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The anti-Christ du jour

I had occasion this week to take issue with a priest of the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) as follows:

My correspondent considered as merely “stating the obvious” the recent proclamation of Abp. Demetrios (Please see “We Are No Longer an Immigrant Church” - http://www.orthodoxnews.com), head of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese here, a jurisdiction which despite the courageous efforts of OCL, Orthodox Christian Laity, and those working in concert with it (OCL owns and maintains the Orthodox News site, and I myself served for several years on its Board of Directors), remains illegally, uncanonically, and without theological warrant subjected, nay, enslaved to the cabal in Istanbul which – to come right out and make a clean breast of it, no longer functions as anything resembling the Church, let alone any kind of “ecumenical patriarch” with jurisdiction over the entire ecumene, namely the whole world!!!

Thus Abp. Demetrios’ statement may have stated what anyone of sound mind and with his sanity still intact would recognize as obvious – but it’s what got Abp. Iakovos (then head of the Greek Archdiocese) fired after what is now known to history as ”Ligonier”, this being the Pennsylvania town where a gathering of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in America came together in 1994, and at which the American bishops proclaimed - although considerably more tentatively - just what Abp. Demetrios is now so forcefully reiterating. This is, moreover, the principal issue I myself have been addressing from that time until this! It is very significant, and, indeed, very BRAVE, that Demetrios was as forthright and explicit as he was in the details he offered. It is also significant that Demetrios was recently invited to Russia and for a fairly extended visit of several days actually traveled in Russia, so -- something must be in the wind.

As for Istanbul Patriarch Bartholomew – it was his so-called “encyclical” at the beginning of Great Lent 1995, after Ligonier, that launched my writing campaign. One of Bartholomew’s several fraudulently specious claims, it being from this fake pretense that all the others derive, is an Orthodox claim mimicking the equally fraudulent and specious claim of the Roman Catholic Pope to universal jurisdiction over the entire church, all over the whole world!!! Brothers and sisters, tell me if you dare try, how Christ’s Church, Christ’s Body, of which Christ Himself is ipso facto the Head – can have a rival “head” on earth!!!

Only an anti-Christ, a usurper, who would mendaciously pose as Christ – pretending to take the place of God Himself - could ever possibly make such a claim! Back at that time in 1995 I produced a very well reasoned theological and canonical history of the Church (I have the arduous training necessary for such a task inasmuch as the Jesuits at Georgetown forced me to research every word within an inch of my life to support my charge that they were not teaching the true Catholic faith. It was because I became so expert, and made everything I said stick, that they finally just got so furious, they threw me out.) What I said made Bartholomew equally furious, he was calling me names all over the place, but then Pope John Paul II who was my friend (you will recall that he called for a review of how the claim to papal infallibility should be differently exercised in today’s changed circumstances in his encyclical “Ut Unum Sint” which he published the summer of 1995, after I had begun writing to him several times a week) so John Paul stuck up for me, and since then Bart has at least kept a civil tongue in my regard; Bartholomew’s ability to masquerade as the Pope of Orthodoxy depends on his proximity to the Pope of Rome.

Certainly it is not without weighty significance that Pope and Patriarch Peter VII of Alexandria ardently commended me for this study of the Church, and Abp. Christodoulos of blessed memory also sent me a letter of commendation for what I was doing. On September 11, 2004, Pat. Peter, together with the cream of the Alexandrian Partriarchate, 17 persons in all, perished in a mysterious “accident” which remains unexplained to this day, a helicopter crash in the Aegean Sea near Greece, as they were traveling to Mt. Athos. It is highly significant that Pat. Peter, before boarding the helicopter, gave the keys to the Patriarchate to his assistant, saying, “Life is short, and you never know what may happen.” So he recognized that he was facing martyrdom and embraced it. I am sure his prayers for our continued effort on behalf of the Church will be heard and bear rich fruit.

At this point in my response to my correspondent I wrote: So, understandably, I cannot wholeheartedly concur when you say “On the one hand I give the OCA a lot of credit for being patient for so long with the Greek Archdiocese out of respect for the Ecumenical Patriarch” – yet I agree wholeheartedly that “there is little doubt within the Church as a whole the greatest obstacle to unity in America is the Ecumenical Patriarch.” Yes, what most of all panics the Istanbul Patriarch (as also the politically at this time most significant Jerusalem Patriarch, a solidly Greek cabal which – when they ordain any Arabs to the priesthood at all – will ordain only married priests ineligible to become bishops. I mean, what business have Greeks got in Jerusalem where the indigenous Christian populace is Palestinian Arab and has been for 2 millennia?) – so what panics these anachronistic pretenders to ecclesiastical power, these anti-Christs is that, while Constantinople doesn’t even exist anymore, it is now the Turkish city of Istanbul – it is rather in the Russian Church, including, and most emphatically, the Russian Church dispersed around the whole world in emigration, and also in the Moscow Patriarch’s daughter Church, the Orthodox Church in America, newly cleansed spiritually and now reinvigorated in the Faith, that we find Christianity competently led by devoted, deeply prayerful, hierarchs, and in such wise as to – most notably in Russia – press the government and other “secular” structures to respect the sound moral code treasured and observed by traditional religions in all times and places until in recent times our urbanized centers have renounced and deviated from these. Little wonder that Bartholomew, in his infamous “encyclical” for the Sunday of Orthodoxy, Great Lent, 1995, makes so bold as to deny the canonicity of the OCA, claiming that only the Istanbul Patriarchate has the right to grant autocephaly! As if his bogus claims affected the actual status of our Church in any way, especially given the myriad saints we have raised up in the past hundred years – which contrasts strongly with, for instance, the recent track record of the Roman Catholic Church, which, apparently, given all the apologies the present Pope is being forced to make on his current travels, divulges a problem which is virtually as world-wide as the Catholic Church itself, not limited to North America by any manner of means!

No, your All-Holiness – this being the title Bartholomew, the anti-Christ, lays claim to, even the Pope is addressed merely as “your Holiness” – the obvious fact of the matter is that, while you threw what can only be reasonably designated as a convulsive fit at my calling Constantinople “Second Rome”, which by implication would validate Moscow’s claim to be the “Third Rome”, it must be obvious to the sane minded that not only is Moscow legitimately the Third Rome, having saved Christianity, cleansed and purified and genuinely resurrected, through her 70 year Golgotha under the atheistic Soviet regime – but since the reconciliation of the Russian Church which raised up so many saints and martyrs Outside of Russia, with the Russian Church which raised up its saints and martyrs within Russia, the implication is inescapable that the Orthodox Church in America, the ONLY Christian Church founded precisely AS the Church in America – all the other significant Christian churches, Orthodox and otherwise, in the entire hemisphere have come from “somewhere else” – effectively stands today, given the power, wealth, and, concomitantly, political standing, of America, as Fourth Rome!!! Its status today is akin to that of Rome in its day and then Constantinople in its heyday. For the respective claims of both Rome and Constantinople to “primacy” are in no way ecclesiastical, but rather political.

Thus the order in which the Primates of the Orthodox Churches are mentioned in the diptychs is a protocol based on considerations like size, political importance, their age, and the like – anyone who plans a state affair has protocol officers who calculate such things as diplomatically as possible. This has nothing to do with jurisdictional supremacy. Canons are laws, and laws rightly are changed and modified in accord with changing circumstances, but even as they at one time stood in ancient times, more than1,500 years ago, those canons cannot be construed to give worldwide domination as claimed by Bartholomew, not even back in the middle of the first millennium. As those canons were originally formulated, Rome, the then imperium since living memory, was being 4 times sacked and overrun by Germanic barbarians, as was all the rest of Europe, when Charlemagne came to power he was building the first libraries and schools in Europe, emerging from its Dark Ages as a wasteland. So those canons charged Constantinople, at that time the only haven of civilization in European Christendom, with the care of the besieged Christian enclaves in Europe, and they never, not even 1,500 years ago, applied in any way to Asia, Estonia, etc.

When I got to this point in my original correspondence, that’s when I thought: hey, that’s what Bartholomew is – he’s our anti-Christ du jour!

I will try to explain because this anti-Christ business is tossed around all over the place, often without even the nod to Scripture which the “left behind” crowd distorts so appallingly.

Just for starters, as Mel Gibson has made all too plainly evident – basically nobody understands why Christ was crucified. One of the first questions Herbert Schwartz would ask when someone new came to the house was: Why, when God could have saved us any way He wanted, did He choose to do it by such a horrible death? The Apostle Paul answers clearly and unequivocally (despite the penchant of our avidly Bible-reading Christians all over the place for remaining ignorant of this): “He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, will he not also give us ALL THINGS with him?” (Rm 8:32) Because of the enmity between God and ourselves which was the principal effect of our first parents’ fall, we have a bedrock fear and mistrust of God, it’s all through the Psalms, the fear of being abandoned, and the Psalmist is always at great lengths to convince himself otherwise and rest quietly in trust. The devil convinced our first parents that the reason why God forbade them to eat of the tree was not because they would die as God had told them, but because He, God, knew that if they ate of it they would become gods like Himself – and they believed the devil and ate. But, in fact, God willed so powerfully that they WOULD become LITERALLY God, participating in His, God’s, own triune divine nature, that He sent His Son, with this potent message of DIVINE LOVE that would not stop at anything at all, not even such a despised and shameful death. So this is the basis of our hope: “He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, will he not also give us ALL THINGS with him?”

And from the mystery of the Transfiguration we are given to understand how God the Word has, in truth, “clothed Himself in me”, as our services repeat over and over, several times a day in the season stretching from Pascha to Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. Jesus took three of His most ardent disciples to Mt. Tabor with Him, and before they began their ascent, He asked them who they understood Him to be, and Peter answered, “The Christ, the Son of God.” As all the Fathers have affirmed: God became man that man might become God. And if death on the cross was what it would take to convince us – so be it.

And this is what the Church is all about – not “fellowship” and such, although these things may play a helping role. Most fundamentally, God wants to, quite literally, divinize us, impart to us His own nature. St. Paul is always counseling us to put off the old man, put on the new man. And we see how this works out in the lives of the saints. In line with this, it is tremendously significant that it is the Orthodox tradition which in North America has raised up so many saints and martyrs.

One of the most remarkable of these, and one closest to us in time, it was in 1966 that he reposed in the Lord, was a hierarch of the Russian Church Outside of Russia, St. John Maximovitch of Shanghai and San Francisco. St John has said: "Holiness is not simply righteousness, for which the righteous merit the enjoyment of blessedness in the Kingdom of God, but rather such a height of righteousness that men are filled with the grace of God to the extent that it flows from them upon those who associate with them. Great is their blessedness; it proceeds from personal experience of the Glory of God. Being filled also with love for men, which proceeds from love of God, they are responsive to men’s needs, and upon their supplication they appear also as intercessors and defenders for them before God."

And he should know whereby he speaks, for St. John was filled with the uncreated light of Mt. Tabor every time he celebrated the Eucharist, and visibly so, there are even pictures of him in the midst of this aura, the other servers standing reverently around him, their heads bowed. Moreover, St. John’s life more than exemplified this compulsion to transmit this gift of divine life to everyone he came in contact with.

So the anti-Christ is, by contrast, the evil mirror image of the Christ. It is not one single person, born on a certain date and fated to do such and such, whatever. Just as the saints move among us communicating life and love and blessedness – so the evil spirit incarnates himself in those who love evil, and they are legion – at one point in the Gospel, it says their very name is “Legion”. Instead of fomenting a creepy fear of the anti-Christ, as I have seen, notably in the monasteries established by a particular monk in our Greek Archdiocese (what else can you expect to find in a jurisdiction lorded over by Bartholomew, who is so fixated on his own supposed “primacy” and supreme power that he refuses even to obey the civil laws of the land by respecting legal documents he himself personally signed into law!) – so instead of taking this creepily fearful tack, we should follow the counsel of St. John Maximovitch, and strive to become like him. Then we will have the very experience the disciples had when Jesus sent them out to the people: “The seventy returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us in Your Name!’ And He said to them, ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold I have given you authority … over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.’” Lk 10:18f

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