Tag Archives: The End

It’s 1055 in Lubbock

By Dionysius Redington

The appointment (one can call it “election” only in the narrowest etymological sense) of Metropolitan Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis) as Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America will no doubt be remembered as a significant turning point in the history of the twenty-first Century Church. Whatever hope might have existed that the schism between Constantinople and Moscow over Ukraine is merely a temporary, unimportant event has surely now been extinguished

Archbishop Elpidophoros is a distinguished and knowledgeable theologian. As a Turkish citizen, he is a leading and obvious candidate someday to succeed His All-Holiness Bartholomew on the Ecumenical Throne. In the major controversies of Bartholomew’s reign (the Cretan Council as well as the Ukrainian schism) he has consistently and staunchly defended the Patriarch’s positions and authority. While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity with which he has taken these stances, it is evident that he has a vested interest in strengthening a presently feeble jurisdiction which he is one day likely to command.

Thus his appointment to the second-most powerful post in the Ecumenical Patriarchate has a two-fold significance.

On the one hand, it telegraphs that there is unlikely to be any backtracking at the Phanar when Patriarch Bartholomew leaves the scene. On the other, it raises the theological stakes, because Archbishop Elpidophoros does not consider the Ukrainian affair a trivial matter of reasserting Constantinopolitan control over a wayward province illegally dominated for a few centuries by Moscow.

On the contrary, he uses the most serious term of opprobrium in all of Orthodoxy to describe his opponents, one the Phanar generally goes out of its way to avoid employing. He says they are heretics.

In 2009, then-Archimandrite Elpidophoros delivered a memorable speech at Holy Cross School of Theology which may still be found online, for example at https://www.aoiusa.org/ecumenical-patriarchate-american-diaspora-must-submit-to-mother-church/. In this speech he makes the following interesting statements, which he has elsewhere expanded into his well-known thesis that the Ecumenical Patriarch is “primus sine paribus”:

“Let me add that the refusal to recognize primacy within the Orthodox Church, a primacy that necessarily cannot but be embodied by a primus (that is by a bishop who has the prerogative of being the first among his fellow bishops) constitutes nothing less than heresy. It cannot be accepted, as often it is said, that the unity among the Orthodox Churches is safeguarded by either a common norm of faith and worship or by the Ecumenical Council as an institution. Both of these factors are impersonal while in our Orthodox theology the principle of unity is always a person. Indeed, in the level of the Holy Trinity the principle of unity is not the divine essence but the Person of the Father (“Monarchy” of the Father), at the ecclesiological level of the local Church the principle of unity is not the presbyterium or the common worship of the Christians but the person of the Bishop, so to in the Pan-Orthodox level the principle of unity cannot be an idea nor an institution but it needs to be, if we are to be consistent with our theology, a person… In the Orthodox Church we have one primus and he is the Patriarch of Constantinople.”

Note first the phrase “constitutes nothing less than a heresy”.

Note second the theologoumenon that the person who acts as the principle of unity for the Church Universal is not Christ Himself, but rather some bishop.

Note finally that the bishop in question is not (as a naively literal reading of the Holy Canons would seem to indicate) the bishop of Rome, but that of New Rome. (This latter is a serious point much neglected in the present controversy. Whatever the role of the Primus may be in Orthodoxy—i.e. whether the he is “primus inter pares” or “primus sine paribus”—there is no doubt that for centuries the historical Primus was the Roman Pope. The only reason for rejecting Roman primacy today is that the Roman Church has abandoned Orthodox teaching. And yet Constantinople, with its lifted anathemas, has more than any other Orthodox Patriarchate seemed to imply that no such apostasy exists. How then can the Phanar claim to be essential to the Church, when the Vatican would have to have a stronger claim? If the ecumenical movement were to succeed and full communion with Rome be re-established, would Constantinople gladly cede its primacy? And how does the existence, if only formerly, of Orthodox Rome agree with the Phanar’s claim that the Church “cannot exist” without the Patriarch of Constantinople?)

Perhaps his words are subject to misinterpretation, but Abp. Elpidophoros seems to believe that the Ecumenical Patriarch is a sort of Pope, the Vicar not of Christ, apparently, but of God the Father! He also seems to believe that those who disagree with this view are heretics.

This is a rather more serious claim than “You know, now that the USSR is gone, there really should be an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church free from Moscow.”

How can world Orthodoxy maintain communion with a Patriarchate that promotes an alien ecclesiology, and refers to those who object as “heretics” (a term it does not apply to Roman Catholics and Protestants)?

There is another aspect to Elpidophoros’s elevation that the 2009 speech also illuminates. Although the Phanar has historically been very opposed to ethnophyletism (in part to stop the incursions of the Bulgarian and other churches into its canonical territory), it is a matter of historical record that the Patriarchate has always seen itself as the bulwark of Greek nationalism. (Patriarch Bartholomew himself would probably neither deny this nor see any problem with it, as is clear from his 2018 remarks about the “predecence” of “our people”.)

In his speech, delivered at America’s only Greek seminary, Elpidophoros is largely concerned with this exact issue. He says that “ecumenicity is the heart of Hellenism and by definition alien to any form of nationalism or cultural chauvinism.” He adds that “diaspora” refers not to people temporarily living in lands beyond the Roman Empire, but to those who live there permanently. Nevertheless, in a seeming contradiction, his vision of these people is limited to immigrants from traditionally Orthodox countries and their progeny. His primary concern is the maintenance of (in this case Greek) culture and tradition without assimilation, and he has this to say about “converts”:

“Another great number of candidates to the priesthood come from converts, who possess little, if any, familiarity with the Orthodox experience and they are usually characterized by their overzealous behavior and mentality. It is of interest that the converts who become ordained into priesthood represent a disproportionally greater percentage than the converts among the faithful. The result of this disanalogous representation is that, more often than not, convert priests shepherd flocks that are bearers of some cultural tradition, but because their pastors either lack the necessary familiarity with that tradition or even consciously oppose it, they succeed in devaluing and gradually eradicating those cultural elements that have been the expression of the parishes that they serve.”

While this is a legitimate concern, it is notable that Elpidophoros nowhere talks about an evangelical mandate to bring Americans as an whole into Orthodoxy, nor does he discuss parishes which do not have a single (or any) ethnicity. In the context of a talk at a seminary (where the Dean at the time was named Fitzgerald) the speech seemed to have a clear message summed up in the sarcastic nickname some people gave to it: the “Too Many Xenoi” speech.

I am a xenos. So far as I know, the interaction of my post-Schism ancestors with Orthodox Christians was limited to fighting them on the Eastern Front. My wife and I converted to Orthodoxy in 1988 at the OCA cathedral in Boston. We were the founders and editors of the now-dormant Saint Pachomius Library, one of the first Orthodox patristics websites, in 1994. We used to teach Church history online, and I was involved for a number of years in Orthodox evangelical outreach to the Rastafarian sect. In 1997, we moved from Boston to Lubbock, Texas, where I was ordained a reader in GOARCH and served as a chanter at Saint Andrew Greek Orthodox Church until last October.

Lubbock is a university town with a population of about a quarter-million. It lies in the center of the Llano Estacado, a vast thinly-populated plateau straddling the Texas-New Mexico state border. The first Orthodox in Lubbock were probably Lebanese merchants who arrived around 1900, but there was no parish until a few Greeks decided to found one in the 1970s. They succeeded, after great struggle and many difficulties: Lubbock, although fairly large, is invisible to most Americans because of its isolation. St. Andrew did not have a priest until 1996; before that, people would drive over 100 miles to Amarillo for liturgy.

When my wife and I arrived, we were not sure what to expect. We found a parish that was part of the Greek Archdiocese, but also very multi-ethnic and welcoming. The liturgical rubrics and music were Byzantine, but the services were entirely in English, and every effort was made to accommodate people of different backgrounds: Greeks of course, and converts, and Arabs, Ukrainians, Russians, Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians… and probably members of other nationalities I am forgetting. The “Greeks” in the parish were themselves a mixture of recent immigrants and families that had been in the US for several generations. Both of the priests who served in my 21 years at Saint Andrew parish were graduates of Saint Vladimir’s (OCA) Seminary.

The parish was not utopia, but it had its successes. Two of the parish’s young men (both of them converts, as Archbishop Elpidophoros might have predicted) went on to become priests of the Greek Archdiocese, a remarkable record for a parish so small and young by Greek standards. They are both, I might add, outstanding, even saintly, clergymen. One of them, whom I especially admire, was featured on the national GOARCH webpage in March. Neither of them answers to Abp. Elpidophoros’s caricature of the convert-priest as a fanatic ignorant of Greek culture (indeed, both of them married Greeks!)

My wife and I were very impressed by the generosity of the Greek parishioners at St. Andrew, their commitment to the religious education of their children, and above all by their sheer persistence in keeping alive a parish in an uncomprehending Protestant fundamentalist town, ignored by the rest of the country, always on the edge of financial collapse. At least twice, the parish seemed certain to close; once it was saved by an “anonymous” donation actually from the diocesan bishop, a very good and holy man.

Then in 2018, the current schism happened. My wife and I had been unhappy with the direction of the Greek Archdiocese for some time (I had been parish council president during the Council of Crete) but had always managed to convince ourselves to stay, if only because there was nowhere else to go: The Amarillo parish 100 miles away was still the nearest, and it, too, is Greek. Moreover, we did not want to cause a division in the already embattled local community; we respected our metropolitan; and (as I remember saying on more than one occasion) “If this were really heresy, and not just rhetoric, surely at least one of the other Orthodox churches would break communion over it”.

The Ukraine issue, however, made Patriarch Bartholomew’s more-than-papalising claim of being “primus sine paribus” impossible to ignore. We decided to leave the parish, and to hold reader’s services privately. We did not however tell anyone what we were doing except for the parish priest. We did not wish to be seen as sowing dissension, and we still hoped that the affair would be resolved in a few weeks. Then we found out that other people had noticed our absence, and eventually we decided to announce publically that we were starting a new parish, under the protection of St. Catherine of Alexandria.

At first we had no place to meet, so we met outdoors, at a park bench on the university campus, with the dome of heaven over our heads, flocks of pigeons (and the occasional hawk) circling above us. A few joggers looked at us in amazement, but for the most part we were ignored. For three months, this was our church.

I had imagined that once we announced our existence, many of our fellow-parishioners at Saint Andrew would wish to join; after all, the theological issues seemed rather clear-cut. This did not happen. Instead, the old parish split along neatly ethnic lines. Nearly all of the parishioners who came from the former Soviet Union joined our group; almost no-one else did. (It might interest Archbishop Elpidophoros that the converts have—so far—stayed with GOARCH.)

This is the tragedy of what is happening: an already barely-viable multi-ethnic parish has become two. Our parish is, I am confident, the Orthodox one, and the other is under a Patriarch and an Archbishop who are in communion with schismatics. But this is not the fault of the remaining parishioners of Saint Andrew. Few if any of them care at all about Constantinopolitan hegemony, much less Ukrainian autocephaly. For them, the parish of Saint Andrew is the Orthodox church, the church they or their parents built from nothing with sweat and sacrifice, the church where they were baptized or married or where they expect their funerals to be served. It is where they have met the Lord every Sunday in the Eucharist. Perhaps it is as impossible for them to leave GOARCH as for French peasants in the twelfth Century to have repudiated papism; for them, it would be “leaving the Church”.

But with the elevation of Archbishop Elpidophoros, surely that is what things are coming down to.

At the mission parish of Saint Catherine, we have had rapid progress.  We were accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia almost immediately. The Dean of Texas, Fr. John Whiteford, has been named our acting Rector; although distance has prevented him from yet visiting in person, we have had two liturgies served by Hieromonk Aidan (Keller) from Austin.

We no longer have to worship on a park bench; an Anglican parish allowed us the use of their abandoned Sunday School chapel, complete with amusing stained-glass windows depicting happy 1930s children from around the world. A parishioner (Alexey Ageev, who deserves mention by name) built a traditional wooden altar and donated some hundred icon prints. God willing, through the prayers of St. Catherine the Great Martyr (and of St. Andrew the First-Called!), we will perhaps, despite our sins and weaknesses, be able to ensure a witness for Christ on the Llano Estacado.

But what about the other parish? What about the Greek “diaspora”? How will they fare under Archbishop Elpidophoros?

The year is now 1055.

 

The End of Rue Daru

The ‘dissolution’ of the tiny Rue Daru group, centred in Paris, was announced by Patriarch Bartholomew on 27 November 2018. This closure was probably in revenge for the group’s quite recent refusal to obey the Patriarchally-appointed Archbishop Job Getcha. In any case it has brought forth extraordinary reactions from within that group. These reactions are patterned by outright disobedience and total incomprehension of how the Church works, that is, by obedience to bishops, and not to ‘human rights’ and ‘Western secular democratic values’ etc.

References by Rue Daru to its right to the Kerensky-conditioned 1917-18 Moscow Council wash with no-one, since the freemason Kerenesky was an anti-Church figure. Indeed, his first task after the Western-backed aristocratic coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg in March 1917 was to interfere in Russian Church life. Notably, he at once uncanonically deposed the saintly and anti-masonic Metropolitans of Saint Petersburg and Moscow. The Rue Daru authorities, descendants of the selfsame Saint Petersburg aristocrats and their followers, have themselves written to Patriarch Bartholomew and stated that they refuse to obey until their ‘democratic’ Diocesan Assembly on 23 February 2019. See: https://orthodoxyindialogue.com/2019/01/23/letter-to-patriarch-bartholomew-from-orthodox-churches-of-russian-tradition-in-western-europe/

Naturally, in obedience to their Patriarch, local Greek bishops have demanded that the former Russian parishes of Rue Daru go under their jurisdiction. Notably in Italy, the aggressive local Greek bishop has suspended the Russian priests in Rome and San Remo (which has since like Florence joined ROCOR) for refusing to commemorate him and has demanded the keys to their historic heritage properties. This reflects the situation in the Ukraine where the Church is also being persecuted by a Constantinople-founded nationalist organization. This State organization basically has no properties or followers, but is stealing properties from the canonical Church by violence and calling itself ‘The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’ to try and attract followers.

Phyletist but tiny Constantinople has set out on a course of grabbing property – since free souls, whose interest is spiritual life, will not follow it and are not interested in its power-hungry machinations. We can assume that Greek bishops will claim property in the same way elsewhere, notably in Paris, where there is more Rue Daru real estate. Rue Daru has played into Greek hands by informing Constantinople of the 23 February meeting, since Constantinople now knows that all it has to do is act before 23 February, suspending anyone it wants in Rue Daru, including Archbishop Jean.

The solution is simple. It is for Rue Daru to return to the Russian Orthodox Church and so at last start learning the Russian Orthodox Tradition. However, this has always been highly unlikely, given the Russophobia of those in Paris descended from the very aristocrats who carried out the coup d’etat in 1917 and overthrew the saintly Tsar, destroying free Russia and handing it over to genocidal Non-Russian and anti-Russian Marxists.

At present, the tiny Rue Daru Establishment, always with the same megalomaniac Parisian fantasy that it is somehow important, at the centre of the Orthodox world (!) or even the only canonical Orthodox Church in the world (!), is looking to set itself up as some sort of sectarian ‘independent’ Orthodox Church. For clearly the other ideas, that it could go under the OCA in North America is canonically and geographically a fantasy and the idea that the US-controlled Romanian Church would want to take on Rue Daru temporarily until it can find a better solution (!), are to be dismissed.

The 1980s nightmare of the late Rue Daru Archbishop George Wagner, that he would be abandoned by Constantinople, has come true. So what are the very limited choices facing today’s Rue Daru?

  1. To obey the Church of Constantinople and accept the dissolution of Rue Daru, with its assimilation into Greek parishes. This means that it will fall out of communion with the Russian Orthodox Church, but this is at least a logical proposition.
  2. To return to the Russian Orthodox Church, either the part centred in Moscow or else the part centred in New York (as did the parish in Florence last year), since Rue Daru has at various times in history been part of both of them. This proposition is both logical and also historical.
  3. To become a tiny, ageing and uncanonical Church, with a few properties scattered throughout Western Europe, no seminary and one 75-year old bishop who speaks only French, and be unrecognized by any Orthodox Church on earth. This is illogical. However, Rue Daru has never acted according to logic, but only according to fantasy.

 

Istanbul: The Young Turks Take Over

The three-day Synod in Istanbul, the last of the year, ended yesterday.

Firstly, after over three generations of indulging its illusions, it finally dissolved the rebellious Rue Daru group in Paris, reducing its 75 year-old French archbishop to a vicar-bishop. We had long expected this, but did not know when and in what despotic conditions without any consultation. Now in each community of that little group infighting will follow between opposing clans, those who are actually of the Russian Tradition and the anti-Orthodox Russophobes. This mirrors the present and coming battle in the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) group, which as such was founded by Paris intellectuals nearly fifty years ago at the height of the Cold War and is equally divided between Orthodox and Russophobes.

Secondly, the Synod sacked the 90-year old Archbishop Dimitrios in North America, as had been expected earlier this year. This sacking involves a large sum of ‘missing money’.

Thirdly, the Synod did not give the Tomos for Ukrainian autocephaly, just as they said they would not two years ago before their disastrous meeting in Crete, but as they had been paid $25 million for by the US taxpayer to do this year. This leaves President Poroshenko, who demanded this Tomos (he was the only one who wanted it, apart from his US paymasters) with a very red face, outwitted by Greeks who came bearing (apparent) gifts.

Why did all this happen now?

With an ageing (and, according to some, ill) Patriarch and many other elderly and ill bishops, such as the unstable John of Pergamos or the above-mentioned 90 year-old Archbishop Dimitrios or the arch-rebel Archbishop Stylianos in Australia, it seems as though the young generation of ‘Young Turks’ has taken over in Istanbul. These include the ultra-papist Metropolitan of Prussa, Elpidiphoros (Lambriniadis), the Metropolitan of Gaul, Emmanuel Adamakis (said to be the very ambitious successor in Istanbul), or the now notorious Archbishop Job (Getcha).

This new generation lacks pastoral experience and is bound to an extraordinary ideology of Eastern Papism, that comes from a fantasy that ended 565 years ago in 1453. They will eventually come down to earth with a very cruel bump. Meanwhile, the self-imposed spiritual suicide of the New or Second Rome does mean its end, except as a small and schismatic group of ‘new calendarists’. This in turn means that the Russian Orthodox Church is now free to establish canonical Orthodoxy worldwide. A great burden has been lost. Freedom has come. The eyes of the Orthodox world are now looking to the Russian Church to take on the mantle of authority and prove itself worthy by at last setting up the infrastructure in the Diaspora which we have so long been battling for without support. To those who have been given much, much is expected.

 

Outrage

The end of the (Roman Catholic) Church will come through its corruption from within by the Jewish and pagan avarice that reigns in the very Kingdom of Christ that makes Rome a second Babylon.

Gerhoh von Reichersberg (1093-1169), the prominent Roman Catholic scholastic

The latest appalling Muslim terrorist outrages in three different countries have shocked. However, the fact is that worse happens every single day in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Yemen etc, where it is not uncommon for the fanatics to bomb babies and crucify Christians. And that goes largely unreported in the Sodom and Gomorrah of the hedonistic and immoral West.

Now, when the Nazis occupied Serbia in the Second World War and one of their soldiers was killed by Serbian resistance fighters, they applied a tariff. For every German killed, 100 Serbs were killed. And this appears to be the tariff of the Western media – every Westerner killed is equivalent to 100 Non-Westerners, no matter whether they are Arabs, Burmese, Nigerians or Ukrainians. Of course, if they are Christians, they are even less important. Christians are despised by the propaganda outlets of the Western media and their pagan Western leaders.

Islamic terrorism began when the colony of Israel was set up in Palestine, through the bribery and blackmail of Zionist bankers. Al-Qaida was set up by the neocon CIA, which trained Bin Laden. Islamic State is also a US/Zionist creation: divide the Muslims between pro-Western (Sunni) and anti-Western (Shia) and arming Sunni terrorists (Saudis, Qataris etc). What is the Western (and Zionist) disease that lies behind such slaughter?

It is that of profit, of Mammon, the old Syrian word for riches. It is this obsession with profit that lies behind idolatrous, neo-pagan Western materialism, whether Marxist or Capitalist. It is this obsession with profit that means that tens of millions of poor people from Asia and Africa, refugees from starvation and exploitation, have been forced to immigrate into Western Europe ever since the Second World War to work in its low-paid jobs, undermining the cultural identities of Western, and increasingly Eastern, European countries and leading to their mosque-ization.

In France there is now a debate about whether it is permissible to use abandoned Roman Catholic churches (all Catholic churches there were stolen by the tyrannical French State over 100 years ago and belong to the secular authorities) as mosques. Most French people are against them becoming mosques. But is this because they prefer to see them used as nightclubs? The fact is that Western people are responsible for their own decadence. If they practised Christianity, if they used their churches, none of this would ever have happened.

The contemporary crisis of the Western world is not about the breakdown of traditional Church culture, but about the breakdown of the secular culture which has tried to take its place. The demonic powers which have entered the empty house of secularism cannot be exorcized by the politician and the economist; the Church is the only power that can defeat the powers of destruction. But the various Western denominations, once Christian, are all but dead in Europe.

A Czech journalist, Ladislav Kashuka (1), has just written that Western people will one day have to find refuge in Non-EU Russia, ‘fleeing before the Muslim fanatics on their streets as they burn and destroy the Western cultural heritage’. Only Russia is still free from the Western elite, all the more so since the West declared war on it through the Ukraine. Thus, all intelligent and honest Russians have finally seen through the Western delusion, giving President Putin 89% of popularity. In other words, said the journalist, Western Europe’s nightmare future is already being lived out by Christians in Iraq and Syria today. There today; here tomorrow.

For this journalist the massive movements of migration, as from the chaos and violence in Libya, caused by the French and UK bombing of the country and their permission for its leader, once their feted friend, to be massacred by a mob, are pre-planned; the Western elite ‘wants to cause chaos in order to impose its totalitarian rule’ all the more easily. Only Russia, as we can see with the case of Edward Snowden, is strong enough to protect freedom and also big enough to accept and settle the millions of last Western Christians as refugees, who will be able to receive baptism only in Russia. There we would see established a European Orthodox Church Outside Europe (EOCOE).

None of this is new; it is all in the eighty-year old prophecies of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1948).

Note:
1. http://fr.sputniknews.com/opinion/20150619/1016617974.html#ixzz3eFdNFKUI