Posted on 11/27/2005 6:48:18 PM PST by x5452
Monks come to blows at rebel monastery in Vatican dispute
Orthodox monks traded blows yesterday in the Mount Athos monastic community in northern Greece as a bitter fight between church authorities and a rebel monastery turned violent.
A spokesman for the besieged Esphigmenou Monastery said workmen and rival monks tried to demolish the community's offices at Karyes, the administrative centre of the medieval sanctuary - from which women and female animals are banned.
"They used pickaxes, spades and crowbars to try to break down the door," said Father Neophytos. "They were trying to throw us out."
Police said nobody was injured in the clashes.
In a dispute spanning three decades, the zealot monks staunchly oppose efforts to improve relations between the Orthodox Church and the Vatican.
The spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, has declared the monks in the 1,000-year-old monastery to be schismatics, and ordered them out of the walled compound.
But the 100 monks of Esphigmenou, one of 20 monasteries at Athos, have settled in for a long siege.
However, their supplies are dwindling and the monks' telephone line was cut last month. They are now relying on mobile phones.
The sanctuary is popular with Christian pilgrims.
The Prince of Wales is a regular visitor to Mount Athos and President Vladimir Putin spent time there in August.
ping
How very unfortunate.
They are under the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch. These "monks" are disobedient schismatics and should be removed from the monastery as surely they will be.
"There is no shorter ascent to the royal and Divine mansions...than through subduing the five passions hostile to obedience, namely: disobedience, argumentativeness, self-gratification, self-justification and pernicious high opinion of oneself...Disobedience is the mouth of hell; argumentativeness its tongue, whetted like a sword; self-gratification is its sharp teeth; self-justification its throat; high opinion of oneself, which casts one into hell, is the belching of its all-devouring belly. But he who, through obedience, conquers the first, by one stroke cuts off all the rest and with one stride reaches heaven."
+Gregory of Sinai
Sad none the less (it presents a bad image for us all).
Their sentiment is perhap worth investigating but this is not at all the way such disent should be expressed.
This is a HUGE keeper. I'm copying into my quotes doc, thank you very much!
" Sounds like he was describing western culture today...."
Or the culture of his day. The Evil One hasn't needed to change his tactics one bit since the Fall given our predilictions.
Isn't it marvelous how the Fathers, especially the Desert Fathers in their instructions to their monks, resonate with us today many hundreds of years after they lived? The shame is that the West has forgotten or ignored so much of this wisdom and Truth. The indictment unfortunately rests squarely with the Church which has failed to teach its people.
So, now it's up to those of us who are alive now to do the right thing. And no matter what our place is in life, there is a right thing for us to do to shed Christ's light in this dark world.
Being in the situation of the story that started this thread is probably not the way we can best serve the Lord...sigh.
"As you know, he left it (the sweet key of obedience) in the hands of his vicar, Christ on earth, whom you all are obliged to obey even to the point of death. Whoever refuses to obey him is, as I have told you elsewhere, living in damnation (D 154)."
" Who has the greater merit: those who belong to an order or these others? I answer you that the merit of obedience is not measured by the act or the place or the person commanding (that is, good, bad, lay or religious), but by the measure of love in the person obeying. This is the measure with which it is measured (D 164)."
"take the wood of self knowledge along with contempt for their self complacency and self conceit, and put these into the fire of divine charity, espousing once again…holy obedience as their bride (D 162).
*Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose
"Fistfights, whether on Mt Athos or in Jerusalem, are no manner of the Greeks settling inter-Church disputes without tarnishing all of Orthodoxy."
OTOH it may just be proof that the Greeks and the Irish have far more in common than either would care to admit! ;)
If they wanted to make a more reasoned case for their suspicions, however, I think you might find many Catholic traditionalists who may be able to help them out with their arguments - might even give birth to a new "ecumenism of reactionaries."
"OTOH it may just be proof that the Greeks and the Irish have far more in common than either would care to admit! ;)"
Mother always maintained that the Irish were really the descendants of a bunch of Greeks who got blown far, far off course!
The abbot just smiled and said, "At least they care, my son. At least they care."
" The abbot just smiled and said, "At least they care, my son. At least they care."
Most abbots, thank God, are wise men!
There you go!
Remember that the clergy are supposed to be exemplary individuals. If I can't see love in them, who are they to tell me to find love even for my enemies?
The Orthodox approach is to seek fault, not praise, in us first and foremost. But that is usually easier said than done. All of us are good at talking the talk. Trouble is, what we say somehow gets "lost in translation" when we begin to walk the walk.
I have always been weary of the professionally holy (Thomas Merton's expression).
goood one
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