Byzantine Math
Posted by JohnG (November 16, 2007 at 3:23 pm)
The Antiochian Orthodox Church is on a mission. They are on a mission to convert America to Orthodoxy. Here is a map, note that they have several missions, and several mission projects.
Now… Lets compare and contrast to my Church, the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church.. Uhhh…. welll… Ok… there is no comparison.. the Orthodox are taking the Great Commandment to heart… and My Church is holding Seminars on what a great thing it is to be a Byzantine Catholic.
Now… Who is going to get the “Well done, good and faithful servant.” My bet is on the Orthodox, while they may not have Union, they have zeal and it counts for something.
Mark 9: 38-41
“Teacher,” said John, “we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.
Dr. Alex Roman told me several months before he Doxed that one can be Orthodox and still love the Pope. I’m not sure but I’m very pessimistic about the BC Church reviving until it almost completely dies out.
It would be better to be proactive about our death and resurrection and not simply lemming like about our collapse. We now subsidize the happily dying from the living flesh of the healthy. It seems perverse.
CDL
Comment posted November 16th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
What don’t you like about the RDL?
Comment posted November 16th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
Joseph,
1) The use of Inclusive Language - which the Latin rite is moving away from.
2) The moving away of a common Liturgy with the Orthodox which moves us further away from union
3) The rendering of the Liturgy into more formal English (contrary to popular belief the use of Thee and Thy are actually a more informal form of english)
Comment posted November 16th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
The RDL is incomplete … like untorched creme brulee.
Comment posted November 17th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
1) Certainly agree. I know of it in two places. Is it in more?
2) With ACROD or…?
3) I can see your point there, but for me the richness isn’t lost by the form of English. My father is Antiochian Orthodox and when I go down to visit it’s usually just simple replacement of the words you’d expect.
Would you move back to the Ruthenian Recension or where would you go to fix/complete the RDL?
Comment posted November 18th, 2007 at 12:07 am
I’ve just read that the OCA is creating many new missions as well. I thought the Byzantine Catholics had a purpose. I guess those of us who believe it must act alone.
CDL
Comment posted November 19th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Joseph,
1) The problem is with creep… the Hirearchs have shown that they will bow to pressure from the small small neo-feminist group within the RBCC. Now that they have given in a bit, they will be pressured to give in more, because they have shown that they are willing to yield on the issue of inclusive language.
2) With the entire eastern lung of the Church, the Byzantine Catholic Church should be working with the Orthodox for a true and good english revision of the DL.
3) One of the Parishioners at my Church quipped “It’s just words.” The problem is that it isn’t just words, the DL isn’t just a bunch of words that are thrown together and somehow we worship God. This was one of my reasons why I left Protestantism, the idea that anything can be changed by the whim of a few left a very very bad taste in my mouth.
4) GK Chesterton once said said that the problem with Christianity was “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” I would borrow his phrase and simply say that for the RBCC that “The Divine Liturgy Ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” Rome, and I would say by the hand of God, in the 1940’s produced a recension for our Church (basically because we wouldn’t do it ourselves, or couldn’t) that has been left to rot, untried, every group of our Bishops has ignored this document and has made every excuse in the world not to go to this translation and make a truly faithful English translation of it.
Comment posted November 19th, 2007 at 9:18 am
I belong to the Romanian Catholic Church, St. Peter and Paul in Chicago. On June 29th, 2008 our mission will be elevated to a parish. It will be the first such elevation since the creation of our diocese. We have a few other missions in various stages and our own priest has confessed that he’s eying sponsoring a mission parish of our own once we can work out the financing so they won’t have as rough a road as we did.
Priests who want to evangelize count for *a lot*. Motivated parishioners count as well. Having the Pope on your side is a great help in beating middle management into line (though middle management isn’t quite accurate in a technical sense, the effect is the same). We have an equal obligation to proclaim the gospel to the world you know. So what would it take to fund a missionary priest, Bishop? Where do I donate for such a thing? How about you father? How can we evangelize and make this church overflow with new arrivals? Don’t take no for an answer, Jesus wouldn’t.
I note some commentary about pressure groups, specifically neo-feminist groups. I don’t have a problem with feminism, so long as it’s properly thought through. But if they’re getting out of hand and demanding distortions to our common faith be introduced, pressure has to come from the other direction for your average bishop to have a decent chance at resisting successfully.
Comment posted November 19th, 2007 at 11:33 am
TMLutas,
You also have the full support of your Bishop, which I might add, he seems to be a visionary.
My problem is where a vision is come up with and the Bishop says to everyone working on it “Hey this is great, but you are the one’s who have to implement this.”
This is what happened in Whiting Indiana, we brainstormed we worked but at the end of the day. Laymen cannot restore the Minor orders to the RBCC (Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church), nor can we ordain married men, nor can we assign priests to mission parishes, nor can we consolidate parishes so that our few resources can be made available to areas where they are needed.
This is the difference between a Church with a Vision and a Visionary Bishop and a Church without Vision and without a visionary shepherd.
Comment posted November 19th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
JohnG - You think I don’t get that turnaround (ok, *you* do it) in my mission/parish/diocese? Dream on. That’s how the clergy separates out the serious from the guys who just want to run their lives without doing any actual work themselves. Pay your dues and you’ll eventually find productive collaborators among the clergy.
And I believe that lay people can help restore minor orders. Those with vocations to them can ask to be initiated to them. And if they are denied, they can appeal the denial, respectfully, and in accord with proper procedure set down by the Vatican.
If you have a vocation for the priesthood and you are married, get thee to a seminary and seek ordination. Somebody’s got to do it.
Let me tell you the most insane ordination story I’ve ever heard. Mr. Eugen Mihai, accountant, former teacher at the Blaj seminary, former political prisoner, asked bishop Louis, our first bishop to elevate him to the priesthood. He said he was willing to do it unpaid (he was 65 at the time). Bishop Louis, sure that it was impossible said that while ordination in the US was not possible, if he could find an underground bishop in Romania to ordain him, he would let him serve at Mr. Mihai’s local parish. It took a couple of trips to Ceasescu’s Romania for him to successfully shake his Securitate tail and make his way without government minders to Cardinal Todea, who he personally knew and who was just as sure that no american bishop would incardinate him, had promised that if he found a bishop who would take him, would elevate him to the priesthood. A few hours later, he was a priest. Then he went home and told his wife what he had done (that woman is a saint).
I helped somewhat in regularizing his paperwork almost a decade later. Up to that point, his sole proof of priesthood consisted of two prayer cards with lightly coded messages on the backs from the bishop on each side of the transaction. Do you really think you’d have a harder time than Fr. Mihai?
At worst, eventually your local bishops will see that doing it themselves is just less effort and paperwork all around and they’ll do what’s right.
Visionaries happen in all roles in Christ’s Church. The trick is to *move* and start turning the vision into reality. But it can be difficult to figure out what’s a good vision as a layman so try this. Ask your priest what he would do with an extra $50k in funds to fulfill the mission of the Church. In other words, what corners are you cutting on *his* vision for the parish for lack of money. Then go and raise it or figure out how to implement the program without it and say “ok Fr. we’ve got the resources, now let’s do what *you* said you wanted to do.”
And yes, there are usually a lot of Don Quixote jokes when you start out. You may be viewed as a little disturbed for ‘rocking the boat’. Be prepared and have a plan for pacing yourself so you’re ready to do this the rest of your life.
Comment posted November 19th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
look, I don’t want to come off as pissy. 50k of extra money at our parish means that we reduce the debt by 50k.
Unfortunately we have a large parish debt that needs paying off.
Annunciation Byzantine in Homer Glenn is doing great things, however with the debt over our heads we are in a catch-22.
We have our radio show, 100 children under the age of 18, we are doing amazing things. We were working starting a Mission in Peoria, but the problem is that we, and our priest are stretched very thin.
Fr. Loya is doing what he can, but the fact remains that we have a 1/2 a million albatross around our necks. The when we try to show what can be done the Eparchy gives us hell for not making our stewartship appeal numbers.
Again, I commend your bishop. He has vision and is willing try to do things.
We have lost a few of our members to St. George’s in aurora. I would rather see the in your church and I am happy that our monastic went into the Romanian Byzantine Catholic Church. Your church has recieved much and will use it well.
As for the ordination of married men over here let’s just say that it is going to be frozen in a warm place before this becomes a norm over here. The only reason our church lifted a married man from the deaconate to the priesthood was we we needed a priest because one died.
Comment posted November 19th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
Half a million is a very tough nut. I very much sympathize with “getting hell” from the higher ups as well. I understand that both Bishop Louis and Bishop John Michael got the same over the married priest issue. We seem to have been “very creative” in how we applied the regulations on emergencies with regards to married priests back in the day.
One of the things that I have realized is that there is a big difference between raising money to pay down debt and raising money to further the mission of the Church. The latter opens wallets much better than the former. But even with uninspiring financial goals one can work on it. Have you tried presenting a talk on CCEO 25? My priest liked that one.
Comment posted November 20th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
TM,
I think we both agree that a church that evangelizes is a living Church. I guess the issue now is that some of us feel we have to prod in order to get action. this is blog is one of those prods.
Comment posted November 20th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I agree that prodding is well in order. I’d like to learn how you prod and would like to share how I do it. You have a property on the Internet, possibly the greatest pro-evangalization identity for easterners available. Once you get enough of us prodders together, a state change happens and a self-sustaining community forms. That is *much* more effective because you create a shared pool of resources to grab from as well as having somebody say something interesting on a regular basis.
Comment posted November 21st, 2007 at 10:22 am
I agree! I will take it under serious consideration. The site the blog is on is actually owned by someone else. I have recently been elevated to Admin for the blog.
I think there are things we can do.
John
Comment posted November 21st, 2007 at 10:24 am
JohnG, While I don’t disagree with the basic point that the Antiochians are doing very well in outreach - far better, than us - I think that you really should get some numbers to do the math.
It’s been over a month since you blogged on this subject, I think. Have you made an count - analogous to what you are posting from the AOC - of the missions, communities, and outreach efforts in the BCC. Have you made an analogous count of the parishes formed in the last 30 or so years?
Comment posted November 22nd, 2007 at 12:47 am
djs - I think that it’s letting our own bishops off easy to compare the BCC with the AOC. There are 22 sui iuris Churches that are in the BCC, each with their own policy on evangelization, expansion, and mission work. As for my own Church, we’ve 14 parishes and 4 missions, and some of those parishes are rotten, shells that stay open through a string of seemingly divine interventions that could cease at any time. It would not be surprising to find that all these organizations *including the AOC* suffer from that particular problem.
The Ruthenian eparchy of Parma has 37 worship places with one being explicitly named a mission (St. Louis). Some others are not parishes but I’m not quite sure how to catgorize them. Is that really “heading WEST at 0 mph”? I can’t really say but I certainly can see the need for improvement.
Comment posted November 22nd, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I also see the need for improvement.
A plan for improvement requires a proper assessment of the situation - historical and present. So what are the real numbers?
As to the comparison with the AOC - that’s was JohnG’s entry.
Comment posted November 23rd, 2007 at 12:22 am
The Eparchy of Parma has a web site. All the parishes, worship groups, and missions are listed. 37 total with 1 mission was my count. Use it on faith or do your own from the original source. If I’m off by one or two, it’s not going to change the analysis much. Accuracy is overrated in this case because we are so far away from where we should be.
There’s room for hundreds of parishes in your territory. In our terrritory (USA) there’s room for thousands. Nobody’s covering themselves in glory here. At best, one Church is somewhat less dysfunctional than another. That’s not a prize worth having or even discussing much in my book.
I’m interested in figuring out a financial package, what a group of laypeople in a community without a priest needs to come to the bishop in order for him, in good conscience, to risk sending a priest. I’m looking for a toolkit for laity to understand their mission responsibilities, both as members of missions and as parishioners at established parishes. I’m willing to do a certain amount of preliminary analysis on the past, how we got to the present but I firmly believe that the focus should be on the present and how do we transform it into a future worth creating.
This future worth creating will have abundant vocations, high growth rates, financially well funded parishes, significant missionary activity, and an ever deepening love for Christ that is humble, obedient, and doggedly persistent. It will come about because this is what Christ wants for his Church, not just for one or some parts of His Church and, in the end, we really ought to give Him what He wants.
Comment posted November 23rd, 2007 at 4:13 am
>the Hirearchs have shown that they will bow to pressure from the small small neo-feminist group within the RBCC
I am wondering who this group actually is. They have been alluded to numerous times over the past year or more of the RDL mess. I’m starting to become very uncomfortable with this continued finger-pointing at the “other” supposedly in our midst.
I could guess who you mean exactly, but I doubt if it would be the same group of people. I hope you are not going to point the finger at the Sisters of St. Basil, because if it weren’t for them, the lone current bright spot of our Church, the Byzan-Teen gatherings, would never have happened.
(And liturgically speaking, their Matins, Vespers, and Triodion books were never official — in fact, that was pretty much all we had in English for years. I doubt they intended for the entire Metropolia to use their materials, they just needed something to support their own semi-monastic liturgical life. They should be praised for doing *something* when the hierarchs officially were doing *nothing*. And so the books even ended up used in the Seminary chapel. What was the alternative? I guess they could have used the OCA books but the times were definitely not going to permit that.)
Comment posted November 24th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
TML: I agree with what you are emphasizing in your posts. I would just add that I don’t see how the negativity of half-baked comparisions to AOC serve the cause of evangelization.
Comment posted November 24th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
From RDC:
the Hirearchs have shown that they will bow to pressure from the small small neo-feminist group within the RBCC
Comment posted November 24th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
“I am wondering who this group actually is.”
Me too!
Comment posted November 24th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
RDC - I was in the Pre-1989 Church. There was sometimes speculation on who had been sent to this church or that in order to infiltrate it and render it harmless as an organizing point against Ceausescu. I viewed such discussions as themselves doing the work of the Communist secret police, sowing distrust and paralysis.
It is possible, though admittedly somewhat difficult, to organize as if everybody is a false friend and simultaneously as if nobody is. Your transactional costs go up but you are able to act with stringent cross-checking that all is well at every moment.
It is from that deep well of paranoid experience from my youth that I say, identifying who “the other” is does not really matter. With a proper christian attitude of forgiveness, they never have to be identified, only converted, something that one can do without pointing fingers. The current Pope is a great help, as are the documents of the Councils (though perhaps not the faux “spirit” so many bandy about that go against the actual documents).
djs - If one is not negative about present performance, how do you organize for something better than “more of the same” for the next generation? This is a real question. I honestly don’t know how to be a motivating Pollyanna. If you are warning against the dangers of sounding like Cassandra, on the other hand, I agree. Solely negative contributions lead to lethargy and depression. That’s no way to fight for Christ.
What is effective in my opinion is to navigate between the two extremes. Start negative but turn positive and offer plenty of support in making a future worth creating. So what’s your future worth creating and how do you want to turn it into reality? The AOC seems to have done something like that. Is yours the same as the AOC or is it different? How so? Do you see how the initial negative sting is a goad to turn into a positive effort to create something better?
I’ve given an outline of what I want already. What do you want? If it’s the same as what I’m saying, add some detail. I certainly left plenty of room.
Comment posted November 25th, 2007 at 1:22 am
TMLutas, thank you for your perspective as a Romanian Uniate Greek Catholic.
Would an actual Ruthenian Catholic please respond to my question? After all, it was, I assume, a Ruthenian Catholic (JohnS) who first asserted that “the Hirearchs have shown that they will bow to pressure from the small small neo-feminist group within the RBCC”. I would like to know who my fellow Ruthenian Catholics believe this group is. If it is “small small” it shouldn’t take long to enumerate them (even without proper names, if you don’t wish to “embarass” them by linking them with neo-feminism, whatever that may be this week).
Comment posted November 25th, 2007 at 2:56 am
Sorry, JohnS, I meant “JohnG” made that statement I quoted.
Comment posted November 25th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
“If you are warning against the dangers of sounding like Cassandra, on the other hand, I agree. Solely
negative contributions lead to lethargy and depression. That’s no way to fight for Christ.”
Bingo!
“If one is not negative about present performance, how do you organize for something better than “more of the same” for the next generation? This is a real question. I honestly don’t know how to be a motivating Pollyanna.”
Well let’s look at something we might learn the example of the Antiochians. I don’t see them rending their garments over beardless priests and bishops, Roman collars, Vigil liturgies, audible anaphora, too much English, too few monastics, no seminary, xenos in the vanguard, and women (perhaps neo-feminists).
I don’t mind seeing the recent map of the AOC, but I I’d like to one showing our history. I don’t begrudge praise of the Conciliar Press, but why nothing about ECP, let alone our seminary press, or diocesan newpapers and newsletters.
I learn far, far more about outreach efforts throughout the Metropolia from the latter sources than at this site aimed at evangelization. I see carping at JohnG’s site about a drag show at the University of Santa Clara but I don’t see a link to the you-tube video of the Father Hernandez leading a full classroom there in the Byzantine Hours. I see complaints about the new liturgy, but no link to this:
http://cantuar.blogspot.com/2007/09/so-i-went-to-byzantine-divine-liturgy.html
It’s the easiest thing in the world to google news and blogs on “byzantine catholics” and see who is going to Salinas or hosting a Spanish language liturgy (and a Rusyn Vatra) at our shrine in OH. Or to follow the story of a young man from our parish in New Mexico, who was recently ordained priest and is working to revitalizing our parish in Denver. And invite prayers for him and his parish. Could a site like this raise money for kids who might have wished to make the trip to Pittsburgh for vocation discernment? Was there an item about this retreat on this site?
This site could be a place that details and discusses what is going on, and encourages more. That we be a good start for it.
Comment posted November 25th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
The pressure for the Horizontal Inclusive language is coming from somewhere, and usually it is from a small group of vocal minorities.
No woman in my parish wants the inclusive language and most women in my parish are insulted by it. So… My guess is that it isn’t coming from vocal minorities inside the parishes.
Finally, the Sisters while doing good things like the byzanteen gatherings, have published texts in the past with major inclusive language.
However I find it rather disturbing that our Church let two very Orthodox monasteries leave our church, and go to another jurisdiction (TM, I don’t blame you or your bishop, I feel a deep loss at having these devout monastics leave our church.)
Comment posted November 25th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
RDC - If the Ruthenians are the RBCC what are the Romanians?
djs - I would caution about fundraising that there are tax implications if you do it badly. Byzentineevangelization.com would need to organize as a tax exempt group in order to properly do charitable fundraising, doing it as a tax exempt group would be better but even more expensive. Being a megaphone for diocesan or parish efforts might be better because these groups presumably already have all their IRS paperwork done and expedited under special rules for the Catholic Church. Is byzentineevangelization.com in the Catholic Directory? Doing this sort of organizational work as an independent is a pain in the neck.
JohnG - I’m reminded of some slovakian liturgy books I saw back in the day. They had the filioque in them all and the filioque had been blacked out in all the copies. Is this development an “organic” one or is it imposed by the larger feminist zeitgeist out there? Add Pope Benedict with his own statements on such gender language and I would be rather encouraged about the direction things seem to be heading.
Comment posted November 25th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
>The pressure for the Horizontal Inclusive language is coming from somewhere, and usually it is from a small group of vocal minorities.
Really? Sounds like you are merely speculating.
Over at Topix.com, they are convinced that it is diabolical creatures who masquerade as church sextons and can bilocate and fake IP addresses and a presbyteral gay mafia that have ruined parishes all over the Eparchy of Passaic. But at least they have come up with some names of actual people!
>However I find it rather disturbing that our Church let two very Orthodox monasteries leave our church, and go to another jurisdiction
Trust me, the Ruthenian Catholic Church has lost nothing except a pile of trouble by “losing” the monastery in North Carolina ex of Miami.
If you are really wondering where the “neo-feminist pressure” came from, you need look no further than the list of Consultors of the Archeparchy of Pittsburgh during the years of Metropolitan Judson Procyk’s reign. Follow their careers…there’s your answer. And I’m sorry if you find that shocking.
Comment posted November 25th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
I hope I am not being too pushy by speaking out so much but I just ran across something I thought might be of interest to those reading/commenting. Canon 585.3 of the CCEO seems to indicate that a priest is supposed to be in charge of promoting evangelization in every eparchy. I confess that I don’t know who mine is and only just discovered this as I was editing the Wikipedia entry on the CCEO. Do you all know who yours is and what has Fr. been up to?
Comment posted November 26th, 2007 at 12:12 am
TMS,
I use RBCC for the Church because my I don’t like typing. I simply shorten it for time sake
DJS
The monasteries that I mentioned were Holy Resurrection in the Desert in California, and the women’s Monastery in Olympia Washington.
TMS - filioque
Rome has repeatedly told the Byzantine Catholics to go deeper into the east back to their roots. The filioque was inserted in the Western Church (usually blamed for the Schism of 1054, but that was a deeper issue than the filioque) combat heresy in, I believe in Northern Italy. Since we are Byzantine, we should be using the Creed without it, since this is the traditional creed of our Church. Rome has repeatedly allowed the creed in Churches who don’t have it in the creed when they rejoined with Rome.
Comment posted November 26th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
JohnG - I didn’t bring up the slovaks in order to branch out to the filioque (and I have no disputes as to what you say) but rather to comment that inappropriate language has a solution other than complaint, and that is simply to fix the text. Whether you scan/OCR/reprint or you cross it out and put the proper language there, an in-page fix is available. If you’re feeling generous, you can share your fix up the line along with explanations as to why it was done.
Comment posted November 26th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
One has to realize that the Orthodox are recruiting Protestants more than anything else, and these Protestants are causing all kinds of internal problems within American Orthodoxy. They see the Orthodox Church as the ultimate of Protestantism, and they continue with their anti-Romanism, sometimes using it to question traditional Orthodox teachings (I’ve even seen some question the theology around the Dormition because the Romans proclaimed the Assumption!)
So, part of the missionary zeal comes from Protestants who remain, fundamentally Protestant and only an external Orthodox spirituality. I’ve seen it many times, and many of my Orthodox friends are flabbergasted about it.
Comment posted December 10th, 2007 at 5:20 am
Henry,
Yes they are protestants, some of them can be anti-catholic. However… that isn’t an excuse for us to be nothing.
We should be reaching out, and we are not.
Comment posted December 10th, 2007 at 8:48 am
John
I am not saying we should not be reaching out; the point is that one of the big differences between us and them is that the Protestants with anti-Roman sympathies find it much easier just to move on to Orthodoxy as a kind of “mega-Protestant” revolt. They continune along with the same anti-Roman reasoning before and after, and influence many Orthodox in the US this way. The dismay some Orthodox have of this has been heard by me for years — I remember one Greek man from Greece studying at a seminary in the US telling me I was more Orthodox than some of his professors!
Of course, when one looks to our history, and how we are more or less forbidden to have mission work in the US, and only to open churches for our own people and nothing else, one can understand the legacy and heritage which continues to influence our church today.
Comment posted December 10th, 2007 at 9:12 am
Henry Karlson - Who among the romans, today, is forbidding us from doing mission work? Who would have the power?
I recently started up a wiki on the subject of evangelization (http://byzevan.pbwiki.com/?full_access=H2bJIDAXHw&l=S) and you’re all invited.
Comment posted December 13th, 2007 at 11:38 am
TMLutas
Did you read what I wrote? I said it is in the past, and that people were thus socialized into that perspective. That is the norm of our tradition for the last hundred years. We were allowed to exist for the sake of the immigrants from our tradition, but we were not seen to have jurisdiction or authority in the US to do evangelization and indeed, we were hindered from it.
There are still issues behind the scenes about the relationship of East/West, and many in the West still hinder our work — even with our own people. I’ve known Bishops reconfirm Eastern Catholics when they marry Romans; Roman Catholic priests ignore canon law and encourage Easterners to go to the local Roman parish instead of directing them to the Eastern ones in town; etc.
These issues must be understood and worked out. However, people need to understand and appreciate why we have not been an “evangelization” tradition in the US to realize the kind of work which needs to be done to help our own people do any work in that field!
Comment posted December 14th, 2007 at 10:53 am
the problem is that our Bishops and hence our Church is working under a disfunction that makes us feel and seem inferior to the roman structures in the US and Abroad.
For us to totally break out from under this we need to become more “Orthodox” i.e. RESTORE our liturgy to the fullest, take up our traditions of minor orders, monastics, and the ordination of Married men to the Priesthood.
We have to cast off the mental shackles that we have retained over the last few years and be our own Church.
However with the current crop of bishops, I do not believe this is possible. I would love them to surprise the hell out of me… but I am not expecting it.
Comment posted December 14th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Henry Karlson - We seem, in the end, to agree. What tripped me up was “how we are more or less forbidden to have mission work in the US,”. Had you said “how we were”, I think I would have caught on from the beginning, my bad.
In the Romanian Church, we are confronted with the reality of two apologies, one papal, one patriarchal. We have so far almost exclusively focused on the implementation and the consequences of the patriarchal apology (for Orthodoxy’s role in our 1948-1990 suppression) and ignored the papal. I think it might be wise to examine both apologies with the same eye and same response, loving reconciliation when they are followed faithfully and drawing attention to when they are not.
I believe that it would be wise to forgive entirely all events prior to the Pope’s apology. Are the incidents you write of entirely prior to that period or are some of them post-apology? If they are post-apology, I would take them much more seriously than if they are pre-apology and I would frame our response as a matter of disrespect to your Church, a matter of disrespect to the Papacy, and a serious barrier to reestablishing full communion with Orthodoxy. If there is to be more than a quickly broken paper reconciliation, the East and West need to practice how to live with each other. Fortunately, we are the perfect laboratory.
I have started my (very threadbare) wiki (see link above) exactly because I think we could use an evangelization resource to get us moving faster and better in evangelizing the world. You are welcome to provide what you have already. It won’t diminish you and at least one priest in charge of evangelization has committed to visit every once in awhile and integrate anything good into our own eparchial efforts. You might try to get your own evangelization director to do the same. Every eparchy is required to have one.
JohnG - I believe that one helps cure this sort of dysfunction best by simply acting normally. If you climb out of your crouch and encourage others to do the same, results are surprising. The dysfunction currently is normative, not normal and by behaving normally (evangelizing, spreading the gospel as Christ wants and the Pope reminds us) we become the creators of a counter-normative meme. Normality becomes the norm and the dysfunction is cured to the extent that our conter-norm becomes the accepted norm.
This is breathtakingly bold stuff and it is something of a 24×7 commitment, not just the few hours in the week where liturgical reform is relevant to our lives. The fact that we’ve got the Bishop of Rome on our side of this struggle is of immense use. We should take full advantage of that.
We’re not talking about a level of falling away in our hierarchy as during the height of the Arian heresy but the laity’s response needs to be the same, to fully support our clergy in their orthodoxy and insist on re-establishing orthodoxy where it is partially or fully lacking.
Comment posted December 15th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
TMLutas
Ok, I can see how the “are” could be confusing, but it was meant in relation to the “history” and not outside of it in current context other than that history influences us now. Just like how the battle over married priests, and our loss of them in the US, though could be won today, has had historical effects making it difficult to re-etablish the tradition (on many levels, including the lack of desire for it by some, the fear it will be too costly, etc).
Comment posted December 16th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Sara Bareilles - Love Song…
Sara Bareilles - Love Song…
Comment posted February 1st, 2008 at 4:18 am
If one is looking for the source of a good deal of the inclusive language, one need look no further than Uniontown.
Comment posted February 6th, 2008 at 1:30 am
My question is what are the real hard numbers for AOC membership?
The OCA is in about the same boat as the Ruthenians. The key and qualitative difference has been that for better or worse (I happen to say better) the Ruthenians have slavishly adheared to priestly formation guidelines presented by Rome and our bishops will NOT (or can not) allow for the types of correspondance formation or voluntary presbyteral ministry models that have largely been embraced in the OCA and some other jurisdictions.
About 55 minutes from me, the offices of The Coming Home Network can be found in Zanesville, OH. It assists clergy of non-Catholic communities who are in the process of becoming Catholic. (And in fact there are hundreds of them out there that have made or are making that journey.)
If today our bishops made it known that should these men and their families enter the Church via the East, presbyteral ordination was a real possibility without making a fuss of the Pastoral Provision (which technically does not apply to Evangelicals and the like) we could have 20 men in formation tomorrow, and ordain a dozen or two dozen men a year for the next decade…
Question is, where do you put them, how do you support them?
Canon law is pretty clear that the Church is obligated to support them and their families. Additionally it has been explained to me that a nuance of canon law (with which I agree) is that you have no rights to sign away your rights. That is to say it would not be possible to say “Don’t worry, I don’t need a salary and will never ask for one, I waive my right to support.” You can’t waive it. And this is good, it precludes coercion or the creation of a class of people with fewer rights. (Think of it as being like minimum wage. You can’t tell your employer and the state, it is OK, you will work for $3.00 an hour!)
(Comparing this to the Antiochian mission in town - where they meet at a Greek Catholic Church Sunday afternoons, and the priest is not paid but works a secular job… Also noting that I know of at least three Antiochian “missions” that constitue a faction of a schism within OCA parishes…)
This financial support matter was an issue with an Orthodox priest who approached our bishop to be incardinated assuring the bishop that he would not be asking for a salary, he would just like to be rostered and be permitted to concelebrate DL or occasionally fill in for Father when he is away… Again though, should his circumstances change, and his secular employment come to an end, he would have the right to demand an assignment and an income from the eparchy. Our church operates on a $12K a month budget, we simply don’t have that.
Would we start to supply our priests to the Romans as bi-rituals then? I am aware of one UGCC priest who helps to support himself and his family offering Mass at a local latin parish in a diocese that needs the extra help. I don’t know that I would count on a lot of Roman enthusiasm accross the board for such a proposition.
Same issue for the oodles and oodles of new deacons that have been more recently ordained. A good number of them would make fine priests (I can name several off the top of my head!). Ordaining them is not the problem. Paying them kinda is.
By the numbers, the OCA growth has been largely a function of ordaining and incardinating a lot of married men who support themselves and serve small chapels.
Where the BCC had large parishes, they are now medium sized. Where they were medium sized, they are now small. Where they were small they are now closed. The OCA has had more success in keeping the small parishes open by having volunteer bi-vocational priests who are either retired or work full time at a secular job such as teaching.
Today, they (OCA) have more parishes and priests, but what is the ratio of clergy to parishes, or membership to parishes or clergy to membership? Do more clergy and parishes mean the OCA has grown? Good hard numbers that I trust have been hard to come by. But some of what I am seeing is leading me to indicate that they have mostly maintained the number of laity in levels we have.
With some total 1026 clergy listed in the last year book, 197 of them deacons, 829 priests
Using the Hartford Institute’s estimated membership of 39,000
(per: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research…earch/tab2.pdf)
You get -
ratio of clergy to laity: 38.01
ratio of priests to laity: 47.04
39,000 / 456 parishes = 85.52 members per parish
Using Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff’s estimated membership of 27,196
You get -
ratio of clergy to laity: 26.50
ratio of priests to laity: 32.85
27,196 / 456 parishes = 59.64 members per parish
PERSONALY, I think the number of faithful who are active by even the least of standards is probably closer to 15,000. Yes, that’s right. I think that about 1 out of every 15 members of the OCA is a priest, deacon of bishop.
(YES, some of those priests are retired. Accounting for that could make some numbers look better, some numbers look worse.)
Where the OCA has grown, has been in their ethnic diocese – through immigration.
The point is they (and to some extent us) are at worst dying. At best we are trading in our ethnic enclaves for essentially social enclaves of small personal chapels of people who take time to explain to co-workers the chotki on their wrist, why they cross themselves funny and on some days of the year are forced to ask for breadsticks without butter and shrimp linguini with red sauce when they go to the Olive Garden for lunch with co-workers. Served by a whole lot of clergy doing the same.
Again Greek Catholics, for better or worse, having aligned themselves with Rome which has, in recent years, been especially vocal about the nature of presbyteral ministry and the importance of family life, a church model of volunteer priests (which canon law does not support) split between their family and parish responsibilities lacks appeal.
Now the comments of Father Serge Kelleher on another forum are worth mentioning:
“These absurd claims of ridiculously inflated numbers are a serious embarrassment, especially in a discussion of presenting the Church honestly! It is no disgrace to be small - Our Savior tells us to “be at peace, little flock”. For that matter, it is no disgrace to be poor. When we are small, poor, and honest, God certainly loves us. What do we possibly have to gain by false boasts of being huge and rich?
The book - I think it’s titled Becoming Orthodox, but I could be mistaken - which recounts in some detail the journey from the Campus Crusade for Christ to Antiochian Orthodoxy mentions that towards the end of the discussion Metropolitan Philip thought that the membership figures of the parishes seeking entry into the Antiochian Orthodox Church were drastically underestimated. When Peter Gillquist and the others assured him that the figures were as accurate as was humanly possible, Metropolitan Philip responded with a list of institutions and works and Church employees and asked how such a small number of faithful could possibly support all this. The Evangelicals answered to the effect that their faithful were accustomed to tithe - and just how did the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese support itself?
the answer to that question may not have been altogether edifying!”
Along similar lines, studies show that the Episcopal Church has done a laudible job (whatever else my distaste for some of their current praxis) at keeping small parishes afloat and having ministries and outreach to the poor and homeless - sometimes in diocese smaller than 5K. A great deal of volunteer work and tithing is present in the circles that are the most successful at staying afloat in the face of largely declining numbers.
So the challenge to my Greek Catholic bretheren is this: are we prepared to be a tithing, sacrificing community that not only will support priests and their families (paying your priest is Biblical!) but will draw our gaze from its all-too commonly inward focus, and start to consider what our flock can do to be a flock of service.
No fear little flock. Be generous!
But to wrap up an exceedingly long post, points to consider when comparing and contrasting AOC/BCC growth (or nongrowth) include:
1)We train our priests. Insistence on full seminary training at an inhouse program for BCC candidates differs significantly from Sayedna Phillip’s choice to consider simply admitting to orders men serving as clergy in ecclesial communities. (CEC, EOC, and HOM training being what it was, this can and has proven a problem.)
2) We pay our priests. If we adopted a model of “second career”/bi-vocational priesthood similar to Latin Deacons who got minimal stipends and were charged with supporting themselves while overseeing the creation or maintenance of parishes… I bet we could ordain 1,000 men in the next ten years anxious to be part time Catholic priests.
If you don’t have to pay the priest a salary, and charge him and his congregants - however few or many there may be - with finding a hall to rent, or even a small building, how long do they have to go without “turning a profit” so to speak? IOW, let’s say I get ordained a priest after correspondance work, or a history of clerical roles in other denoms. Sayedna tells me I must support myself, and gather a congregation that supports itself. If I can get 25 families donating $100 per pay every two weeks, within two years that would be $130,000 - enough to a hefty downpayment on a small commercial building or ex-church with a parking lot somewhere… Keep it up for another few years, graciously sendnig Sayedna his portion… after a decade if it works, it works, if it doesn’t you may close up shop and get rostered with the OCA or just kind of languish in a little micro-parish.
4) The Get-to-know-you-process for us takes a little longer and has a few more impediments. Groups coming to us en masse will take longer to get to know and to train for some of the above mentioned reasons. In the 1980s some reps of the fledgling Ugandan Orthodox Church DID approach us about becoming canonically regular. Our bishops wanted to know who they were, what there training was, etc. It didn’t get past the first informal meeting…
If the BCC starts to ordain men with correspondance school training that they don’t have to pay, but are expected to build their own churches… The comparison will start to work better.
3) The AOC is the new TEC. The AOC is the new Episcopal Church. I am not meaning that they are an Eastern rite version of pro-gay & lady priest ordination or all that silliness. I mean to say that yesterday’s Evangelical who sought liturgical Christianity with historic roots would have looked at Orthodoxy and said “its all greek to me” and merrily gone High Church Episcopal. Maybe even Anglo-Catholic.
Today even a blind monkey could see that TEC isn’t a safe bet on that front, and the Antiochians have gone anglo-phone and gone native in a big way… What does that have to do with the BCC? As eluded to above, the Orthodox don’t have to tackle the major misgivings that Evangelicals have with “Romanism” in the same way Episcopalians never had to.
PS - what is with the “blog fade” going on here? There is plenty to write about… come on back!
Comment posted February 6th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Henry Karlson - I suspect that if you end up borrowing a married priest from another rite, you might resolve your issues with adopting it for yourselves. A similar thing happened in our own mission on another issue where precedent from the Byelorussians was useful for us. “If x eastern Church in our own Constantinopolitan tradition can do this, why can’t we” I believe is a good tack to take.
Asimplesinner - In theory, the money issue is simple. Give more! But as they say back in the old country, theory is theory, but it’s the practice that’ll kill you.
Do you want a missionary priest? Find out how much is needed to pay one and create a fund whose investment income will generate that much money. Give it to your best bishop as an offering to the Church and tell him that you’re tired of being the third servant in the parable of the talents. The investment fund would pay for a missionary priest to make a new community and as the new community steps up financially, the fund withdraws from supporting them and it’s off to support the next mission.
I think it would be a very odd problem for Ruthenian bishops to have money to pay a priest but no priest. I suspect that they’d get over the strangeness of it pretty quickly.
I take exception to the idea that canon law does not support volunteer priests. Give me chapter and verse because I don’t buy it. I understand your concern as you laid it out and am saddened by the scenario. If you trust the priest and he stands by his word, there is no problem. If the priest is faithless, having to support him is a small price to pay for that knowledge.
I personally know of two fine priests in our own eparchy who used that model. One of them spent his entire priestly career without drawing a penny (he’s passed away) and the other had to be strong armed into taking a salary and only did it to the extent that the mission could financially stand it so that he could drop his second secular job (when I joined that mission he had a full time and a part time secular job as well as a separate business).
The paying of priests is separate from their missionary spirit. If they have the proper spirit, volunteer priests can work without compromise as their voluntary period will only last until the community can support them.
Comment posted February 9th, 2008 at 11:26 pm