I know your comment in this thread is two years old, Isidora, but I just had to say that I think it is spot-on! I wish you lived next door so we could speak regularly over coffee. I can’t say with certainty what has or has not happened in other countries, but I think the laxity we find so frequently in the US within the Orthodox Church (excepting ROCOR, in my personal experience) is largely uniquely American. Our entire culture is so informal – we don’t have 1000 years of heritage of more formal society upon which to draw as in countries such as Russia, so I think we tend to dumb down everything into informality, including faith, including even Orthodoxy. Just as we as a country should be on our knees begging for forgiveness and mercy from God, we as Orthodox and we as Orthodox churches should be asking forgiveness of God and recommitting ourselves to what is holy and leaving the rest behind. If we do not, we are risking our own – and others’ – very salvation.
]]>We Orthodox need to stop accepting liberal terms such as “Living Tradition” (i.e., we can change it as we wish) and start being truthful about Orthodoxy. It is not a religion of comfortably sitting on your tush waiting for the service to finally be over. Tradition makes Orthodoxy hard at times–standing a lot, dressing modestly/respectfully, prayer rule, confession, reading to acquire the mind of the Fathers–but it creates the conditions the Saints found necessary for Theosis. The dumbed-down version of Orthodoxy knows nothing of Theosis, but acts as though this is our version of the Papist/Protestant/Pagan mission to create one’s own religion with one’s comfort and preferences being the supreme good.
As long as rank and file Orthodox are this ignorant of Orthodoxy, the fight against GBLT is just another battle about which Traditions the double-minded clergy can get rid of next.
]]>Giacomo Sanfilippo is Peter J. SanFilippo = a defrocked Orthodox priest, an actively gay man, and homosexual advocate working to attack the Orthodox Church and change the clear and unchanging teaching on the sin and dangers of homosexuality and sodomy.
The author of the Conjugal Friendship article on the Public “orthodoxy” website is Giacomo Sanfilippo who also goes by the name Peter J. SanFilippo.
Peter J. SanFilippo (Giacomo Sanfilippo) wrote an article back in 2008 that clearly outlined his radical pro-homosexual views:
A Voice of Dissent in the Orthodox Church
https://www.christianforums.com/threads/a-voice-of-dissent-in-the-orthodox-church.7321493/In the midst of the current maelstrom over same-sex marriage raging at every level of American political and religious life, the Orthodox Church has hunkered down with an improbable cast of bedfellows, including the Vatican, James Dobson and his Focus on the Family, and Bible Belt fundamentalists. A growing catalogue of naysaying articles at http://www.orthodoxytoday.org lists contributions from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese’s Metropolitan Maximos of Pittsburgh, Fathers Thomas Hopko and John Breck, former professors at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary outside New York City, and a number of other familiar and less familiar names. The informal coalition of most Orthodox bishops in the U.S. and Canada known as SCOBA (Standing Conference of the Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas) issued a joint denunciation of same-sex unions in their August 27 “Statement on Moral Crisis in Our Nation,” also available at Orthodoxy Today’s website. The award for insensitivity, however, must surely go to Father Ted Stylianopoulos, who expects that his gay communicants remain not only perpetually abstinent but alsocloseted in lifelong shame.
What is most remarkable about the combined testimony of these and other Orthodox spokesmen is its failure to add a single new or creative thought concerning the problem of diversity in human sexuality to what has already been parroted ad nauseum by their Western cousins in the faith.
…
The traditional Orthodox conception of the inner content of conjugal life and love –including its erotic expression– differs in no respect whatever from what the Church’s gay sons and daughters have come to know experientially in their own committed, monogamous, durable unions. The hierarchy’s intransigent, doctrinaire insistence on the indispensable requisite of “gender complementarity” for conjugal love to be genuine is nothing short of arrogant, and an insult to the integrity of those of us who know otherwise, and who have endured together through trials that would have rent most couples apart.Metropolitan Maximos is widely reputed for his holiness; Fathers Hopko and Breck are good men. No one expects the Orthodox Church to start blessing same-sex unions overnight. However, is open dialogue too much to ask? Likewise, is the long overdue admission that the attempted gang rape in Sodom, the Levitical prescriptions for ritual purity and the death penalty for non-compliance, the Jewish focus on procreation as a supreme end, the Pauline censure of ritualized promiscuity in the pagan world, and finally the irrational sputterings of certain church fathers -identical in tone to their anti-Semitic rants, incidentally- have no relevance for a loving couple wishing to establish a life and a home together, too much to ask?
So long as these kinds of things continue to be sidelined in the mainstream Orthodox Church, its gay sons and daughters will remain vulnerable to the allure of such uncanonical entities as the “Rainbow Orthodox Church”… or even worse, to the oblivion of suicide. If the hierarchy thinks this is an exaggeration for dramatic effect, they have homework to do.
Peter J. SanFilippo is a former priest and current communicant of the Orthodox Church, an alumnus cum laude of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and the divorced father of five children. He attends school in San Diego, where he resides with his partner of one and a half years.
Peter J. SanFilippo (Giacomo Sanfilippo) also wrote his thesis in 2015 and further laid out his heretical pro-homosexual agenda:
]]>A Bed Undefiled: Foundations for an Orthodox Theology and Spirituality of Same-Sex Love
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/75512Abstract (summary):
The present thesis explores possibilities for a more affirmative Orthodox theological and pastoral response to sexual diversity in human nature. Despite numerous modern articulations of an Orthodox theology of erotic love, and a more general emphasis on the radical otherness of the human person, no contemporary Orthodox author of note makes any allowance for same-sex love known to me.Yet the greatly revered priest, theologian, and martyr, Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), establishes a solid traditional foundation for men to form a lifelong, monogamous, sacramental union which bears essentially no difference from the spiritual content and unitive function of the marital bond between a man and a woman.
His essay, “Friendship,” serves as an interpretive lens through which to discern a subtextual thread running through multiple layers of Holy Tradition, bearing eloquent testimony to the inherent receptivity of same-sex love to transfiguration through the collaborative action of human asceticism and divine grace.
I have not read his book – and – if I have time – I certainly will – but I think the context that he is writing within an assessing of a sort of uber-nationalized orientation to the Faith and its effect on the ability of the Church to act as a prophetic voice, to act as a check on the state, as it were – most likely pervades it –
Have you read the book? or talked to him – He’s easy to talk to – There – amongst many of the posts – seems to be a demonization of authors, their education, without much dialogue – and that, I think, is a concern.
I have no question of Dr. Papanikolaou’s “Orthodoxy” – perhaps a good conversation with him would be useful –
]]>Just found that out – I disagree with him utterly – Fr. Hans response below regarding intimacy and bonding – sums up what I was trying to say.
]]>Yes, we have lost sight of that and to a large measure the propaganda of Gay INC contributes to it, as does the writings of those who want to Episcopalianize the Orthodox Church. Here’s a response I wrote to Sanfilippo’s article on a closed Facebook group for clergy:
]]>Peter Sanfilippo was a seminary classmate. I knew him and liked him. There is a truth in his article and it is this: Men need intimacy with men. I have learned this especially counseling men in tough marriages and also dealing with young men. Men need men in order to learn how to be a man.
The problem with homosexually active men addressing this topic however, is that they eroticize this need for male friendship and bonding. It becomes sexual. They think the longing will be met through same-sex activity. (And truth be told, the lack of male to male intimacy is what gives rise to the same-sex attraction down the road.) That’s why Sanfilippo implies that some prominent Orthodox thinkers who were deep friends were also secretly sexually active for example.
One of the grave problems with the continued homosexualization of the culture is that it shortchanges the natural bonding that boys and men need to increase in self-knowledge and stability. Any kind of emotional intimacy is branded as gay; anyone who exhibits it is perceived as a “latent homosexual” as the propaganda says.
As for Public Orthodoxy, Dr. Jean Claude Larchet says the editors are attempting to “deconstruct the Orthodox Tradition”:
Excuse me but, I think there is now a great problem in the United States because many Orthodox Theologians are working in Catholic Faculties of Theology. For example, in the Department of Theology of Fordham University, there is an ‘Orthodox Christian Studies Center’, but the two representatives of ‘Orthodoxy’ [George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou] have a complete Catholic mind and their main activity is to deconstruct the Orthodox Tradition. This is the same for example with Marcus Plested, in Marquette University who wrote a book to promote Thomas of Aquinas and to introduct his thought in Orthodox Theology. Recently there was a terrible book of Fr. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, which is completely Roman Catholic, with a preface of his mentor, Metropolitan John Zizioulas…
I do not know him but I have read his work and know several folks who know him well (through their association with him in the OTSA). Perhaps you are a current or formal student of his?
I think it is important to keep in mind that we (or at least I) am not attacking the man himself. I have assurances from people I trust that Dr. Papanikolaou is a “good man”, and I believe it to be so. However I also know that he has “a vision” as one seminary professor who I have studied under put it and that this vision is an explicit reconciliation or detente with modernity in a comprehensive way that is parallels (though is not exactly the same) as the Vatican II effort within RCism. This vision is summed up well enough in the Amazon.com blurb for his book here:
Unfortunately, this vision is a false one. In the end it rests on confusion and compromise with “the world” and on the secular understanding of man and his destiny (though not God – secularism is careful not to confront God directly). It confuses the relative good of technological and apparent (but often not real) moral “progress” of western civilization with the Kingdom. Heck, it is not even a good mash-up of Christianinity with modernity as the RC and Anglicans are much more experienced and clever in this area. “Clarity” can not rescue his philosophy from being (yet another) expression of the spirit of the age…
]]>The man who wrote that article is gay, and he has other articles that make it plainly obvious he wants Orthodoxy to normalize gay sexual behavior. A deeply caring, platonic relationship, is not the issue here.
]]>Do you know Dr. Papanikolaou? Have you ever listened to him lecture or take his class? You sound like you do – if you haven’t or haven’t spoken to him for clarity – why not?
]]>I read that article –
One of the questions it raises is whether two men can be connected deeply without being homosexual – which leads to a deeper point of why our culture is so hypersexualized – which is a pretty good question.
In Greece and Albania – there still is a tradition in some small cities and towns – of strolling down the boulevard – women walk arm in arm – or holding hands – no one thinks twice about it – I bet you that many in this country would immediately interpret that in a sexualized light – that’s our problem – not theirs – and our religious discourse has the potential to exacerbate that hypersexualized orientation –
I think that you can a deeply open honest, vulnerable and platonic relationship with anyone – it’s been proven historically – and we’ve lost sight of that – and that’s sad.
]]>Dr. Aristotle is doing “yeoman’s work” in the mixing of light and darkness, something has been popular since the Garden and will be popular until the Eschaton.
His synthesis of modernity with Christianity is the very essence of what it means to be “secularized”. Yes, the Gospel needs “translation” but if the meaning does not come through then the translation is a false one – and yes, we are to judge these efforts: “…Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?” (1 Corinthians 6:13)
]]>You mean when the blog he helps run at Fordham publishes stuff like this:
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