Unless sodomy is rooted out, as King Asa of Judah did when he got rid of the homosexual priests in the Temple (3 Kings 15:12, LXX), the decay becomes inexorable...
Back in the 80s, there was a hit movie from France called La Cage aux Folles (“birds of a feather” more or less); a comedy about homosexuality and hypocrisy, which often go hand in hand.
A young couple wanted to get married and because the father of the prospective groom was homosexual, he persuaded his partner to dress in drag and pretend to be the boy’s mother.
A joint blessing on the SYNODALITY AND PRIMACY IN THE SECOND MILLENNIUM AND TODAY.
Hilarity ensued. (One laughs until it stops being funny.)
I imagine this is how Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis feels as the gordian knot of same-sex marriage tightens around his neck.
The developments regarding the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples was put on the back burner for awhile. However, now that the cease fire between Israel and Hamas looks like it may hold, advocates for same-sex-marriage have turned up the heat bringing it to a full boil.
The latest leaks from the prime minister’s office indicate there will be a decision the end of December; beginning of January at the latest. Frankly, I think the election is just a pretense. The decision has already been made.
It’s interesting how certain developments turn into an “all hands on deck” situation for those who normally don’t have all that much to do with each other. The typical walls between Evangelicals, Muslims, and Jews in Greece have all but disappeared as they now join forces to stop this abomination.
There is one Christian religious leader, however, who remains completely silent on the matter. His name is Dimitrios Arhandonis, better known as His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Archbishop of New Rome. He claims to speak for the Orthodox world and yet has announced nothing to the Church about any of this.
If you’re confused by role of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, you are in good company. Who are they and why are they?
It goes like this: To head the Ecumenical Patriarchate, you must live in Turkey. To live in Turkey, you must be a Turkish citizen. To be a Turkish citizen, you must speak the Turkish language, as no other language is taught in Turkey.
As for the Church of Greece, things are also a bit peculiar. Although the Church of Greece is autocephalous, and not under the Excumenical Patriarchate, it must submit candidates for canonization to Istanbul.
The Greek Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate are tightly connected. Their history has something to do with it, as does their proximity. But it goes deeper than that. The Holy Synod of Greece will continue to be heavily influenced by Bartholomew as long as Bartholomew remains the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Turkey. If Bartholomew were to move out of Turkey, that would be a different story. He would lose his ecumenical status.
His fairy dust of special privileges would blow away, as well.
Suffice it to say, he probably isn’t going anywhere. He’s an old man holding onto 30+ years of magical thinking as if it were a life raft. That it’s been taking on water for decades escaped his notice. Greece, particularly several Northern Greek and Aegean dioceses, gave Bartholomew “Constantinopolitan” status and he isn’t going to let that go. Not if he can help it.
So let’s get to the punchline: The Greeks have have chosen a replacement for Archbishop Elpidophoros AND Bartholomew.
The candidate they have in mind is Archbishop Makarios of Australia. After his stint in America, he’ll become the Ecumenical Patriarch in name only. Makarios was NOT born in Turkey. Nor does he speak Turkish. Greek, yes. English, also. But a proficiency in French, Russian, Italian, and African dialects, won’t do him much good in Turkey.
They either have to change the rules, abandon Makarios, or move the Ecumencial Patriarchate out of Turkey. To move it is to dissolve it. They step out of Turkey, they become just another patriarchate. They could lose their status as first among equals, as they would now be at the bottom of the diptychs. Perhaps their intent is to drop off altogether when they unite with Rome. Bartholomew can take that statue of his and put it in a garden at the Vatican.
This is all pretty heady stuff. Shouldn’t the rest of the Church be allowed to weigh in? Given the whole “plenitude” thing, you’d think the entire Church would have the opportunity to say something. If the Orthodox world had a say, they would nix the idea of keeping the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Or at least their present way of doing things. – But Greece? I don’t know.
The Greek Church (not to be confused with the GOA) has always been an autocephalous Church, but it does not scream “autocephaly.” In fact, it’s more like ukrocephaly, the curious configuration created by Istanbul for the schismatic, uncanonical sect known as the OCU. Its goal was to remove all the Russian parishes and monasteries that have peppered the Ukrainian landscape for centuries. The rest of the Orthodox world, as well as the entire planet, looked on in horror as the spawn of the Nazis “Third Reich,” known as the Azov Assault Brigade, confiscated or bulldozed that which belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church, culminating in the action of banning the Church from Ukraine altogether. Talk about a Rube Goldberg contraption.
On the plus side, if the Ecumenical Patriarchate no longer exists, maybe the OCU won’t either.
But there is more. There is always more when it comes to the Greek-speaking contingent.
The Catholic “synodal synod” Bartholomew presided over with Pope Francis might be another reason he isn’t talking. The Catholic-Orthodox commission issued their first joint statement in 7 years.
The so-called Alexandria Statement, issued June 7 and formally titled “Synodality and Primacy in the Second Millennium and Today,” was a follow-up to a statement issued in 2016 in the Italian town of Chieti. The older document was an examination of the state of the Church in the First Christian Millennium, before Rome and Constantinople suffered schism.
The joint international commission was established by the Holy See and 14 autocephalous Orthodox Churches and has issued a number of documents over the past four decades.
The commission met from June 1-7, conducting much of its discussions in the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Annunciation in Alexandria. Eighteen Roman Catholic members were present. Ten Orthodox Churches were represented: the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Patriarchate of Romania, the Patriarchate of Georgia, the Church of Cyprus, the Church of Greece, the Church of Poland, the Church of Albania and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. The Commission worked under the direction of its two co-presidents, Metropolitan Job of Pisidia of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity.
https://aleteia.org/2023/06/14/catholic-orthodox-commission-manages-1st-...
We were a bit surprised to see one of these names. And disappointed. But as St John Chrysostom was reputed to have said: The road to hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lampposts that light the path.
So what does this portend for the future? I can’t tell you that but I can tell you how we got here. And the answer is not a pretty one.
When sodomy takes hold of an institution, it invariably rots and unfortunately that’s where we find ourselves with many of the hierarchs of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Unless sodomy is rooted out, as King Asa of Judah did when he got rid of the homosexual priests in the Temple (3 Kings 15:12, LXX), the decay becomes inexorable.
Notice, I did not say that homosexuals are the problem; I said s-o-d-o-m-y was the problem. What’s the difference? A priest or bishop who has a homosexual inclination but is otherwise leading a life of prayer and repentance, is no different from a priest or bishop who is heterosexual, and likewise living a life of repentance. Both men are subject to the lustful intentions that besets all human beings, but if both men don’t act on them, there is no problem.
But now we’re at a crossroad where the issue of blessing gay marriages is on the table. Blessing them to do what, exactly. How long after that will they insist on Orthodox weddings with crowns and the whole enchilada?
The Catholics, with Bartholomew, headed a year-long exploration into what a “synodal synod” would look like. At the conclusion, Bartholomew stood with Francis in front of 18,000 people in St. Peter’s Square, knowing the outcome was a cry to “bless” same sex unions. And you know what? Ten of our Orthodox Churches are standing with him in spirit. Did they ask the other Orthodox Churches what we think? No. But they didn’t have to. They know we support the teachings of the Church and blessing gay marriages isn’t one of them.
The issue with the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a whole is there is no prohibition regarding sodomy which results in a general lack of restraint. We can see that this is so because of what we have read in the newspapers (google “Bulgarian Stallions”). We also see this being played out in the Greek diaspora, where the Metropolitans of the various eparchies are known for their lavish lifestyles. Things that include indoor swimming pools, expensive apartments with spectacular views, gold cufflinks, and so on. Or worse, the hasty removal of hierarchs after spending the night in some foreign jail.
The key word here is restraint. Once sodomy takes hold of an institution, all restraint is gone and the men in charge act like the mean girls you knew in junior high. Notice I said “mean girls“. Not all homosexuals are effeminate but those who are do not inspire confidence in other men. Truth be told, they don’t inspire confidence in women either.
We see this in the eparchies of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The well-heeled laymen who style themselves as “Archons of the Ecumenical Throne” engage in Byzantine cosplay while hierarchs bless abortion at pro-life rallies. (One GOA bishop wished women who had abortions a Happy Mothers’ Day, “as they were mothers, too.” As for individual parishes, some have female altar-servers. One parish, in its devotion to the green agenda, put out a video of a pretty girl playing with a snake. Nothing screams paganism like that.
This is all wackadoodle stuff if you ask me. (Editor’s Note: Heretical is a better word.) It’s reasons like these that cause many to view the eparchies of Istanbul as spiritually dead.
We also see this with the horrendous attrition rate among the laity. According to one estimate, the GOA has shrunk from 450,000 communicants to 120,000. That’s a decrease of 330,000 members (approximately 73 percent)! That’s shocking any way you look at it. People, in other words, are voting with their feet.
Sure, some are going to the Athonite monasteries. Others are going to non-GOA jurisdictions. ROCOR, the OCA, and Antioch have also seen growth due to an influx of former GOA laymen, but none have absorbed all of these numbers into their ranks.
In other words, Orthodox laymen are either going to non-Orthodox confessions or are simply not going anywhere at all. In other words, becoming apostate.
And so, here we are.
Unfortunately, I don’t see this turning around anytime soon. The guy waiting in the wings to replace Bartholomew does not inspire confidence. In terms of excess, his home is purportedly worth $6.5 million. I hesitate to say more, because he has sued others who have written about him. But now that he’s turned himself into public figure, he might have a harder time doing that (at least here in the States). As already stated, effeminate men are unable to rise to the task. And there is this feeling that no one has any intention of changing anything for the better. So why bother?
As a Greek-American and Orthodox Christian, I have seen nothing but deterioration.
At the end of the day, the ultimate question is: how long can the Ecumenical Patriarchate last as an institution? Or, as we read about Churches in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation, will we see its lampstand overturned?