The adventures of a developing academic who got a late start
The Patriarchate replied with this.
The Archdiocese now says this.
I no longer have any clear idea what this is actually about. I can tell that certain people are in disagreement about who is in charge, but I couldn’t tell you the first reason why anymore.
The Holy Synod of the See of Antioch, after long discussion and deep deliberation of the Synodal decision of February 24, 2009, and with the recommendations of His Beatitude, the Patriarch, it affirms that the nature of the Episcopate is one and the same to all those who are consecrated as bishops.
The Holy Synod of Antioch affirms and reminds that all bishops of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America are bishops who assist the Metropolitan,
And that, furthermore, any diocese of the one united Archdiocese, under any circumstances, cannot be considered an independent Archdiocese. The Holy Synod of Antioch alone has the prerogative to establish Archdioceses in the See of Antioch.
Issued June,17, 2009
Bp. MARK has already weighed in on this; we will see what actually happens, if anything. It strikes me that the Synod has perhaps said as much as they can without appearing to lay the hammer down on any person in particular — which, perhaps, means they haven’t said much of anything at all, except to say that AOCNA’s self-rule status is for all intents and purposes a legal fiction with no particular effect that they are willing to recognize. Perhaps this is a first move towards folding AOCNA back in as a more normalized part of the See of Antioch? I don’t know — I guess we’ll see.
AOCNA’s North American bishops with Metropolitan PHILIP on Friday, 24 April:
And with Patriarch IGNATIUS on 2 June 2009:
It’s tempting to want to use the contrast between Bps. BASIL and ANTOUN as the barometer…
Mark Stokoe and friends report that the six bishops who were enthroned in their dioceses, minus Metropolitan PHILIP, will travel to Damascus on 1 June for meetings with Patriarch IGNATIUS IV.
The Archdiocese’s own attorneys have weighed in. The conclusion is the money quote, to say the least:
…the February 24th decision is not a valid decision of the Holy Synod of Antioch. Moreover, even if were, it would have no effect on our Archdiocese since it wasn’t intend to apply to our Archdiocese and if it was intended, it would not apply because it is inconsistent with, negates, and would violate the irrevocable Resolution on Self-Rule, the Archdiocese Constitution and the Archdiocese Articles of incorporation, filed with the State of New York. Unless properly amended, these documents cannot be overridden and the February 24,2009 decision is inapplicable to the Self-Ruled Archdiocese.
Pursuant to the Constitution, all members of the Board of Trustees including the clergy and the hierarchs have an obligation to insure that the Archdiocese Constitution and Articles are protected. A constitution defines certain rights and privileges and obligations, these apply to the entire church population including the laity. It is incumbent upon all members to insure that these provisions are not violated even if one disagrees with them.
There is an element of trust that is underlying the role of a member of the Board of Trustees (and a member of the General Assembly) whether the person is a hierarch, priest, or member of the laity. That trust is that the member will act in the best interests of the Archdiocese and follow the dictates of the spirit as well as the letter of the Constitution.
If the members do not act to protect the Constitution and the self-rule as defined therein, then they will have violated that trust. The consequences, among others, will be a legitimate lack of trust by clergy and laity in the leaders of this Archdiocese. That would be tragic.
In Christ,
Robert A. Koory
Chancellor
Charles R. Ajalat
Chancellor
Full text is at the link above, and my hat is tipped to Mark Stokoe and co.
Pan Orthodox Sermon by His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah at St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral
Vodpod videos no longer available.
So, I was going to post something about my bewilderment to the negative reactions I had read to the announcement of a pan-Orthodox synod. I was going to rant and rave that we’re treating bishops, particularly foreign bishops, as enemies and as antichrists, that we seem to be assuming the worst about certain figures by default, that it seems sometimes that our communion is very tenuous and fragile and can only be preserved by not talking about or trying to solve our issues. I was going to point out that it is the family that won’t discuss its problems that is dysfunctional, and that it is the fear of this synod happening that is the clearest demonstration of its necessity. I was maybe even going to let slip that I was investigating scholarly avenues to perhaps attend one of the planning sessions as a lay observer.
Then this hit. From an address given at Holy Cross Seminary by the Very Reverend Archimandrite Dr. Elpidophoros (“Hope-bearer”) Lambriniadis, Chief Secretary of the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantiople:
With regards to the United States, the submission to the First Throne of the Church, that is, to the Ecumenical Patriarchate is not only fitting with the American society and mentality but also it opens up the horizons of possibilities for this much-promising region, which is capable of becoming an example of Pan-Orthodox unity and witness.
The Mother Church of Constantinople safeguards for the Orthodox Church in America those provisions that are needed for further progress and maturity in Christ.
Go read the whole thing. I’ll wait.
Here’s the thing — on some very big things, he’s not wrong. Ecclesial administration problems at the local level brought on by “how Americans do things”? Check. Orthodox Christianity being brought to America by people here to make money, not serve as missionaries? Check. How monasticism tends to work in this country? Check. Imbalance, demographic and otherwise, to say nothing of other issues with respect to priestly formation, among convert seminarians? Check. Lack of a decent pool of candidates to be monk-priests? Check.
Most important — thirst for an authentic faith in the United States? Check.
If he had left it at that, and then related those points to the possible function of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the United States, that would have been fine.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he took some potshots (granted, not in a vacuum), strongly implied that the OCA is essentially a vagante group towards whom everybody else has just been magnanimous enough to not break communion, and made some assertions that it would take serious nerve on the part of anybody in any jurisdiction to make. I’ll leave it to my commenters to discuss what I might mean.
That there is disagreement over how the Church should exist in America is no surprise. The United States is a very strong center of gravity when it comes to political and economic influence, so everybody wants their own little piece of it, and nobody wants to give up the possibility of having a piece of it. The irony is, it’s everybody not wanting to give up their little piece of it that means Orthodox Christianity is unlikely to be more than a very minor blip on anybody’s radar.
I heard a story once about a Roman Catholic hierarch saying, “The trouble with the Orthodox Church is that it doesn’t exist.” Well, we exist, but sometimes it sure looks like we’re a communion of people who don’t like each other too much. We can appear as the family who keeps track of who isn’t talking to whom this week, and will only go to family reunions if we can each sit at our own table, alone.
From the American Orthodox Institute:
Once this consensus is reached, bishops, priests, theologians, and laymen must request an independent unity that is free of foreign constraints. This first phase of unity may proceed on several different fronts. The bishops who make up SCOBA can certainly meet more regularly and request the convocation of an all-American synod. Priests on the local level can meet with their counterparts regularly and receive from their parish councils the resources necessary to consolidate operations. Cities that have bishops can request that the resident bishop serve as the president of the local Orthodox ministerial association. Laypeople must likewise apply their talents and experience to the cause of unity. Lawyers will be needed to help draw up diocesan incorporations. Accountants and financiers will be needed to assemble strong, enduring, transparent financial structures. Medical doctors and bioethicists can be appointed as permanent advisors to and members of episcopal councils, advising bishops about the ethical implications of current and developing medical technologies. The demand must be from the “bottom up” as much as from the “top down.” The universal call for unity cannot abate.
The particulars of unity would have to be worked out in anticipation of an all-American convocation on unity, which might run for several months or even years. Once the new dioceses and metropolitan districts are formed, then the existing bishops, archbishops, and metropolitans could decide among themselves who would administer each see, with final decisions open to lay review and approval. The consolidation of the new jurisdictions and the new patriarchal administration could then proceed apace.
Well, that’s about as culturally American as you can get — this hypothetical American Patriarchate would be a secular non-profit agency acting as an umbrella organization for a collection of committees, nothing more, nothing less. If that’s the alternative, I guess I’ll take “phyletist” jurisdictions for the time being.
Thing is, Mr. Michalopulos is not exactly wrong in terms of this being what it would need to look like if it were to exist tomorrow — and that’s precisely why we’re nowhere near ready for it to happen, even if it feels really good right now to suggest that somehow jurisdictional unity, and its mysteriously related cousin, “empowering the laypeople”, is the solution to every problem.
Esteban, I’m understanding what you mean by “militant Americanist Orthodoxy” better by the day without you having to say a word of explanation.
(That said, I do encourage you to read the American Orthodox Institute Blog and comment copiously. They do some good, interesting stuff over there, even if I disagree with parts of this article, and it seems like they attract a far narrower readership than they should. Check them out when you have a moment.)
There’s a C. S. Lewis quote from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer that Orthodox love to pull out:
What pleased me most about a Greek Orthodox mass I once attended was that there seemeed to be no prescribed behaviour for the congregation. Some stood, some sat, some knelt, some walked; one crawled about the floor like a caterpillar. And the beauty of it was that nobody took the slightest notice of what anyone else was doing. (p. 10)
My instinct is that the reason why this dynamic worked is because except for him and his wife (elsewhere he mentions attending the Divine Liturgy when they were honeymooning in Greece), everybody and their families had been Orthodox as long as anybody could remember, and it was an entirely natural thing to be there and to be doing whatever they were used to doing.
I suggest that we Orthodox Christians in America, cradle and convert alike, have been less successful in reproducing this dynamic, and it seems to me there are a number of reasons for this. For us converts, we’re new to this, everything is totally unfamiliar, and we’re all here because we think Orthodox Christianity is Right and therefore we want to do things the Right Way.
I might also suggest that the presence of pews or rows of seating otherwise in many American churches, contributing to the sense of passive participation as it does (see article by Paul Meyendorff here), also makes us even more afraid to do something different from what the congregation as a whole might be doing.
So, to some extent, we think we have to take notice of everybody else; we’re all sort of nervously and self-consciously glancing sideways at the rest of the congregation, not wanting to stick out like a sore thumb and wanting to Do Thing the Right Way.
Among cradles, I’ve seen definite reactions to what they perceive as “things only done in the Old Country”; I’ve seen ethnic Arabs freak out when fasting gets talked about, or when there’s a conversation about possibly removing chairs from the nave, for example. I’ve also seen a Romanian woman get very nervous and almost confrontational when it seemed like women wearing headscarves was something that might catch on at a particular parish.
I’d say that for both cradle and convert alike, there can be a worry that, if you do something that I don’t, it’s because you think that you’re holier than I am, and if what you do catches on and becomes normative, I’m going to be judged because I don’t. Another nuance could be that there’s something disingenuous-seeming about somebody telling you how non-legalistic and non-clericalist Orthodox Christianity is, just before that same person, say, does three metanias before asking for a priest’s blessing, kissing his hand, and then looking at you expectantly to see if you’re going to do the same thing. (In the interest of clarity, I don’t shake priests’ hands, I kiss them, so this is not a knock against that practice by any means.)
It’s an odd mixture of self-consciousness and pride. Is that uniquely American? Could be — I’m not sure.
There’s a deeper aspect to taking too much notice of what other people are doing, however, and that’s a particular xenophobia, as well as its twin, xenophilia, that can occur with converts. There’s the person who wants to be Orthodox for convictions of faith, but upon encountering anything the slightest bit Greek, Arabic, Russian, or otherwise non-Western, gets extremely uncomfortable and wants to write off all of these things as ethnic custom, “little-t tradition,” that we should jettison as quickly as possible and replace with practices which seem more “American.” There’s also the exact reverse of this person, who will tell you why the Orthodox traditions of <fill in the blank with a country name> are actually the “purest” version of Orthodox practice, and anything else is a deviation.
These are two manifestations of the same overall problem: preoccupation with something which seems exotic, which we could restate, in keeping with our present theme, as preoccupation with what somebody else does.
Realistically, this is going to take a few generations to work out, but I think figuring out how to be Orthodox Americans in a non-self-conscious manner is going to be a necessary step towards unity, and, to get back to what I was saying yesterday, I think having our own saints, our own indigenous models of sanctity, will be one of the major things that helps us do that.
One other thought along these lines — as some have pointed out, there is an irony to a foreign-born hierarch telling American-born priests what is American and what isn’t. Surely, as the natural reaction to this goes, this isn’t 1970 anymore, and people aren’t going to make negative assumptions about somebody with a beard these days.
Here’s where I think the disconnect is — I think Met. PHILIP and company have a very Wall Street-level perspective of what “being American” is. I think the question they’re asking is, “What do wealthy, powerful Americans do, how do they dress, how do they act?” This is not totally unexpected, given that Met. PHILIP has made it clear that those are the very people he wants to be able to influence. Those are, nonetheless, exactly the people who don’t care about Orthodox Christianity, simply because they are least likely to have any reason to care. What we do will be far more effective in the long run, I am convinced, if we ask ourselves what the urban poor, the lower class, and the rural would do and to what they can relate. If you’re going to build a big church in a bad part of town, throw your doors open to your neighbors — don’t do everything you can to keep them out. Minister to the masses, and the classes will follow. Minister to the classes, and the masses aren’t going to care. Isn’t that what Christ told us to do in the first place?
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 