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.

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 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!

Sara Bareilles - Love Song…

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.