Eastern Orthodox Church - Opus Publicum

September 9, 2015 Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church

Mitis

From a purely juridical standpoint nothing better has been written on Pope Francis’s motu proprio Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus than Dr. Edward Peters’s two entries (here and here) at his canon-law blog. I don’t know if I can recommend any other reading on the matter in good conscience, simply because so much of what has been written in the Catholic press borders on absurd. “Prudent reforms”; “Nothing has changed”; “Doctrine remains untouched,” and so on and so forth. Of course doctrine has not been touched in any direct manner; it’s just now Catholics will likely have a much easier time circumventing it.

If a silver lining is to be found amidst this fresh storm of confusion to hit the Church, let it be this: No Catholic should any longer strike a triumphalist posture against the Eastern Orthodox with respect to the latter’s marriage praxis. Orthodox doctrine may not be exactly “neat” in this area, but they have dodged the need to engage in legalistic acrobatics to justify their behavior. I hope that charity compels the Orthodox not to snicker too loudly over all of this. When it comes to the crisis of modern marriage, we’re in this together.

August 31, 2015 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church, Liturgy

Some Thoughts on Church Slavonic in the Liturgy

Church Slavonic, like all extant liturgical languages, is a dying tongue. The Russian Orthodox Church remains the single largest user of Slavonic, though many of its parishes in the diaspora—including those of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR)—have abandoned it in favor of the vernacular. The Orthodox Church in America, with few exceptions, has completely dropped Slavonic and other local churches, such as the Bulgarian and Serbian Orthodox, have moved away from it as well. The main argument against using Slavonic in the liturgy is that few understand it anymore, particularly outside of traditional Orthodox homelands. In the Greek Catholic context, those churches which draw their heritage from the Slavic tradition now favor the vernacular. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), which was once the largest Catholic communion to use Church Slavonic, now serves most of its liturgies in Ukrainian (with exceptions made for parishes in other parts of the world). This is somewhat ironic given all of the effort the Congregation for Oriental Churches put into producing a master set of “de-Latinized” Slavonic liturgical books for the Ukrainian and Ruthenian churches between the 1940s and 70s. So, is it time to move on from Church Slavonic? Should the liturgical language which sustained the Eastern Slavic churches (Catholic and Orthodox) for a millennium be abandoned once and for all? Or is it still possible to maintain a liturgical link to the past without sacrificing intelligibility to the point where the liturgy becomes either a museum piece or a performance?

August 27, 2015 Eastern Orthodox Church, Orthodox Social Thought

Ancient Faith Acton? – More Quotes to Digest

Here are a few more words, penned by Eastern Orthodox Christians, for “Ancient Faith Acton” to digest.

[T]he structure of the state is secondary to the spirit of human relations… The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life.

– Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia, pg. 49

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

– Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1978 Harvard Address

The attitude of Orthodox Christians to property should be based on the gospel’s principle of love of one’s neighbor, expressed in the words of the Savior: «A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another» (Jn. 13:34). This commandment is the basis of Christian moral behavior. For Christians and the Church believes for other people as well, it should be an imperative in regulating interpersonal relationships, including property relations.

According to the teaching of the Church, people receive all the earthly blessings from God who is the One who holds the absolute right to possess them. The Savior repeatedly points to the relative nature of the right to property in His parables on a vineyard let out to be used (Mk. 12:1-9), on talents distributed among many (Mt. 25:14-30) and on an estate handed over for temporary management (Lk. 16:1-13). Expressing the idea inherent to the Church that God is the absolute owner of everything, St. Basil the Great asks: «Tell me, what do you have that is yours? Where from did you take it and bring to life?» The sinful attitude to property manifested in the conscious rejection of this spiritual principle generates division and alienation among people.

– The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, ch. VII(1)

August 17, 2015 Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church

Preparedness

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the next generation of Christians living in America—Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestant alike—will die as either martyrs or apostates. If that is true, more will surely flee the Lord than flock to Him in their terrible hour of need. This is as it has been before, only today the attraction to depart from the easy yoke of Christ is practically a nonmatter for those who have come to believe that not only is hell inconsistent with a loving God, but that adherence to anything more than material interests is tantamount to madness. Of course, those Christians steeped in what I will broadly call “liberal mindset” are rather unconcerned about this, believing as they do that in the end libertas religionis will save us all. Even otherwise conservative Catholics who really ought to know better still think pitching some court battles and public-relations endeavors can spare them—and the Church—from any trying times. And if the trying times should come, then what? A separate, but not wholly indistinct, band of conservatives have nothing more to offer than, “Run!”

August 12, 2015 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church, Integralism

A Followup Note on the Cross and the Sword in Ukraine

Web-logging about complex phenomena is always a fraught enterprise, particularly when no single blog post can hope to capture the density of religious and political life in Europe during the last century. Yesterday’s entry, “Comments on the Cross and the Sword in Ukraine,” may have left some readers with the (false) impression that the intersection of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) with national political life amounted to little more than the subservience of the UGCC to bald nationalistic interests. Nothing, I would argue, could be further from the truth. For while it is true that some segments of the UGCC became too involved in the affairs of Ukrainian nationalism at the expense of its God-ordained vocation, the sticky truth of the matter is that the UGCC, since the 18th Century at least, found itself placed in a complicated role of both forging a political living space for the faithful it served and putting itself in the service of saving souls.

August 9, 2015 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church

Sunday Jottings on Conversion

It is not uncommon, either in person or via social media, for me to be asked how I went from Point A to B to C and so forth with respect to what I’ll call half-jokingly my “religious alignment.” Over the years I picked up quite a few dodgy answers, all of which are meant to indicate that I don’t feel like talking about it. I still don’t. Conversion stories are typically (though not always) a bore and the only one which people should spend any time meditating upon happened almost 2,000 years ago on a road to Damascus. The whole idea of conversion at this point in history strikes me as a bit silly, especially when it involves people going from, say, Catholicism to Orthodoxy (or vice versa) or, at the intra-ecclesial level, from “Novus Ordo Catholicism” to “Traditional Catholicism” or “New Calendar Orthodoxy” to “Old Calendar Orthodoxy,” etc. Never before have Christians had so many “options” (there’s that word again), and any “option” that is exercised typically comes from movements of the soul that have little, if anything, to do with “discovering the true Church” or “the truest part of the truest Church.” That’s not a new observation. Owen White—if I recall correctly—made it many moons ago and formulated it in terms far more powerful than any I have to offer. Not every movement of the soul is good, mind you. Some of mine certainly have not been. A lack of resolve coupled with a very personal—and highly subjective if not selfish—desire to live beyond the horizon of inter-ecclesial barking has driven more than a few of my choices over the years. A choice for Catholicism, in my estimation, should not be a choice against Orthodoxy, though anyone who has read my blogs and occasional articles over the years knows full well that I haven’t exactly lived that belief out day to day. Frankly, I struggle to live out my belief in the Credo (with or without filioque) day to day, which makes me the absolutely worst candidate to start-in about some epic ecclesiastical odyssey shot through with contradictions and missteps.

July 26, 2015 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church

Contra Beeler’s Gross Inaccuracies

I have never met nor had much communication with John Beeler (“The Young Fogey”). Sometimes I would glance at his web-log, A Conservative Blog for Peace, or peruse the comments he would make here on Opus Publicum, but that’s about it. So imagine my surprise when I noticed a trickle of traffic coming my way from a post which attempts to both make fun of me and criticize views I simply do not hold. Although I have endeavored to ignore the public commentary on Beeler’s moral and psychological shortcomings, I find it difficult to ignore his intellectual ones in this instance. For those uninterested in cross-blog arguments, feel free to ignore the rest of this post. However, aside from setting Beeler straight, I hope that it will clarify some of my views—views which I admit have been subject to revision, correction, and realignment over the years thanks to thoughtful and intelligent criticism from friends and strangers alike.

July 25, 2015 Eastern Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church

A Comment on “Unia”

Strange I never saw it before, but a friend directed me to an apparently defunct blog, The Holy Unia. The title pretty much gives away the game in terms of its orientation and, to be frank, much of the content isn’t terribly inspiring. Although the blog disclaims any affiliation with the Society of St. Pius X or its eastern affiliate, the Society of Josaphat, the tone is similar—which is fine. What’s less fine, or at least less clear, is what, if anything, is to be made of the site’s “mission.” It seems that there is still an inclination on the part of some to see “Uniatism,” that is, the incremental reunification of Eastern churches through the establishment of parallel sees, as the only acceptable model of bringing Catholicism and Orthodoxy (Eastern or Oriental) together. That hasn’t exactly been the way of things for some time now. No, the Balamand Statement does not carry much (or any) magisterial heft for Catholics, but as a “policy paper” it effectively put an end to “Uniatism.” So what then is the next step? If one follows the line proposed by Fr. Robert Taft to its logical conclusion, it would seem that what the Catholic Church “should do” is simply recognize the Orthodox Church as a true, particular church; offer full reciprocal communion to any local Orthodox church that will accept it; and lay aside almost every substantive theological disagreement the two parties have (or at least think they have). It’s a radical vision, and not one likely to come into being any time soon. Not only are most local Orthodox churches unlikely to accept such an offer, but Roman chauvinism isn’t dead—just ask the Eastern Catholics.

July 19, 2015 Eastern Orthodox Church, Integralism

Further Remarks on Integralism and Symphonia

Symphonia, as a theological-political concept, is practically dead in our times. Maybe, just maybe, a few glimmers exist in contemporary Russia, though a large body of critics, including political scientists and churchmen, think otherwise. What may look something like symphonia at first blush is merely a (post)modern form of caesaropapism, with the Russian Orthodox Church serving as the handmaid of the Russian state. The Moscow Patriarchate’s “Russian World” ecclesial ideology fits snugly with secular Russia’s larger international ambitions—ambitions that have made themselves violently felt in places like Georgia and Ukraine over the past several years. In other parts of the so-called Orthodox world nothing like sympahonia exists. It certainly does not exist in the Middle East nor in Greece, where the state finds its future crushed on the heel of the European Union while the Orthodox Church remains almost powerless to provide firm moral guidance under seemingly impossible conditions. Integralism, which has become a rallying cry for a small (but dedicated) band of Catholics, is certainly not dead, but it remains, at best, a theory and, at worst, a concept without teeth. There are more than a few of those floating around right now. May we forever be spared the suggestion of a coming “Integralist Option” or, for the symphonia crowd, a “Justinian Option.”