Justice Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime (Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, 1808)
The conclusion to be drawn is that something catastrophic happened on board that has caused this airplane to ditch in a controlled or an uncontrolled fashion.
Chris Yates
Jane’s Aviation analyst
The above is a classic example of doublespeak, that is, language used pompously in a deliberate effort to make the speaker appear more authoritative or more veracious. Of course, Mr Yates should have said, “I am afraid that the plane crashed”. We need to use this same standard to judge a comment made by Rev Tassos, the OCA Treasurer. He stated that he could not tell the truth concerning the recent financial scandal that roiled that body, for it would, according to him, “destroy the Church”. I think that Rev Tassos has to be taken to task for such mendacious hyperbole and be forced to retract it publicly.
The Church survived the Neronian persecutions. It weathered the great Christological disputes. It resisted the Uniate menace. It stood firm against the attacks of the infidel Muslims and the godless Communists. However… the picayune antics of a raggedy beggar’s lot of inconsequential, corrupt, overblown, and venal married priests would “destroy the Church”. Metropolitan Jonas has the duty to call this man to task and demand either a complete retraction of such rubbish or his immediate resignation. There is only one way forward to true and complete healing. The guilty must be turned over to the secular authorities and they must answer for their thievery (for one must call it what it is). I should state that there is a federal minimum-security prison just down the road from St Tikhon’s Monastery on Route 296. Herman and his cronies could be imprisoned there, and have access to, with little difficulty, Orthodox pastoral care.
If Benjamin Peterson bleats, “We have to move on” (a fatuous statement, if there ever was one), he should be investigated to see if he covered up any of the crimes (or, indeed, participated in them). We must do what the Episcopalians were forced to do when a treasurer in that body was found to be dipping her hand in the till. She was handed over to the authorities, tried, convicted as an embezzler, and imprisoned (when I told a friend of mine, a former Episcopalian parish warden, what Rev Tassos said, he looked at me incredulously).
There is nothing unchristian in handing over a suspected criminal for trial. For that matter, convicted criminals do NOT cease being Christians. Herman, Kondratick, and the rest of their merry men deserve our Christian love and charity if they are sent to the slam for their escapades. The salvation of these fellows would not be impeded if they were convicted as felons. Truthfully, it would be a salutary warning to all of them, and it would cause some to “ponder nothing earthly-minded”, perhaps, for the first time in their lives.
The financial scandal is only a symptom. However, it must be treated before we can treat the systemic cause of the disease. We must first clear away the consequences of this relatively-petty wrongdoing so that we can grapple with the deeper damage caused by Aleksandr Dmitrievich Schmemann and his cabal at SVS. That is another, and far more substantial, issue. It is truly a topic on its own, and we would do damage to it to consider it here. We would do well to emulate the identical twin brother of Aleksandr Dmitrievich, Andrei Dmitrievich Schmemann, and reject his crack-brained notions. We must return to the path of tradition, or, the painful history of the OCA shall only be repeated time and again.
Let the accused have their day in court. Let history judge. Otherwise, we not only expose ourselves as fools, we show ourselves foreign to all the previous generations of Christians that went before us. Only the truth shall set us free. Otherwise, we are sunk in prelest, and Satan laughs. Ponder that.
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Monday 1 June 2009
Albany NY
