Replies

This Pyotr is an idiot. Using "backwardness" as an argument against a church rooted in 2,000 year-old tradition is an oxymoron, but an often used card by various European "mondialists" who are more interested in fashion than faith.

There is nothing backward about the Russian Orthodox Church. Obviously Pyor Romanov (if this is his real name!) had no clue why the Church is separated and what reasons prevented Russia from receiving the Pope. He certainly ignored the whole Uniate issue and justifiable theological basis for ROC's steadfastness.

The fact that some other Orthodox countries were visited by the Pope is more an expression of those countries' political weakness and their churches' lack of resolve (and character) to negotiate with Rome from the position of parity, but rather from the position of weakness and submission.

Let's not forget that Russia is the backbone and the pillar of Orthodoxy and that the rest of the Orthodox in the world are but a small and disunited peripheral factors that Rome could gobble up one by one.

Ecumenical prospects were never bright at all, and this article is a bit silly, it seems to me. The Pope had to have known that he was a long ways from real ecumenical progress with the Orthodox world (especially the Slavic Orthodox world), and in light of this, the Vatican's insistence on making such a big public deal about a visit to Russia is difficult to explain.

This was a Pope for whom expressions of friendship and cordiality (which is the logical place to start with relations) seem not to have enough. It was either big public ecumenical pageantry or nothing when it came to the Orthodox.

You can get by with this sort of ecumenical game-playing with the Ecumenical Patriarch, who is a bishop without a diocese -- an answer desperately seeking a question, a man with nothing to do other than go to ecumenical meetings since pretty much all the people in his diocese are Muslims. But you won't get by with it with the MP, who is the real de facto "first among equals" of the Orthodox world because he has the majority of the world's Orthodox Christians under his jurisdiction, and the deep respect of large numbers of Orthodox Christians around the world not under his jurisdiction because of the firmness of his stances.

JPII was a towering figure, and one that we Orthodox can, should, and generally did respect. May the world be blessed with a Catholic Pope who even approaches the firmness of this last Pope's stances on traditional Christian morals.