as social liberals. Statists flock together until they turn on each other and fight it out for supremacy (see WWII and the non-agression pact between Hitler and Stalin).

And yes, most Americans, courtesy of the public schools, have neither any knowledge of nor appreciation of history. Multi-cultrualism is an active attempt to destroy any hope that any sense of history might be introduced.