Posted on 05/25/2010 6:44:01 AM PDT by marshmallow
Getting away from some of our more parochial considerations of late, I am very excited by the new developing relationship between Pope Benedict XVI and Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church. A capital article is Sandro Magister’s A Holy Alliance between Rome and Moscow is Born. This is no “touchy-feely” ecumenism but hope for a dying Europe. The great ally for the new evangelisation of Europe is the Russian Orthodox Church.
I note several things in the article before you go and read it for yourselves.
Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, said to the Pope: that the Catholic Church will not be alone in the new evangelization of dechristianized Europe, because it will have at its side the Russian Orthodox Church, “no longer a competitor, but an ally.” The Russian Church has seen many things change for the better under Benedict XVI, quite apart from the fact that the Russians detest the Poles. Benedict XVI is made of the theological and intellectual stuff that the Orthodox admire, and the fact that dechristianisation has to be beaten before it beats the Churches. We can only do this together. The third vital dimension is mutually embracing the great Christian Tradition at the heart of the Church’s mission to Europe.
What strikes me in Patriarch Kirill’s writing, Norm of Faith as Norm of Life, is a convergence with a former reflection of mine in The Anglo-Catholic, that of the futility of moral and political combats without first transmitting the faith. Before we can fight the evils of abortion and perverted sexuality and other such problems of society, we have to transmit faith in God and the experience of conversion to Christ. Otherwise, activism is futile. How refreshing it is to read the teaching of the Patriarch of Moscow!
The first notion to come out is that of Tradition, but the great tradition and not the ideology of marginal groups of western Christian reactionaries. He urges us to a totally different philosophy of life based on man’s transfiguration and sanctification. The big problem we all suffer is not having the spiritual health needed to defend ourselves from the rot of relativism and what Pope John Paul II called the culture of death. The Patriarch traces the history of the liberal Enlightenment ideas and the rejection of Tradition, chiefly expressed by the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation.
He has this to say about some of the current problems in the west:
If we look at the question of female priesthood or that of the admission of homosexuality, is not this perhaps precisely what happens today? Both of the questions confirm, among other things, the thesis about the liberal nature of Protestantism, as previously defined. It is absolutely evident that the introduction of female priesthood and the admission of homosexuality have taken place under the influence of a certain liberal vision of human rights: a vision in which these rights are radically opposed to sacred tradition.
Now, the Patriarch would not then go and deny man all freedom and subject him to slavery, but rather establish the basis of a different anthropology from that with which we have become familiar in the liberal and anti-traditional west. It is the same liberty of perfection as we find in the moral theology of St Thomas Aquinas. The truth makes us free. True liberty is freedom from sin, determinism and mechanisation. It is the freedom that comes through suffering and asceticism. A vital dimension in this emancipation is the communion of the Church. We are made for love and community, not for individual isolation and alienation.
The modern conception of liberalism has penetrated into every institution and each one of us, and it is the greatest obstacle to evangelisation. How do we do something about it? Do we resort to terrorism and violence, or what? This is precisely the question I asked in my other article.
The two usual responses of the Church and smaller groups of Christians is either to create a ghetto or other isolated entity like the Old Believers or some of the traditionalists in the west, or to accept neo-liberal civilisation and align the Gospel and the Church with it.
It is clear that the two models are mutually exclusive. It is also evident that both enjoy strong support. The opposition between these two points of view is to a great extent at the basis of the climate of tension and confrontation in social life; a tension that also impacts the life of the Church.
The solution is as old as the hills: live in the world without being of the world. We cannot change our political institutions, which is essentially the message of Leo XIII when he told the French Catholics to live with the Republic. It doesn’t mean the Republic is right, anti-Christian as it is, but it is there. The Church can survive without the support of the State, and even under persecution. We all have to live with the world as we find it, and impregnate it somehow with the seed of Christ’s word and the leaven of the Holy Spirit. Our social doctrine needs to be firmly rooted in Tradition and be able to give answers to the questions of contemporary society.
If ever the Catholic Church of Benedict XVI (and one would hope a future Pontiff of the same new tendency) achieves union with Moscow, imagine the power of the Church’s witness in this liberal society we have to live in! Will it happen in our lifetime? There are many naysayers who say that it can happen only by one Church totally submitting to the other or giving up its specific identity. I’m not so sure about that. Our Anglican Ordinariates are laboratories to prepare for bigger things in the future. Things have changed and are changing as time goes by.
What lessons can we learn from all this, especially if we are Europeans? I think one thing is to learn something about Russians, their history, culture and mentality. I have been fascinated by Russia since my student days. I have never been there, even though Moscow is no further from my home than San Francisco from New York! My initiation was reading Vladimir Soloviev and Nicholas Berdyaev, which took me onto reading other philosophers and theologians from that great land. My generation and older have been all too influenced by Cold War propaganda, stories of Russkies and Commies and the threat under which we lived as children, no different than our grandparents with the Germans.
We need to get over all those things and the “errors of Russia” (meaning Leninist Communism) foretold by Our Lady of Fatima. She specifically asked Russia to be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart, like nineteenth century France to the Sacred Heart of Christ. I am sometimes uneasy with many of these devotional images, but they are important. There are many links between France and Russia, and I have great faith in France’s ability one day to wake up and become once again a great force for the Church’s mission.
I spent many fascinated hours reading Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s L’Empire des Tsars et les Russes. This book was written in the nineteenth century, long before the Revolution, and describes the real Russia – the rudeness of that land that created a race that could suffer anything and keep the faith and Christian hope. They are incredibly resilient people, tenacious and stubborn. They resisted Napoleon and Hitler; helped by the rudeness of their climate. The incredible thing is that the Church of Russia has come out of the 1980’s Perestroika and Glasnost and the plunder of their land by western capitalists all the stronger and less influenced by the liberal soul-rot. I look at pictures and films of their liturgies, and am amazed. And now, at last, they have found someone worth talking to in the western Catholic Church – Pope Benedict XVI.
Some fear Russia. I have no fear that Russia could ever inflict anything on us that is worse than our liberal relativism and rotten politics. Let them come and help us to be manly enough to welcome Christ and be ready, like them, to resist anything the Devil can throw against us.
Gospodi Pomilui!
Russia has passed through the darkness. Light is now coming back to this deeply spiritual people.
Amen! Without faith in God and conversion to Christ all one has is the flesh. We need to give them a reason to support life and to see the sanctity of chastity and charity. Preach the Gospel always and sometimes even use words!
I can only agree with that!
“I have no fear that Russia could ever inflict anything on us”?
You have no idea. Better wake up.
Peter and the other apostles abandoned the Lord in his hour of greatest need. Yet they went on to evangelize the world.
The Russian Church is aware of its past failings and the scars left by communism. Like the apostles, however, there is always a new beginning and a chance to walk in the light.
Read this:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/20/putin-solzhenitsyn-kirill-russia-opinions-contributors_orthodox_church.html
If this article will not open your eyes - nothing will.
Like I said in full detail in the other two threads on "dialogue" with Kirill I, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia:
The "dialogue" is a lie, there is no dialogue when one side is hiding the truth. The Catholic Church's side is hiding truths, hiding is a form of a lie (Honorius I was excommunicated for doing the same thing) You can't lie, even to save the world.
What I'm highlighting is the fact that there is scarcely a Catholic that thinks that the Orthodox are still heretics, schismatic, their sacraments are not efficacious to salvation for the heretic and schismatic, and the Russian Orthodox church is loaded with KGB agents. They are not to be trusted, and anything that they do and say, are to be taken with suspicion.
Kiril may well have been a KGB agent. Putin certainly was. I don't see that as an insurmountable issue.
As for Kiril's so called "denial of human rights", I say more power to him. I think his complete disdain for the western secular sacred cows of homosexual "rights", diversity etc, is just great. Good for him. Every society has the right to define its own identity and values and Russia is no exception.
A civil law based on the moral law.
What a concept!
Well that awakening of the Russian Church only took 60 million mass murders of its citizens. Some alarm clock!
That's what is known as the "error of a false dichotomy".
Furthermore, there is no God given "right" to sin nor is there any God given "right" to enact laws which recognize sin or facilitate it. God gave us free will but try not to confuse the gift of free will with "rights". Man's freedom is limited and fallible. In fact, man failed. He freely sinned. By refusing God's plan of love, he deceived himself and became a slave to sin. This first alienation engendered a multitude of others. From its outset, human history attests the wretchedness and oppression born of the human heart in consequence of the abuse of freedom.
The exercise of freedom does not imply a right to say or do everything. It is false to maintain that man, "the subject of this freedom," is "an individual who is fully self-sufficient and whose finality is the satisfaction of his own interests in the enjoyment of earthly goods.
The fact that Russia is resisting attempts to impose a foreign set of values is to be applauded. The fact that Russia sees the need to base the civil law on the moral law is to be applauded. The fact that Russia sees and is beginning to reject the great moral errors embraced by decaying western societies is to be applauded.
Western Europe is moribund and the US is not far behind. Amazing that Russia would be reluctant to go down that road, isn't it?
And many of those were Christians. The Church in Russia was persecuted. Some members chose martyrdom, some collaborated or acquiesced to the tyranny.
How many Christians in America have made their peace with this culture of death which surrounds us? How many have we eliminated? Only fifty million?
Does that mean there is no way back for America or those who walk past abortion clinics with barely a thought? No.
As long as God is in control there is always hope and always forgiveness and a new beginning.
It depends on what you mean by "individul freedom," and that's what marshmallow's point was. If you take the secularist's view, then "individual freedom" means that there are no objective moral standards. Pope Leo XIII put it this way:
There is no question here respecting forms of government, for there is no reason why the Church should not approve of the chief power being held by one man or by more, provided only it be just, and that it tend to the common advantage. Wherefore, so long as justice be respected, the people are not hindered from choosing for themselves that form of government which suits best either their own disposition, or the institutions and customs of their ancestors.
The most important thing, therefore, is JUSTICE.
Ironically, history shows us that an absence of morality and an erroneous understanding of freedom leads inexorably and inevitably to dictatorship.
As the values of the supposedly "free" western world continue to crumble, watch for its laws to become ever more oppressive and collectivist. In contrast, those countries which have been down this road and understand that true freedom is found in God will begin to flourish.
So you agree with their redefinition of “freedoms” and “rights”?
No, part of the problem is that people think that the only options are one extreme or the other- absolute freedom or absolute tyranny. The reality of America up until relatively recently was “ordered liberty.” Read Russell Kirk’s “Roots of American Order”
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