Trials for the West

A time of renewal may be in store for the West, but it will likely be attended by great suffering before it comes.  May the South prepare herself to endure whatever hardships she must so that she too may join in that renewal.

 . . . Orthodox know that in and through the Church there will be Saints and Holy Fathers until the end of time: within the Church the Tradition never stops, for in the Church the Holy Spirit never stops.

And among those contemporary figures we would now like to mention one who was born in 1913 and reposed in 1960: St John the Romanian, a pilgrim and hermit in the Holy Land, whose still intact relics are to be venerated there to this day. Much could be said of this pious hermit, praying for his native land and its martyric people, threatened historically by Muslim and Roman Catholic imperialism alike, then in these latter days torn apart first by Fascism then by Communism. StJohn had all the nostalgia for the old simplicity of his grandmother’s peasant Romania, as is shown by his Orthodox hymnography. He also possessed all the awareness of twentieth century man, as is witnessed to by his prophetic writings and his approach to Western pilgrims to Orthodoxy. We now quote an extract from a letter recently received from an Australian reader, S. McDonnell:

I was told how Fr Ignatius (a holy Russian hermit from Hebron) often spoke prophetically of the spiritual Resurrection of the West and quite specifically of the restoration of Orthodox monarchy in the West, particularly in England and the British Isles. He also spoke of the hallowed sacred places that would rise as beacons for restored Romanity, the Orthodox Christian Commonwealth. I was also told of St John the Romanian who lived in the Monastery of St George the Hosebite. He always received English pilgrims with such joy, but also shed many tears before them and would say in Romanian: ‘If only they knew’. A brother who knew Romanian would translate his pleas to the English to – ‘love God and to find the truth of your people’.

This day St. John has spoken to the readers of ‘Orthodox England’. Let him who has ears hear.

Source:  Fr Andrew Phillips, ‘Editorial’, Orthodox England, Vol. 20, No. 3, March 2017, p. 1, http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/mag/oe20_3.pdf, downloaded 13 April 2017

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð!

Anathema to the Union!