15 November 2015. A Colloquy on the Amazing Fr Foty and His Golden Voice

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I’m in plain type; my interlocutor is in italics

What about Fr Foty? Would you want him in your choir? He did an impromptu duet with A B Gradsky (one of the judges) at his audition!

He’s amazing and so unassuming. You can even hear it in his voice.

Would you call him a “Monastic Innocent” (I do mean that in all sincerity)? Did you see where G V Leps gave him a list of people to pray for? That wouldn’t happen here!

I guess that you could say that. What he’s doing is truly beautiful, and I (like Dostoevsky) believe that beauty will save the world. Through all this exposure and social media, Fr Foty is doing more good than he could probably imagine.

Would you say that he embodies the revival in the Motherland?

He’s definitely evidence of that.

I think that we’ve had a quiet revival here. Compared to 1980, the Russian Orthodox elements are closer than ever… I believe that we’re on the verge of great things. I’ve lived through the dry years… I know…

It’s definitely an exciting time. I just pray that nothing gets in the way of the revival, be it external forces or internal snakes like the EP.

I hope to live to see a united Russian Orthodox Church here in the diaspora before my earthly death. I pray for that…

I think a lot of people dream and pray for that. I mean, who wouldn’t want that (we all know who, though)?!?

It’s time for the OCA, the ROCOR, and the MP/USA (and MP/Canada) to stop the foolishness. It’s time to form three united metropolias in the North American diaspora… one for Alaska, one for Canada, and one for the rest of the USA. They would function under the legal charter of the ROCOR… but that’d only be a legal formality. To speak frankly, all-Orthodox Unity here is a chimera; it’s not realistic, not at the present, at least. However, we can grasp all-Russian Orthodox Unity… the Serbs did it… the Arabs did it… we can do it, too. Everything comes in its good and proper time. Now is the time to fix up our own house before we go trying to repair someone else’s. I think that all decent and honourable people of good-sense and good will can understand that. I DO want to see Russian Orthodox Unity here before my earthly death… and I DO pray for that mercy…

BMD

My earlier posts on Fr Foty are here and here

click here for a VK vid of Fr Foty singing The Circle of Life from The Lion King (no lie) (you can’t embed VK vids on WordPress)

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14 November 2015. Here’s Some More From Fr Foty Mochalov of the Golden Voice

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A while back, I had a piece on Fr Foty Mochalov, who was a contestant on the Russian TV show Голос (Golos: The Voice). I googled him to see if he had other things out… and he did. ENJOY!

BMD

Hieromonk Foty Advances in “The Voice” Song Competition on Pervy Kanal TV

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Khrustalyova’s audition piece for the contest…  Мне нравится (Mne nravitsa: I Like It)

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Fr Foty’s audition piece for the contest… Lensky’s aria… judge Gradsky and Fr Foty sing an impromptu duet after the main presentation

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Here is one of the other contestants, Ilona Solomonova, singing Kazachya… a second song begins at 4:15 after a colloquy between Ilona and the judges

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On Friday, 23 October, Ryazan homegirl Ella Khrustalyova bowed out of the vocal competition “The Voice” on Pervy Kanal TV. Onstage at “Fights”, she conceded to Hieromonk Foty of Borovsk. The contestants sang a song by Andrea Bocelli, Canto della Terra, as a duet, in Italian. The duo was the idea of G V Leps, he also identified Fr Foty as the winner of this competition, “He has no need to explain where his muse is; he lives the words, ‘Following God, soaring above the clouds’. I always regretted that I couldn’t ever sing like that”. All the judges thanked the duo. P S Gagarina said, “You just bathed in music, in their voices, I have no words for it, it was amazing”. A B Gradsky noted, “Leps joined these two educated and cultured people together and asked them to show us highly-artistic vocal work. In this sense, they showed that our project blows away its counterparts around the world”. In addition, judge D V Nagiyev commended Khrustalyova, “Her appearance enriched the project”. In her farewell speech, she thanked “The Voice” for the opportunity to discover different aspects [of her talent]. She thought that the performance of Canto della Terra was a success. “The Voice” is now going through the second part of the “Fights” segment.

23 October 2015

RZN.info

http://www.rzn.info/news/2015/10/23/ryazanka-ella-hrustaleva-na-shou-golos-proigrala-poedinok-svyaschenniku-i-pokinula-proekt-video.html

Editor:

Pervy Kanal is the most popular TV network in Russia. This is mass culture at its finest. Compare this with its American analogues and there’s no comparison. Look at Fr Foty! Monks don’t sit on a far-off hillside with long faces… they don’t eat boiled potatoes and stewed prunes to show how “Holy” they are. Monastics have always interacted with the world; they’ve always not only prayed for the world, but they took also part in it to show that we can sanctify ALL of life. Most monks and nuns don’t leave their monasteries… but that doesn’t mean that they cut off the world. They do reject the foolishness of this world and they do live “by a different standard”, but they don’t stop being human… nor do they stop smiling. Remember the late Fr Vladimir Sukhobok and Igumen Tryphon up in Washington State… I rest my case…

BMD

Russian Patriarch Warns of New “Time of Troubles”… Urged Believers Not to Follow Western Models

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On Saturday, the head of Russia’s powerful Orthodox Church urged Russians to stay faithful to their own traditions, cautioning that Western recipes of modernisation could result in political turmoil. In what observers will likely see as a veiled attack on the opposition, Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev, a staunch supporter of President Vladimir Putin, warned that blindly following Western models and forgetting one’s roots could lead to a new “Time of Troubles“. The late 16th and early 17th centuries are known as the Time of Troubles (or Smuta in Russian); a period of political upheaval marked by peasant uprisings, rebellion against authority, and attempts to seize power with the help of foreign intervention. The crisis ended with the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613.

Kirill, who spoke on a regularly-featured religious programme on the country’s most popular television channel, said, “We should first and foremost take care not to allow the Smuta in the minds, Smuta in the heads, because today there are people who, like Moscow’s nobles, offer unacceptable recipes for the modernisation of our life and the improvement of living conditions for our people”. The patriarch didn’t name any names, but most will likely see his message as a veiled attack on the promotion of Western liberal values by the anti-Putin protest movement that began organising mass demonstrations last winter before the strongman’s re-election to an unprecedented third Kremlin term.

Kirill said on state-run Pervy Kanal (Channel One) that Russians should learn from the country’s past and not make the same mistake twice by allowing foreigners to take control of Russia. After the Time of Troubles ended, he said, “Russia got a new lease of life, there was a huge and colossal development of national life, economy, state building, (and) the development of new lands”. On Sunday, Russia will mark the Day of National Unity, a public holiday celebrating the Russian victory over the Polish occupiers expelled from the Kremlin in 1612, which preceded Mikhail Romanov‘s accession to the throne. The commemoration was designed to replace the Soviet-era holiday celebrating the 1917 October Revolution {not true… it’s a revived tsarist holiday, so, a leftist could celebrate BOTH Red October and the Day of National Unity: editor}. The Orthodox Church flourished under Putin, becoming increasingly present in society and politics over the past few years. Putin, who’s battling the most serious political crisis of his 12 years in power, flaunts his religiosity, and is believed to have his own father confessor.

3 November 2011

Viktor Drachev

AFP

http://za.news.yahoo.com/russian-patriarch-warns-time-troubles-092239726.html

Editor’s Note:

Note the “and is believed to have his own father confessor”… that’s crackbrained. Everybody knows that Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov is Putin’s confessor… it’s common knowledge; it shows that the correspondent has a shaky grasp of the situation at the Centre (not uncommon for the ignorant pro-Western faction). Putin doesn’t “flaunt his religiosity”; indeed, he does the exact opposite. What planet is this putz from?

We as Orthodox Christians have NOTHING to learn from the heterodox. NOTHING. We don’t need their “mission techniques”, we don’t need their “tithing”, and we don’t need their “input” on anything. They’re outside the Church, full stop… that means that Josiah Trenham spat in Our Lord Christ’s face full-force when he allied himself with a godless Evangelical on his radio show (a Russian bishop called Evangelicals “Christian atheists”… I believe that he’s right). We shouldn’t hate such people… we should be “good neighbours”, but they have nothing to teach us or show us. Everything that we need is in our God-received Tradition, and that’s that. Remember the Orthodox Way, “Send us no letters on doctrine; send us letters of friendship only”. Now, that’s something to hold to…

By the way, this shows that the Blunder is out of sync with HH (yet again)… that’s another reason not to get too hot n’ bothered over his latest junket to the USA. He’s trying to buck up his faction here, that’s all.

By the way, my own personal pipsqueak opinion is that Russia should declare a holiday period from 4 to 7 November. It’d start with the celebration of the Day of National Unity and end with the commemoration of Great October. These were the two greatest events in Russian history… we should mark them as such.

BMD