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Saturday, June 27, 2015
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
The Heresy of Phyletism
“We renounce, censure and condemn racism, that is racial discrimination, ethnic feuds, hatreds and dissensions within the Church of Christ, as contrary to the teaching of the Gospel and the holy canons of our blessed fathers which ‘support the holy Church and the entire Christian world, embellish it and lead it to divine godliness'” – Holy and Great Pan-Orthodox Synod, Constantinople,1872.
Phyletism (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos “nation” and φυλετισμός phyletismos “tribalism”) is the name of an ecclesiological (sic) heresy which says that the Church can be territoriality organized on an ethnic, racial, or cultural basis so that within a given geographic territory, there can exist several Church jurisdictions, directing their pastoral care only to the members of specific ethnic groups.
A Church Council in 1872 officially defined and condemned this heresy. It reacted to a proposition made by Bulgarians of the Patriarchate of Constantinople who wanted to establish a church jurisdiction, sanctioned by the Turkish government, on the territory of the Patriarchate: The formation in the same place of a particular [local] Church based on race which only receives faithful of that same ethnic group and is run by pastors of only of the same ethnic group, as the adherents of Phyletism claim, is an event without precedent.*
*Excerpt from Maxime de Sardes, Le Patriarcat œcuménique dans l’Église orthodoxe, Paris, Éditions Beauchesne, 1975, p. 378.
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Monday, June 22, 2015
Sunday, June 21, 2015
‘Gift of Unity’: Will Pope Francis Change the Date of Easter?
It’s only on rare occasions that Christians around the world celebrate Easter on the same day. More often, while Roman Catholics and some Protestants are singing “Jesus Christ is risen today!” Orthodox are still in the midst of lent or beginning a solemn Holy Week. While Orthodox Christians are keeping Good Friday in prayer and fasting, Western Christians have perhaps forgotten about the Crucifixion and making plans for Mother’s Day.
The idea of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches agreeing to a common date for Easter has been brought up in the past, but now Pope Francis, who has already shown an openness to greater ecumenical cooperation, has renewed that discussion.
The Pope joked that Christians could say to one another: “When did Christ rise from the dead? My Christ rose today, and yours next week,” adding that this disunity is a scandal.
According to the Orthodoxwiki, Pascha—Easter—normally falls either one or five weeks later than the feast as observed by Christians who follow the Gregorian calendar.
The reason for the difference is that, though the two calendars use the same underlying formula to determine the festival, they compute from different starting points. The older Julian calendar’s solar calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian’s and its lunar calendar is four to five days behind the Gregorian’s.
Some Orthodox leaders have reflected on the dating of Easter. In May, Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II wrote to the papal nuncio in Egypt suggesting a common date for Easter.
And just a week after the retreat for priests, Pope Francis and Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II of the Syriac 
“We express our desire and readiness to look for new ways that will bring our Churches even closer to each other, paving the way for Antioch and Rome, the only two apostolic sees where St. Peter preached, to establish full communion,” Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem said.
According to Catholic News Service, the patriarch also expressed his Church’s readiness to come to an agreement to celebrate Easter on a common date. He said the Holy Synod of Antioch, motivated by the Second Vatican Council, adopted a resolution in 1981, expressing “the eagerness of our Church” to celebrate Easter “on a fixed Sunday in April” in common with other Christian churches.
The celebration of Easter “on two different dates is a source of great discomfort and weakens the common witness of the Church in the world,” he said, thanking Francis for recently “considering to take the initiative to lead the efforts on this matter.”
Historian Lucetta Scaraffia, writing in the Vatican daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, said the Pope is offering to change the date “as a gift of unity with the other Christian churches.” A common date, she said, would encourage “reconciliation between the Christian Churches and …a sort of making sense out of the calendar.”
She noted that the proposal could help reinforce the identity of persecuted Christians, particularly those in the Eastern Churches that are at risk of disappearing.
Scaraffia wrote that a common date “would increase the importance of the central feast of the faith in a moment when changes seem to be suddenly coming throughout the world.”
But a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church expressed hope that the process of finding a common date would follow the tradition set by the Council of Nicaea in the Fourth Century, which established the feast at a time when the Church was united.
According to AsiaNews, Father Nikolai Balashov, deputy chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department of External Church Relations, acknowledged that the Pope “wanted to make a real step forward towards the Orthodox. It is a gesture of good will.”
“If the Church of Rome intends to abandon Easter according to the Gregorian calendar, introduced in the 16th century, and go back to the old one (Julian), used at a time when the Church of the East and West were united and used to date by the Orthodox, then this intention is welcome,” he said. If, instead, the idea is to “have a fixed date for Easter and not tie it to the first full moon after the spring equinox, as established in the East and in the West by the Council of Nicaea in 325, then this proposal is totally unacceptable to the Orthodox Church.”
The Russian priest noted that the Patriarchate of Moscow is at odds over Easter also with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. He said that a pan-Orthodox council to be held next year is expected to debate a review of the date on which to celebrate Easter.
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Friday, June 19, 2015
Patriarch Bartholomew on Pope Francis’ Climate Encyclical “Laudato Si”
Ecology, Economy and Ecumenism
In a series of seminars organized between 1994 and 1998 on the island of Halki off the coast of Istanbul in Turkey, we drew attention to the close connection between ecology and economy. Both terms share the Greek root oikos, which signifies “home.” It therefore came as no surprise to us that our beloved brother Francis of Rome opens his encyclical, which is being released today in the New Synod Hall of the Vatican, with a reference to God’s creation as “our common home.”
How can one not be moved by the criticism of our “culture of waste” or the emphasis on “the common good” and “the common destination of goods”? And what of the vital importance attributed to the global problem of clean water, which we have underlined for over two decades as we assembled scientists, politicians and activists to explore the challenges of the Mediterranean Sea (1995), the Black Sea (1997), the Danube River (1999), the Adriatic Sea (2002), the Baltic Sea (2003), the Amazon River (2006), the Arctic Sea (2007) and the Mississippi River (2009)? Water is arguably the most divine symbol in the world’s religions and, at the same time, the most divisive element of our planet’s resources.
In the final analysis, however, any dissent over land or water inevitably results in what the Pope’s statement calls “a decline in the quality of human life and a breakdown of society.” How could it possibly be otherwise? After all, concern for the natural environment is directly related to concern for issues of social justice, and particularly of world hunger. A church that neglects to pray for the natural environment is a church that refuses to offer food and drink to a suffering humanity. At the same time, a society that ignores the mandate to care for all human beings is a society that mistreats the very creation of God.
Therefore, the Pope’s diagnosis is on the mark: “We are not faced with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” Indeed, as he continues to advance, we require “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the underprivileged, and at the same time protecting nature.” It is also no surprise, then, that the Pope is concerned about and committed to issues like employment and housing.
Invoking the inspiring words of Scripture and the classics of Christian spirituality of East and West (particularly such saints as Basil the Great and Francis of Assisi), while at the same time evoking the precious works of Roman Catholic conferences of bishops throughout the world (especially in regions where the plunder of the earth is identified with the plight of the poor), Pope Francis proposes new paradigms and new policies in contrast to those of “determinism,” “disregard” and “domination.”
In 1997, we humbly submitted that harming God’s creation was tantamount to sin. We are especially grateful to Pope Francis for recognizing our insistence on the need to broaden our narrow and individualistic concept of sin; and we welcome his stress on “ecological conversion” and “reconciliation with creation.” Moreover, we applaud the priority that the papal encyclical places on “the celebration of rest.” The virtue of contemplation or silence reflects the quality of waiting and depending on God’s grace; and by the same token, the discipline of fasting or frugality reveals the power of not-wanting or wanting less. Both qualities are critical in a culture that stresses the need to hurry, the preeminence of individual “wants” over global “needs.”
In the third year of our brother Pope Francis’s blessed ministry, we count it as a true blessing that we are able to share a common concern and a common vision for God’s creation. As we stated in our joint declaration during our pilgrimage to Jerusalem last year:
“It is our profound conviction that the future of the human family depends also on how we safeguard – both prudently and compassionately, with justice and fairness – the gift of creation that our Creator has entrusted to us … Together, we pledge our commitment to raising awareness about the stewardship of creation; we appeal to all people of goodwill to consider ways of living less wastefully and more frugally, manifesting less greed and more generosity for the protection of God’s world and the benefit of His people.
Excerpted from Time magazine
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Laudato Si’ Gives Orthodox “Great Joy”
The presentation of the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis Laudato Si’ included a presentation by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, a representative of the Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
He said the Encyclical comes at a “critical moment in human history” and will “undoubtedly have a worldwide effect on people’s consciousness.”
Excerpted from Vatican Radio
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Monday, June 8, 2015
A Good Rest
Having read “A Good Rest” by Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, I felt that she had written this reflection specifically for me. I am reposting it with the hope that it also speaks to you as much as it did to me…
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“We drive ourselves from one exhaustion to another. We pace our societies by the pace of our computers. We conduct the major relationships of our lives—both professional and personal—according to the speed of our communications. We measure ourselves by the amount of our productivity and every day we become more exhausted, less rested in body, spirit and mind, and so less capable of producing things, let alone of developing relationships, as a result. That’s not irony, that’s tragedy. And though we know it, we do not know what to do about it.
Maybe what we all need most is time to process what we already know so that we can put it together differently, even more effectively than ever before. Maybe we need to think a bit, out on a porch in a summer breeze, down by the creek when the trout are running, back in the garden when it’s time to put the beets and beans in again.
Turn off the television and read a good book. Quit texting and ride your bike. Close the computer and go to a movie. Don’t answer any email. Don’t try to “get ahead.” Don’t take any callbacks. And during the family dinner, turn off the phone. And when the television is on, watch it instead of talking through it. Reclaim your life, your thoughts, your personality, your friends, your family.
No, the world will not end. And no, the rest of the staff will not get ahead of you. They’ll be too tired to even think about catching up.
It’s time to sleep in like you did in the good old days. Have a late breakfast. Read the newspapers all day long. Call some friends in for a game of pinochle. As Ashleigh Brilliant says, ‘Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.’
As the proverb teaches, ‘A good rest is half the work.’ At least, that is, if you really want to be productive.”
—excerpted from Between the Dark and the Daylight by Sr. Joan Chittister
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Friday, June 5, 2015
The Orthodox American – June 2015
The Orthodox American is the quarterly newsletter of the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America. Please click the following link to access the June 2015 quarterly edition: TOA June 2015
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