Patriarch Kirill of Moscow
As we wait to learn exactly what’s in the Mueller report, there’s another Russia story that deserves our attention. It’s about collusion between the Christian right in America and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), and it will be on display this coming weekend in Verona, Italy, at the World Congress of Families.
The WCF, in case you haven’t heard of it, is an annual event sponsored by the International Organization for the Family (IOF), a Washington-based NGO dedicated to furthering the Christian right’s agenda by opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, legal protections on the basis of sexual orientation, and pornography around the globe.
It was established in 1997 by Allan Carlson, a history professor at Hillsdale College, who had the clever idea of turning the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a charter for traditional family values.
He did this by seizing on Article 16, Section 3, which reads, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” A decade later, then Metropolitan Kirill of the ROC upped the ante, justifying traditionalist policies by way of Article 29, Section 1: “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.”
In other words, if you’re at odds with the community’s traditional family values, too bad for you. Read More
The late Margaret O’Gara of the University of Toronto was fond of using a phrase that the late Bishop of Rome, John Paul II, also employed regularly: an “ecumenical gift exchange.” O’Gara published a book in 1998 under that title, while three years earlier the Pope used it in his landmark encyclical, Ut Unum Sint, on Christian unity. I also use the phrase in my new book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico Press, 2019, 154pp).
Readers of the book will quickly see that many of my proposed reforms are gifts from the East, starting with Nicholas Afanasiev, especially his book The Church of the Holy Spirit. It was from him that I developed my argument for a three-fold ordering of the Catholic Church: the laics (to use Afanasiev’s somewhat ungainly term), the clerics, and the hierarchs, all existing together, each with voice and vote in the councils of governance of the church—from the lowly parish council through to diocesan, regional, and international synods. All three orders are necessary for the Church to flourish; each of the three acts as a check on the others, ensuring that none can run totally roughshod over the others.
I am equally indebted to examples drawn from the current structures of various Eastern Orthodox Churches—the Russian, the Antiochian, the OCA, and also—and above all—the Armenian Apostolic Church, whose singular and admirable structures I first highlighted in my earlier book Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Read More
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 