This is the eleventh voice to speak out in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

The deadline to write for this specific series is tomorrow, June 30. We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to add your voice.

To the Bishops of the Orthodox Church:

I don’t really expect to be “heard” when I write this. I’m not sure it will even be read. Yet, I still feel there’s some value in putting it out there. 

I’ve known I was gay for longer than I’ve known what sex is, longer than I understood what this “difference” that I’d always felt was. By 11, I knew what it meant, though. 

It meant God hated me and I would always be alone and never matter to anyone. 

I carried that into puberty, in shame and fear and desperate longing. Around 13 I spent hours one night begging God to kill me. I have rarely cried so hard or so deeply. As I fell into exhausted sleep I prayed, “Kill me or change me. I can’t stand this.”  Read More

Readers who are more familiar with the Russian system of ecclesiastical titles (such as practiced in the OCA, ROCOR, and the OCU) should note that, according to the Greek system, an Archbishop ranks higher than a Metropolitan—and ipso facto, a Greek Archdiocese may consist of several Metropolises.

This explains why the Primates of the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America and the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine are called Metropolitans, while the Primate of the autocephalous Church of Greece is called an Archbishop.

Likewise, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America has an Archbishop as its head and consists of several Metropolises headed each by its own Metropolitan.

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Archbishop Elpidophoros reading his Enthronment Address. June 22, 2019.

Perhaps the most momentous event of recent days in North American Orthodoxy was the enthronement of Archbishop Elpidophoros of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese on June 22-23.

By all accounts, the Archbishop has a winsome personality. Yet the concerns that Orthodoxy in Dialogue raised in our Editorial: Orthodox Popery Comes to America? or Time for a Greek Orthodox Revolt in America? of May 12 remain, namely: Read More

This is the tenth voice to speak out in Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s Fifty Years after Stonewall: A Virtual Listening Tour. The author has ministered pastorally to LGBTQ persons who have been run out of the Orthodox Church. Our failure time and again to minister to our own has consequences in the real lives of real human beings and will face a stern accounting at the Last Judgment. 

We urge our readers to forward the articles in this series to their diocesan bishops and parish priests. We beg our hierarchy and clergy to listen, attentively, reflectively, and prayerfully.

We ensure complete anonymity if you wish to write for this series between now and the end of June.

To my brothers in Christ, the Deacons, Priests, and Bishops of the Orthodox Church to whom this letter may be presented: I pray for you all and I ask you to pray for me who, without God’s infinite mercy, am lost.

I am Father Sean Andrew Lotz, a priest since 1993 in the Celtic Catholic Church. I am not Orthodox, but I have always loved and learned from the Orthodox Church and held her in the greatest respect. Although I am not Orthodox, what I have to say concerns you directly for reasons I will explain below. I ask you in the Name of the Lord whom we serve to give my letter a respectful reading.

Let me first tell you a little something about me. I am the pastor of a tiny congregation, and so I work at a job to support myself. I am surrounded most days by non-Christians, former Christians, and Christians who have chosen to stop attending church. I am blessed by God frequently to have intimate conversations with people who do not have a pastor and who consider me something of their priest. Furthermore; I am gay; and although this fact does not reveal itself in my “lifestyle” in any way whatsoever (if you followed me around 24 hours a day and spied on me from behind the mailbox, you would have no idea one way or the other), everyone who spends any time talking to me knows, since I am vocally “out” about being gay and about being a priest. Read More

Orthodoxy in Dialogue has shown unflinching support for the ongoing project of Ukraine’s political and ecclesiastical liberation from centuries of oppression at the hands of Tsarist-Soviet-Putinist Russia. We have been especially supportive of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kyiv even when we have not always agreed with them. The grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was the right thing to do by every metric, despite some of the worrisome Phanariot ecclesiology that underlay it.

The following article at Bellingcat has been brought to our attention by two of our readers independently of each other. We share it with a heavy heart in the interests of honesty and transparency.

Ukraine-haters will see this report as “proof” that Ukrainians and their Church are all right-wing nationalist extremists. Yet this hardly congrues with the fact that this predominantly Orthodox country handed nearly 75% of its vote to a Jewish presidential candidate and just hosted the nation’s largest and most peaceful LGBTQ festival in the history of Kyiv Pride. Ukrainian democracy continues in its birth pangs, but shows promise of a bright future. Bellingcat makes clear that the right-wing extremism reported below does not enjoy popular support in Ukraine. 

The tragic fact of the matter is that the Orthodox Church everywhere attracts right-wing, nationalist, extremist elements whose diabolical ideologies bear no resemblance whatever to the Gospel or to Orthodox spirituality. This is no less true in Russia, Greece, Serbia, Romania, etc., and even in American Orthodoxy, than it is in Ukraine.

While in Russia the Kremlin and Patriarchate are so completely in bed with each other (see Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy) that it seems humanly impossible to pry them from their adulterous embrace, in Ukraine Metropolitan Epiphanius, the hierarchy, and the clergy of the OCU simply must preach—in season and out of season—that there is no place in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Christ for unrepented nationalist extremism.

Caption:

Epiphanius on LGBT: We Cannot Call Sin Good

Photo hosted by Tradition and Order (Традиція і Порядок) – reportedly one of Ukraine’s most violent far-right groups

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Calls to “Fight” LGBT People by Ukrainian Cleric Emblematic of Church’s Proximity to Far Right

by Bellingcat Anti-Equality Monitoring

Read More