In his post “The Teaching Office of the Bishop,”<\/a> Fr. Peter-Michael Preble wonders why Orthodox bishops have said so little about the current health care debate.<\/p>\n

Recently Dr. Bradley Nassif wrote an article<\/a> entitled “The Calling of a Bishop is to Preach the Gospel” and this is a good start and a jump off point for this discussion. Dr. Nassif states that “All bishops are to proclaim and interpret the gospel of Christ to the church and to the world.” and what is the Gospel? “The gospel is the \u201cgood news\u201d that God became human in Jesus Christ, took upon himself our fallen humanity in order to restore it into communion with God, conquer sin and vanquish death. This he did pre-eminently through Christ\u2019s life, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. This \u201cgood news\u201d must be at the very core of every life-giving action in the church \u2013 the sacraments and throughout every liturgical season of fasting and prayer.”<\/p>\n

My personal belief is that the Gospel also includes the interpretation of events of the day and how that fits in the Christian life. What do I mean by this? An example of what I mean would be the present health care debate. The Church needs to be heard on these issues and the church, meaning the bishops, need to speak on these issues. Catholic bishop after Catholic Bishop have written statements instructing the faithful on what the church teaches on this very important social issue.<\/p>\n

A brief check of the SCOBA website will reveal that since that start of the summer the SCOBA bishops have released the following statements:<\/p>\n

— Disability and Communion
\n— ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN PRISON MINISTRY
\n— College Student Sunday – September 20, 2009<\/p>\n

All important topics don’t get me wrong but where is the teaching office of the bishop? Why is silence all we hear on such an important debate?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read more<\/a>. (HT: Byzantine, Texas)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his post “The Teaching Office of the Bishop,” Fr. Peter-Michael Preble wonders why Orthodox bishops have said so little about the current health care debate. Recently Dr. Bradley Nassif wrote an article entitled “The Calling of a Bishop is to Preach the Gospel” and this is a good start and a jump off point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1784],"tags":[949,160,296,137],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3430"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3430"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3437,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3430\/revisions\/3437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}