I also think of the OCA (which Fr. John is a priest) where only one bishop out of 12 (if I recall the number right) thought that “Thou shalt not steal” was something to be taken seriously (something I left the OCA over – I suppose multi jurisdiction has it’s upside as well).

Not that Fr. John’s concern is not valid, but Orthodoxy in America has it’s own planks in it’s eye to deal with first IMO. For them

Shoot, why not call upon the Orthodox Peace Fellowship over these issues – they seem to have the ability to rouse celebrity Orthodox bishops and speakers as well as almost the entire staff of SVS when they put their mind to it (by evidence of those who signed “the plea“)…;)

I honestly don’t know how we could cultivate a better press. Our old world nationalisms guarantee for the foreseeable future that Orthodoxy will always equal Ruritania/Slobovia/Bulbania. Here in the states it’s not any better. If we’d had a united American Church we might have had a chance. But now I fear that with the new episcopal assembly, we’ll have the worst of all possible worlds: a not American Holy Synod but a congerie of Old World exarchates each with their veto power but outwardly pretending like they really are Americans.

sigh.

Lumping Stalin with Rasputin and Ivan the Terrible, “Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II has spoken out against the canonizations in unusually strong terms over the past year, stressing it would be impossible to canonize Ivan the Terrible, who ordered the deaths of several clergymen who were later sainted, and Rasputin, whose debauchery and dubious healing practices compromised the last imperial family of Tsar Nicholas II.

“This is madness!” the patriarch said in his first statement on the subject in December 2001. “What believer would want to stay in a church that equally venerates murderers and martyrs, lechers and saints?” ”

http://www.rickross.com/reference/rs/rs38.html
http://www.orthodoxchristianity.net/forum/index.php/topic,18584.msg272894/topicseen.html#msg272894

By analogy, I witness the complicit silence of the entire Muslim world as regards militant Islam and its jihadists. If the MP and other Orthodox churches do not clearly and definitively strive for progress of Orthodox societies out of the swamp of corrupt, brutal autocracy, we will ourselves as Orthodox clergy and laity be subject to similar criticism. Already, many Western agencies have us ‘pegged’ as insensitive to humanist issues in Eastern Europe. Witness the Mkalavishvili affair a few years ago in Georgia: the thuggery of a defrocked schismatic against sectarians there resulted in his arrest by civil authorities, but the language of the response of the Patriarchate to the crimes of Mkalavishvili and his followers was inadequate to convince the press that the Georgian church did not at least agree in part with his goals, if not his methods. While the GP may truly have been very upset by the schismatic’s actions, it did not appear to be all that concerned with the affair.

We Orthodox can persist in hypocritically telling ourselves that the world hates Christ, and by extension us and our message and therefore secular powers and presses will always depict the Church in a bad light. But our pariah status in pressrooms does not excuse the Orthodox churches from the responsibility to lead people – including heads of state – to Christ. Can such a man as Vlad Putin actually participate in the life of the Church? When a leader is actively directing a program of re-stalinization of his country, not shying away from the serial murder of critics among the press corps, among other heinous crimes, must the heads of the church pat him on the head and call him a good Orthodox boy? It worries me that among all of us, only Abp. Hilarion is decrying renascent authoritarianism in today’s Russia. We need to do better than leave it up to one hirearch to be able to call a spade a spade.