Friday, July 6, 2018

Who Is Enculturating Whom?


Orthodox enculturation of a land is the working whereby the Holy Ghost acts as a leaven within all the cultural spheres, great or small, of a people - cleansing them, perfecting them, filling them with Grace.  What emerges is a unique Christian culture, a combination of the unchanging Tradition of the Orthodox Church with the particular history of a particular tribe in a particular place.

What has happened in the States, however, as in so much else in their lives, is an inversion of the normal Orthodox way.  One all too often sees the spirit of worldliness invading and enculturating the Orthodox Church to its ways:  Many an Orthodox immigrant has been lured away from the True Faith for the less wholesome atmosphere of the Methodists, Baptists, etc. in order to fit in better with his Mammon-worshipping neighbors.  The clergy, too, falter at times.  The Encyclical for Independence Day (4 July 2018) of His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios of the Greek Orthodox Church of America is an ensample.  A couple of outtakes:

As we commemorate Independence Day, we are gathered in Boston for our 44th Biennial Clergy-Laity Congress.  We are meeting in a city that has deep historical connections to the struggle for independence, a place where events supported the cause of liberty, and significant effort and sacrifice secured freedom and the birth of a new nation.

 . . .

We are blessed to live in a nation and society that values liberty and in a place where our freedom in Christ is joined with a freedom to worship, to minister, and to serve as we are led by God. We are free to work together as brothers and sisters in Christ, free to show and lead others to Him, and free to pursue the unlimited potential of our faith.  . . .


Forgive us, but does His Eminence truly think that we are ‘free to pursue the unlimited potential of our faith’ in a place where same-sex ‘marriage’, pornography, transgenderism, abortion, suicide, casual marijuana use, and easy divorce are openly promoted?  In a place where most restaurants and work cafeterias ignore the fasting rules?  In a place where the typical company wage-slave could not attend the vast majority of weekday services of the Orthodox Church?  In a place where monasteries are so few in some areas that a drive of several hours is necessary to reach the nearest one?

Is it really wise for His Eminence to praise ‘the birth of a new nation’ that was conceived in Free Masonry, king hatred, and all manner of heresies?  Is it wise for His Eminence to uphold the false history of the war-mongering Pres Lincoln, the socialist Francis Bellamy, et al., that ‘America’ is ‘one nation, indivisible’?

Would it not have been better for His Eminence to praise kingship in general, and the saintly Orthodox kings and queens, princes and princesses, of all times and places, from England to Brittany to Romania and Georgia, in particular, whose lives fill up quite a thick book?


Would it not have been much more fitting for him to honor the heroic martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian royal family, which also happened on July 4th (1918), rather than the birth of the nation that has done more than any other to overthrow the God-ordained institution of kingship, and whose actions have led to the slaying of thousands of Orthodox in Serbia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and the Ukraine, and the quiet policy of whose leadership is to crush any independence of a sister Orthodox country (Russia) and bring her back under the heel of the un-Christian Western political and financial Elite?

We are fairly certain His Eminence knows better.  We pray he will have the courage to say and do what he ought in the days to come, and I hope that he will also pray for me, an unworthy sinner.

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

Anathema to the Union!

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