Please
forgive us, but Metropolitan Alexios (may he keep us in his prayers!) is dishonoring
himself with the guidelines he has issued for his diocese. Here is just a part of the whole:
4. During the services •
Before entering the church, the temperature of each person will be taken by a
designated person. If the person’s temperature is above 100.4oF he or she will
be kindly asked to return to their home, both for their safety and the safety
of others. • Parish Council will direct each parishioner to the designated X in
the pews for each person or household to sit starting in the front of the
church and working their way to back. • A place to accept offerings will be
provided in the Narthex upon entering or leaving. If your community has set up
online giving, people should be directed to visit the website to make an online
offering. • Parishioners are not to move around the church during the services
to light candles or venerate icons. • Candles can be lit on behalf of the
parishioner by a designated person if possible. • Honor is to be shown to Holy
Icons and the Holy Cross by only doing your cross and bowing, keeping in mind
not to kiss or to touch the Holy Icons and the Holy Cross. • No one is to enter
the Holy Altar except the clergy and assigned adult helpers. • As for the
Memorials, please write the names of your deceased for the clergy to pray for
their souls (without Koliva). • For the Saturday of Souls specifically (June 6,
2020), email, mail or give only the names to the clergy with one tray of Koliva
being prepared by the community which will be offered on behalf of those who
have departed. • As for Artoclasias, they will be celebrated as normal. • No
service books should be distributed or left out for common use. This includes
papers of any kind (bulletins etc.). Parishioners are encouraged to bring their
own service books.
5. During Holy Communion •
Communicants must line up row by row (with help from Parish Council) and remain
six feet apart using the designated social distancing X’s that have been placed
in the church. • Communicants may remove their masks only momentarily to
receive Holy Communion. • Clergy and assisting adult helpers must wear a mask
during the distribution of Holy Communion. • The red communion cloths (μάκτρα)
will be held underneath the person’s chin by the assigned adult helpers. The
communicant may not touch it and absolutely no wiping of mouths. • No antidoron
will be distributed at the time of Communion but instead at the end of the
service.
--Guidelines available
here: https://atlmetropolis.org/news/safety-guidelines-for-church-re-openings
This
is not the way of the Orthodox Church.
This is instead a demonic parody of the holy Divine Liturgy, and these
are directives that come from demonic influence. And this seems so because they are motivated
not by trust in the healing presence of God’s Grace in the Liturgy but by fear
of death, the very thing we are supposedly gathering together as His Body to
declare that Christ has conquered. And
fear, as Fr Peter Heers points out here,
is
part of the standard method of operation of the devil.
Why,
indeed, have we consecrated our churches with prayers, hymns, and the Holy
Chrism if we are now going to treat them as even more corrupted, even more
contaminated, than the fallen matter outside their walls? Who walks around his home or his yard or a
public park in the sort of abject fear of sickness that will be displayed by the
keeping of these regulations? Yet this
is how we will behave in a church? Is the
Glory of God present or not? The witness
of the Orthodox Church to outsiders will be greatly wounded by all this.
The
Church of Antichrist is nearly born, ready to burst through the last thin,
filmy membrane withholding it from the world.
--
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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