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?
(Early
chapters available here: www.orthodoxinfo.com/general/pious-kings-and-right-believing-queens-fr-james-thornton.pdf)
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.
--
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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