On Friday, the UOC/MP media service reported that the Holy Synod of the UOC/MP relieved Archimandrite Viktor Bedya from the post of UOC Commissioner for Higher Education and Science, abolishing the post as it did so. Besides this, they removed him as Rector of Ss Kirill and Mefody Užgorod Ukrainian Theological Academy, demoting him to the rank of an ordinary clergyman in the Diocese of Mukačevo. Kirill Frolov, the Head of the Department of Relations with the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Community at the Institute of SNG Countries, told our Interfax-Religion correspondent, “Fr Viktor was the main Russophobic mouthpiece in Podkarpatskaya; he expressed sympathy for the Banderovtsy and advocated establishing a national Church in the Ukraine”. Moreover, in a Thursday meeting, the Synod deliberated abolishing the Department which oversaw Bedya, headed by Metropolitan Aleksandr Drabinko, the Secretary to the First Hierarch of the UOC/MP.
Editor:
Metropolitan Onufry Berezovsky gives his answer to the Uniate lovers! “No way, no how, no pope in our town!” This shows that the UOC/MP is cracking down on the anti-Church elements in its ranks. Should I mention that Bedya was a darling of modernists in the diaspora? There’s no joy in Mudville (Syosset/SVS) over this, to be sure. It’s clear that Vladyki Onufry is cleaning house; it’s high-time and long-overdue, it hadn’t happened because of Metropolitan Vladimir Sabodan’s incapacity.
Glory to the Fallen! Love to the Living Vets! Say “Thank You” whilst you still can!
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Kirill Frolov, the head of the Association of Orthodox Experts, sharply criticised the comparison of Victory Day memorial events with paganism. “Of course, it’s better to have churches and chapels at the major memorials to the fallen in the Great Patriotic War, but we should be enchurching Victory Day, not attacking it. However, this denigration, this fault-finding concerning the Eternal Flame… it’s only an excuse to downplay the significance of the holiday, it’s just another lie used by our opponents”, he told our Interfax-Religion correspondent on Thursday. This was in comment on the words of Sergei Chapnin, the editor of the MP official magazine, The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, who said that, today, the celebration of Victory Day is inspired by “civil religion, using ritual forms that, amongst other things, involve the universal worship of fire. Fire coming out of the ground is an image of hell, of the dreadful and fiery wrath of God… up to this day, members of the Church, including bishops, participate in this strange ritual on that day”.
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Watch this… the narration is in Russian… but watch the visuals. You have a heart of stone if the images of the vets don’t move you. It’s why Russia remembers… we hold the arms of our babas and dedes as they weep… so do we…
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Here’s a bit in English in RT on the same topic
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Meanwhile, Frolov noted, “These guys are a bunch of nitpickers, they don’t represent the point of view of the Russian Church, they’re trying to discredit Victory Day; well, we’re aware of the insolvency of their demagoguery. It’s an artificial and forced attempt to counter Victory Day. They resist the Russian national revival, they intend to derail the nascent symfonia of Church, society, and state, they oppose the introduction of military chaplains, and they belittle the churching of the majority of our people, who do honour the celebration of Victory Day”. In his view, the present complaints against the Eternal Flame at the Memorial to the Great Patriotic War are contrived… “After all, the Church, throughout its history, has incorporated many pagan forms and images, giving them new content in the process. Thus, the pagan Roman Pantheon became a Christian church, the once pagan Maslenitsa received a new inner content due to Russia’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity, amongst other things”, he noted. Frolov went on to say, “They sordidly disparage the heroism of our forefathers in the Great Patriotic War, they plant defeatism and combat patriotism under the guise of faithfulness to the Gospel, and they confuse our love of our motherland with totalitarianism and paganism”. Frolov believes that there’s every reason to believe that Victory Day is “definitely enchurched, as the Patriarch is now a necessary participant in the Victory Parade, and the introduction of military clergy, which was artificially delayed, is now a reality”.
In the re-Christianisation of Russia, after the fall of the Atheist State, you can find many charlatans and dubious characters mixed in amongst the actual Christians. After all, one saw Philaret Denisenko, Valentin Rusantsov, the crank ROCOR intervention under Vitaly Ustinov inside Russia, Hilarion Alfeyev, and Diomid Dzyuban, and those are just SOME of the “Orthodox” loonies and nutters, not to mention the Sectarian and “spiritualist” crackbrains (thankfully, very few, but very noisy and beloved of the Western press). We haven’t winnowed them all out yet… for instance, Alfeyev the Boy Blunder is still in good odour (for now… his oligarch zapadniki backers won’t be able to save him in the end, though). They’re quite similar to the crook lot of konvertsy in American Orthodoxy… with the same cult-like obsequiousness to their gurus (whom they mistakenly call “elders”) and they have the same cheerless and rigorist aridity of spirit.
Remember… the Church is the “Big Tent”… it has room for all sorts of sinners. It doesn’t approve of or propagate sin… but it has boundless compassion and accommodation for those who wish to follow its path. It doesn’t throw people out or deny them communion on specious grounds… that’s a lesson that the American konvertsy need to learn… if they stay in the Church, that is. The Eternal Flame symbolises the self-sacrifice of the generation that defeated Hitler… at worst, it’s harmless; at best, it’s a sign of the best of the human spirit… let it stay. As for those who attack it on “Christian” grounds… let the Scripture condemn them (not me):
Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The Gospel according to St Matthew 22.13
This not only applies to those who attack Soviet symbols in Russia using “religious” justifications… it also applies to the American konvertsy who attack traditional Orthodox usages on the same specious grounds… think on it…
BMD
Comments Off on Kirill Frolov Angered by Attempts to See Paganism in Memorial Events Honouring Our Heroes at the Eternal Flame
Orthodox public organisations plan to hold a large march next year in Lvov on Victory Day. “I’ve received a torrent of calls from members of various Orthodox groups in the Ukraine, which stated that there shouldn’t be any more disgraceful spectacles like the one staged by the extremist Svoboda faction, and that next year, on 9 May, Orthodox activists are determined to be there for the veterans and help them to lay wreaths”, Kirill Frolov, the head of the Ukrainian Section of the CIS Institute, told our Interfax-Religion correspondent on Thursday. He went on to say, the Orthodox would march to the Lychakovsky Cemetery, to pay respect to the graves of Galician Russophiles, of whom 60,000 are buried there, and, then, hold a large rally before the Memorial of Glory.
As Frolov noted, “The ideological forebears of the Ukrainian nationalist organisation Svoboda provoked the Austrian government to undertake a persecution of the Galician people, who, at that time, supported all-Russian unity and wanted to leave the Unia and embrace Orthodoxy. They accused Galician Russophiles of spying for Russia, they carried out much mayhem, shooting people down in cities and villages, and they took others to a special concentration camp at Talerhof, where there were no barracks yet built, so the people slept on the bare earth in the winter of 1914“. In his view, Orthodox believers should agitate to seek legal recognition of the genocide carried out against the Galician Russophiles as “a crime against humanity”, not only during the planned action in Lvov for the next Victory Day, but on a steady basis. They should also demand that the Lvov municipal authorities allow the construction of an Orthodox cathedral. In addition, Frolov continued, Orthodox activists in the Ukraine should demand that there be an investigation of the “criminal and terrorist activity” of the so-called “Kiev Patriarchate”, “which is, for all intents and purposes, the puppeteer of the Svoboda faction. In particular, they should investigate the fact that the KP recruited militants who fought alongside the Chechen separatists Basayev and Dudayev, and, on top of that, they also seized canonical Orthodox churches, brutally beating the clergy there as they did so”.
For its part, the all-Ukrainian public organization Православныйвыбор (Pravoslavny Vybor : Orthodox Choice) called the riot in Lvov on 9 May, “an act pf terror directed against all those who wanted to honour the memory of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War. We’d also like to draw the attention of the Ukrainian federal authorities to the positions taken by the councils of Lvov, Ternopol, and Ivano-Frankovsk Oblasts. Through their decisions regarding the celebration of Victory Day, they opposed the will of the entire Ukraine, thus, contributing to the outbreak of sacrilegious violence on 9 May in Lvov”, according to a statement of the organisation received by Interfax-Religion.
Dum-da-dum-dum… you guessed it… it’s time to award the Order of the Big Green Weenie again, kids. I noticed that Interfax had posted this article on their English side… minus the third paragraph! If you’re going to translate the article, translate all of it… not only part of it! FOR SHAME! Normally, I don’t look at the English side of Interfax; it just depresses me. It’s why I only take stuff from the Russian side… that’s complete and to the point.
Well, well, well… the Interfax English translator comes in dead-last in the Pierogi Race, as per usual. Is that a surprise?
BMD
Comments Off on In response to the Riot of Uniate Nationalists in Lvov, Orthodox Activists Plan a Large Rally There for 9 May Next Year
There are three groups within the MP contending for control. One is the “liberals”, who gather about such questionable figures as Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev (who, despite his grandiloquent title, is nothing but a vicar bishop). These are mostly pseudo-intellectuals with very shallow roots in the Church; they’re very similar to American konvertsy in their ignorance and love of argumentation. They have no hope of ever gaining power… they’re too small in numbers and too “exclusive” in attitude (again, you see this in their American konvertsy counterparts, especially the posturing SVS slimers)… they have no appeal to ordinary believers, as their “faith” is airy-fairy speculation and bloodless “paper-and-ink” declarations.
There is a war for the Church’s soul taking place, and it’s going on between “traditionalists” and “modernists”. These categories are NOT the same as their Western analogues. A “modernist” is a believer who supports interaction with the modern world, the use of modern technologies, methods, and media in Church work, and a large “inclusive” definition of the Church. They believe that the Church should interact with modernity, and that this interaction would be gainful for both the Church and for modern society. Prominent modernists are Archbishop Vikenty Morar, Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, Igumen Sergei Rybko, Deacon Andrei Kuraev, and Professor Kirill Frolov. This faction has the wholehearted support of Patriarch Kirill, as it mixes both an open attitude to modern methods and the contemporary world with a traditional approach to the faith.
The “traditionalists” reject the world… they reject modern technology and methods, yet they use the Internet to spread their teachings. They hate rock music, and they believe that the Church should stand in opposition to secular society, which they see as an evil and corrupt instrument of Satan, and they think that we are living in the “last days”. They’re much like the American Sectarians who read such mind-numbing rot as the Left Behind series and the Late Great Planet Earth. When the last MP Archpastoral Council defrocked Diomid Dzyuban as bishop of Chukotka and Anadyr, it was for holding this position. They’re full of conspiracy theories, crack-brained anti-Semitism, and positive fear of other Christian confessions. They believe that sending observers to see what the outside world and the other confessions are doing is disallowable communio in sacris. Such people have an “exclusive” definition of the Church, they are “the little flock that has remained faithful”… all others are damned. Like American konvertsy, they are fond of (mis)quoting the Fathers, the Canons, and theologumenae… making such out to be immutable Church dogma and doctrine.
If one sees this from an “insider” viewpoint, it’s clear why Vladyki Kirill isn’t raising any more of a rumpus than is necessary to keep things sweet. This way, there isn’t as much hurt feelings and bruised egos… and these things can prolong a schism far more than actual disagreement can. Most of the followers of the “liberals” and “traditionalists” are redeemable. There’s no doubt in my mind of that. His Nibs is being very wise… he’s letting things work themselves out naturally, but when there actual danger of harm to children, as happened not only at in St Andrei Bogolyubsky Convent case, but in the case of the Penza Cave incident some years back, the MP acted with expeditiousness to protect the innocent.
His Holiness is showing wisdom… as is Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral, by the way. Both are letting things “go naturally”. This way is longer, it seems more convoluted, and it seems that nothing is being done at times. I, for one, believe that this course is the only one possible at this time without breaking our unity. In the end, the faction around His Nibs will win… just as the OCA is fated to collapse in utter ruin and irrelevancy, and Metropolitan Hilarion is fated to lead a united Russian Orthodox Church in the diaspora. We must show patience… we must show perseverance. We shouldn’t act like the disgraceful juvenile American konvertsy in Stokoe’s comboxes who shout that they’re going to leave a particular archdiocese because the ruling bishop did something not to their liking. That’s Protestantism, pure and simple; it’s not Orthodoxy!
There’s Sturm und Drang now… it won’t last forever. As a sweet lady in New Jersey put it, “We’re waiting for the Frenchman to die”. That’s what REAL Orthodox do… they don’t throw tantrums and threaten to go elsewhere. For example, I asked my staritsa, “Iggy’s a supreme pain in the arse; he’s a lying POS. What do I do?” Her reply was simple… “If he’s not teaching open heresy, you must stay where you are. We’re promised salvation in the Church; we’re not promised that it’s going to be pleasant and to our liking”. That’s the REAL teaching of the Church… it’s why you must ignore people like Patrick Reardon, Freddie Matthews-Green, Vassa Larina, John Behr, and Jonas Paffhausen. They’re pushing a therapeutic “feel-good” Orthodoxy that’s too close to that peddled by the so-called “traditionalists” in Russia (their differences are merely superficial).
There’s a new dispensation coming… it’s time for patience now. Drizzle, drazzle, druzzle, drone… time for this one to come home.
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Tuesday 16 November 2010
Albany NY
Comments Off on Some Thoughts on the Factional Infighting in the MP Brought Out by St Andrei Bogolyubsky Convent Scandal
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