Evil Empire or Russia Consecrated?

Folks - always beware the one agenda man!!

 

If you think the debate over the Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the Russian Orthodox can be had sans any mention of the Ukrainian Holodomor, you're simply mistaken.

 

Careful, that kind of thinking cuts both ways.

I'm always open to be proven wrong. In fact, Brian K is in the process of attempting to prove me wrong as he searches for a full transcript of Cardinal Ratzinger's alleged comments proving his point.

I don't seek to shut down the debate just because the opposing viewpoint makes me uncomfortable.

I love the truth, even when it hurts.

 

Since you brought it up in an attempt to use it against me somehow, I'll turn the table and make it relevant to this thread.

The Holodomor should never be marginalized, which makes it all the more obscene that the Kiev Junta is currently engaged in a modern genocide against the civilians of the Donbass, all with the complicity of the West and with the silence of some Catholic leaders in Kiev.

 

When Russia is truly converted, she will be Catholic.

Christian Unity Cannot Be Built on Lies
November 17, 2014
The Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev not only misrepresents Catholic practice and history, he also misrepresents Orthodox practice and history
Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille

Pope Francis meets with Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of ecumenical relations for the Russian Orthodox Church, during a private meeting at the Vatican Nov. 12, 2013. (CNS photo/L'Osservatore Romano vi a Reuters)

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, the “foreign affairs minister” of the Russian Orthodox Church, is, as George Weigel observed recently in First Things, a talented man, “charming and witty.” However, the gifted Hilarion, Weigel rightly noted, “does not always speak the truth.” Hilarion is rather like the Energizer Bunny: he goes on and on and on repeating tirelessly whatever pernicious propaganda the Russians want to spread. He has three channels to choose from: tired and outright lies about Ukrainian Catholics, repeated ad nauseam for over a decade now; useful if rather vague calls for Christians to co-operate in addressing the social ills of our time (same-sex marriage, divorce, abortion); and tendentious distortions of his own Orthodox tradition, particularly her ecclesiology. It is the third I wish to address.

Earlier this month, the metropolitan gave a speech at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, New York, about primacy in the Orthodox Church and in the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue. Since I've written the most wide-ranging, up-to-date, and comprehensive survey on both topics—Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy (University of Notre Dame Press 2011)—I was vexed at the ignorance and distortions on display in the metropolitan's essay. It is absurd, frankly, that he cannot even relay his own Orthodox tradition faithfully and that it fell to me, lowest of the low (for I am a Ukrainian Catholic—one of those horrible old “Uniates” that Alfeyev is forever denouncing), to more faithfully represent and adequately describe the Orthodox tradition than he himself has.

Now, to be sure, I do not suffer from delusions of grandeur and imagine that everyone has eagerly devoured my book, treating it like some Delphic oracle revealing the way to Christian unity. But it has been lauded by many Orthodox for its faithful, wide-ranging, and comprehensive survey of Orthodox positions in all their diversity. For the Orthodox do not speak with one voice on these matters, and they do not speak in one place, either. I gathered dozens of articles and books, most from very obscure places, and put them into one sweeping chapter, which had never been done before. As Fr. John Jillions, a scholar and the Chancellor of the Orthodox Church of America, said to me quite sincerely and gratefully, “At the very least your book will be useful for telling us Orthodox what we say and think!”

Had Hilarion read the book, he could have saved himself the embarrassment of uttering such howlers in New York as this:

… we are dealing with two very different models of church administration: one centralized and based on the perception of papal universal jurisdiction; the other decentralized and based on the notion of the communion of autocephalous local Churches.

This is the old mythology, never accurate in the first place, that sees the West as all papal and monarchical, and the East as all patriarchal and synodical. Like all stereotypes, it distorts. For the plain facts are that there is a long history of robust synodality in the Church of Rome going back to the earliest centuries of her history, and there is a long history of Eastern Churches attempting to be heavily centralized and run not in a synodal manner but in a manner that some Orthodox themselves have confessed to be “quasi-papal.” The clearest recent example of a super-centralized Orthodox church run on quasi-papal lines is Alfeyev's own Russian Church, whose 1945 statutes gave the patriarch of Moscow (for political reasons insisted upon by Stalin) powers that popes of Rome could only dream about. I document all this in great detail in my book. For Alfeyev not to acknowledge any of this makes it clear that his treatment of primacy is grossly tendentious and thus must be dismissed as inaccurate and unreliable.

But it gets worse. Referring rather sweepingly and positively to “Orthodox....polemics,” the metropolitan sums these up as arguing that “in the Universal Church there can be no visible head because Christ Himself is the Head of the Body of the Church.” He recognizes that some Orthodox do not subscribe to such a view, naming the (safely dead) Fr. Alexander Schmemann, former dean of St. Vladimir's. Tellingly, the metropolitan fails to mention the most important Greek Orthodox theologian alive today, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, who is Orthodox co-chair of the international Catholic-Orthodox dialogue and has argued in favor of universal primacy—as the majority of modern Orthodox theologians also do—exercised in a synodal manner. Zizioulas, moreover, has rightly insisted that universal primacy requires universal synodality, and one cannot speak intelligently about one without the other. Alfeyev's failure to even mention Zizioulas strikes the reader as thin-skinned and perhaps even motivated by envy—there can be only one prima donna in this town, and c'est moi.

con't

 

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Hilarion next makes another spurious claim:

The notion that a supreme hierarch for the Universal Church is a necessity has been approached from different angles over the last fifty years, but invariably the consensus among the Orthodox is that primacy as expressed in the Western tradition was and remains alien to the East. In other words, the Orthodox are not prepared to have a pope.

Current modes of exercising the papacy may indeed remain “alien to the East” in broad measure, but the second sentence here is, as my book's survey of twenty-four Orthodox scholars shows, completely bogus. Again and again, modern Orthodox thinkers have recognized that there is a role for the papacy, that they are prepared to have a pope under certain circumstances, and that the papacy, when exercised properly, is a gift and a blessing for all Christians, including the Orthodox! Indeed, the late Ukrainian Orthodox Archbishop Vsevolod of Chicago bluntly stated, in a 1997 address at Catholic University of America, “the Church needs the Roman primacy.”

There is more tiresome nonsense: Hilarion ties up his piece by referring to the statement of the Rusian Church about primacy, adopted on December 26, 2013 (which I debunked in this CWR piece), where it is claimed that“primacy in the Universal Orthodox Church...is the primacy of honor by its very nature rather than that of power.” There are few phrases more vexatious to me than “primacy of honor.” More than twenty years ago now, the widely respected historian Fr. Brian E. Daley, SJ, in an article—““Position and Patronage in the Early Church: The Original Meaning of ‘Primacy of Honour’”—published in Journal of Theological Studies, one of the most prestigious theological journals in the anglophone world, showed that the notion of “primacy of honor” in the early Church did not mean an absence of authority. Such primacy, in fact, was honored precisely because it was authoritative, and the one exercising that primacy could and did call people to account, where necessary coercing and compelling obedience in various circumstances. The primate of “honor,” then, clearly is not a useless avuncular fellow—able to smile and wave and nothing more. He had real teeth—or, to use Alfeyev's word, “power”.

Why, then, such a shoddy speech? Was Metropolian Hilarion Alfeyev just being lazy in not reading widely recognized landmark scholarship such as Daley's article (to say nothing of my book)? Or was he setting out to distort the record and ignore evidence that does not fit his (and broadly Russian) prejudices? The inescapable conclusion is that he cannot even be relied upon to faithfully, truthfully, and accurately represent his own tradition. If he repeatedly tells lies about Catholics in Ukraine, and is now caught out uttering distortions about his own Orthodox tradition, how can this man be called upon to reliably discuss anything?

If all his invitations to various conferences—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—do not now dry up, then the fault is not with him but with us for our willingness to indulge duplicity. We have made ourselves accomplices in this man's self-destructive utterances by regularly giving him a platform from which to lie. As Christians, we must surely recognize that it is itself a sin to aid and abet another in actions we ourselves know to be sin. Out of genuine charity for Metropolitan Hilarion, it is time that we no longer seek him out or listen to him. Let him never again be given an invitation to a Vatican event of any kind; let no more honorary doctorates be conferred on him; let him be denied all future speaking engagements and photo ops with Billy Graham, the pope, or the archbishop of Canterbury. Let us pray that, being young enough, perhaps he may yet amend his ways so that truth and honesty might light the difficult but vital path of Catholic-Orthodox dialogue.

 

"If all his invitations to various conferences—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—do not now dry up, then the fault is not with him but with us for our willingness to indulge duplicity. We have made ourselves accomplices in this man's self-destructive utterances by regularly giving him a platform from which to lie. As Christians, we must surely recognize that it is itself a sin to aid and abet another in actions we ourselves know to be sin. Out of genuine charity for Metropolitan Hilarion, it is time that we no longer seek him out or listen to him. Let him never again be given an invitation to a Vatican event of any kind; let no more honorary doctorates be conferred on him; let him be denied all future speaking engagements and photo ops with Billy Graham, the pope, or the archbishop of Canterbury. Let us pray that, being young enough, perhaps he may yet amend his ways so that truth and honesty might light the difficult but vital path of Catholic-Orthodox dialogue."

This seems to be against the direction we are being told to go in.

 

The good news is the consecration is for the pope and bishops to fulfill. The rest of us can wear the brown scapular, pray the rosary, and do the first five saturday's devotions. The promises attached to all these devotions are great. I thank God he has provided for the little ones like my family and I. Spiritual and physical protection through our consecrations to Jesus and Mary. Even if all the religious leaders did not listen to God, we still by being faithful have heaven's protection.

 

Again, your analysis is based on the mistaken impression that there is a "good guy" and a "bad guy" in this conflict between the Ukraine and Russia, based on your erroneous assumptions and conclusions arising from your beliefs regarding the Consecration of Russia.

Unfortunately both sides in this conflict are "bad," and innocents are dying on both sides. Neither side holds the moral high ground and "rooting" for one side over the other is about as moral as rooting for one NFL team over another.

 

This is very important to remember. Sometimes we get caught up in our own positions, but if one is not doing the very basic things that Verne mentions above, it is unlikely you will be part of the solution for the state of church and the world. Being right can be a pride issue. Seeking rightousness is good insofar as one does it with humility and prayerfullness. It is always the simple things that matter.

 

The Eastern Schism dates to the 15th Century. Our Lady of Fatima did not appear in the 15th Century. She appeared in 1917, the year that Russia abandoned Orthodoxy for Atheism. Our Lady came primarily to save Russia from Atheism. She came to save Russia from Apostasy for Apostasy is a greater crime than Schism. Our Orthodox brothers, although in a state of Schism, are still spiritually closer to the Catholic Church than our Protestant and Jewish brothers and sisters. But the devil is doing his best to drive a wedge between genuine Catholic-Orthodox reconciliation, vis-a-vis the Ukrainian situation. Here is an article to counter the article you cite above that adds some much needed balance to your argument:

"Moscow Patriarchate: progress in relations with Catholics, increased distances with Protestants" http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Mosc...creased-distances-with-Protestants-27074.html

Patriarch Kirill has rightly condemned the ongoing genocide being committed by the Western-backed Poroshenko. It was not Mr. Putin who orgianzed the violent Maidan coup and then proceeded to launch a full-scale unjust war against the civilian populations of the Donbass. Thank God Putin intervened in Crimea, for if he had not, the civilians in Crimea would have been butchered by Poroshenko in the same way the civilians of the Donbass are being butchered by Poroshenko. Where are the Catholic voices in Ukraine standing up to the war criminal Poroshenko and the bunch of thugs who are currently occupying Kiev?

I think that the Devil really wanted Putin to overreact to the violent Western coup in Ukraine. Thankfully, Putin understands that there are no winners in any war, and so Putin is prepared to take Western punishment via sanctions and character assassination if it means that he can avoid a war. Putin was an intelligence officer of the highest order and understands the chess game that is being played. It must infuriate Western warmongers to no end that Putin consistently refuses to take their bait. It just worries me that if Kiev is willing to shoot down a civilian airliner and blame it on Putin in the hopes of a wider conflict, then they are willing to do anything. It worries me that Kiev will get desperate the longer Putin refuses their advances, and might resort to a false flag far more reckless than MH17.

 

More lies from the west:

Hacked US Documents Said To Reveal Extent Of Undisclosed US "Lethal Aid" For Ukraine Army


Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/25/2014 14:46 -050

early June when Obama announced he had approved $5 million in body armor, night vision goggles and additional communications equipment for the Ukrainian military.

Since then the topic of whether or not to arm the Ukraine army in its civil war against the separatist eastern region has been a hot topic as recently as today, when VOA reported that "U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has condemned what he calls Russia’s “aggression” in Ukraine,but stopped short of saying the United States will provide Ukraine with lethal aid... the White House nominee to fill the number two position at the State Department has said the United States should consider giving Ukraine lethal military equipment."

However, as lately has been a recurrent theme, the Obama administration may not have been exactly forthright with the public or the facts. At least that is the conclusion based on hacked documents released earlier today by the Ukrainian hackers group CyberBerkut, which reveal that despite assurances to the contrary, the US has in fact been providing substantial lethal aid to Ukraine's armed forces.

As Sputniknews reports, "according to the hackers, the information was obtained during the visit of US Vice President Joe Biden to Ukraine last week, when they were able to access confidential State Department documents via a mobile device of a US delegation member."



"After examination of just a several files there is the impression that the Ukrainian army is the branch of US Armed Forces. The volume of US financial assistance amazes with its scale. They also show the highest level of degradation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Besides, thousands of dollars go on personal accounts of military personnel and used by certain officers in personal needs. What will the American taxpayers say?" the statement published on the official CyberBerkut web page said.

Sorry, but the American taxpayers are too busy with other more pressing matters, than policing how their government spends their money.

Other documents published by the hackers indicate that Washington is ready to supply Ukraine with "400 units of sniper rifles, 2,000 units of assault rifles, 720 hand grenade launchers, nearly 200 mortars and more than 70,000 shells for them, 150 stingers and 420 anti-tank missiles."

The leaked documents presented below have not been verified so take them with a grain of salt, although it is worth recalling that it was a hacked leak of Victoria Nulan's conversation in February 2014 that revealed that extent of behind the scenes meddling by the US State Dept in Ukraine's internal affairs just ahead of the presidential coup.
​

 

No doubt.

(But I thought the Eastern Schism dated to 1054? Or were you referring to the Council of Florence and the East-West Union in the 15th Century?)

 

The great Eastern Schism must not be conceived as the result of only one definite quarrel. It is not true that after centuries of perfect peace, suddenly on account of one dispute, nearly half of Christendom fell away. Such an event would be unparalleled in history, at any rate, unless there were some great heresy and in this quarrel there was no heresy at first, nor has there ever been ahopeless disagreement about the Faith. It is a case, perhaps the only prominent case, of a pure schism, of a breach of intercommunion caused by anger and bad feeling, not by a rival theology. It would be inconceivable then that hundreds of bishops should suddenly break away from union with their chief, if all had gone smoothly before. The great schism is rather the result of a verygradual process. Its remote causes must be sought centuries before there was any suspicion of their final effect. There was a series of temporary schisms that loosened the bond and prepared the way. The two great breaches, those of Photius and Michael Caerularius, which areremembered as the origin of the present state of things, were both healed up afterwards. Strictly speaking, the present schism dates from theEastern repudiation of the Council of Florence (in 1472). So although the names of Photius and Caerularius are justly associated with this disaster, inasmuch as their quarrels are the chief elements in the story, it must not be imagined that they were the sole, the first, or the last authors of the schism. If we group the story around their names we must explain the earlier causes that prepared for them, and note that there were temporary reunions later. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13535a.htm

 

Are you Roman Catholic or from Orthodox Church?

The reason I ask is that you are clearly myopic in constantly defending the Russian Orthodox Church. Yet, at the same time you are keen to point out the 'perceived' errors of the Catholic Church in the Ukraine.

http://catholicism.org/glorious-ukrainian-martyrs-victims-of-communist-barbarity.html

 

I'm a bit disappointed in this question. Orthodox and Catholics are so close in belief that we really shouldn't be looking for differences. I think many on this forum will not be enjoying the 'arguments between Brian and Richard but I find the exchanges informative. I think both Brian and Richard are Catholics but Brian has indicated earlier he is very doubtful about Pope Francis so his 'Catholicity' is open to question in my view but I do agree with his comment about there being no "good guy" or "bad guy" in the Ukranian conflict. The truth is that there is sin on both sides and only God knows who leads the sinful race!

 

I agree - this is no time to look for differences, or arguments. And in this time of great confusion, I don't think it's helpful to question the "Catholicity" of our brothers and sisters. Many very good Catholics are puzzled and anxious about the direction Pope Francis is taking. Let's focus on building each other up in the faith, and keeping each other safe in the barque of Peter.

 

Please read Brian's recent posts in the thread 'The Synod' - we have a miracle in our midst, and I think it's beautiful !

 

I hope you're right, Bart (although I think you mean the 'Apostasy' thread). It will show in his future posts if you are.

 

Oh, I see, so because you don't like what I have to say you are going to throw a cheap shot.

For the record, I am a practicing Roman Catholic loyal to the Vicar of Christ, Pope Francis. I put my loyalty to the Truth ahead of any other consideration including my loyalty to Country. I call a spade a spade as I see it and have no problem calling out Catholics when need be - whether it be the Sex Abuse Scandal or the silence of Catholics in Ukraine to the war crimes of their illegal Government.

There are many places where I take issue with the Orthodox - most notably their views on Divorce.