Odds & Ends...

The forthcoming election to fill the vacant Patriarchal throne of the Romanian Orthodox Church has fallen under the shadow of the past. Government files from the communist era containing the names of clergy who allegedly collaborated with the secret police have become a matter of contention. There is a debate going on as to what impact this will have on the election and some of those considered possible successors to the late Patriarch.

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The worst fires in modern Greek history have killed dozens of people and caused massive damage. Relief from all over the world is poring into the Hellenic Republic. Special collections are being taken up in most Greek Orthodox parishes in the United States to help the victims.

Read the story here.

Patriarch +Alexeii II has expressed support for Pope +Benedict XVI's Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum which effectively lifts most restrictions on the use of the classical liturgical rite of the Roman Catholic Church (commonly called the Tridentine Mass).

"We strongly adhere to tradition," Patriarch Alexei said in an August interview with the Italian newspaper Il Giornale "The recovery and honoring of an ancient liturgical tradition is a development that we can welcome."

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An icon believed to be miraculous by many Orthodox Christians will be brought to the cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in San Francisco this month for public exhibition and veneration. The Sretensky Monastery Choir is accompanying the icon whose trip is in honor of the recent end of the great schism in the Russian Church that dated to the Communist Revolution.

The "Reigning Woman" icon is so named because it pictures the mother of Jesus in a throne, wearing the earthly garb of imperial Russia and holding a scepter -- the queen of heaven and earth.

Legend has it the icon appeared to a peasant girl in her dreams. Eudocia Adrianova and her rector found it covered with soot in the basement room of a church in Kolomenskoe, outside Moscow in 1917. The same day, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated.

"People started streaming to this church, which was not known outside the village before," said tour manager Anastasia Boudanoque. "Miracles have been documented of people touching the icon, diseases cured."

Unusually large at 5 feet, 6 inches tall, "It is a very impressive piece of art on thick board," Boudanoque said. "It's quite colorful." Its inscription is in Church Slavonic.

Scholars believe the icon first decorated the Ascension Convent of the Moscow Kremlin, but was spirited to Kolomenskoe in 1812 when Napoleon invaded.

It would be moved again, and again, and again.

Information about the exhibition and services surrounding the icon's visit can be found here.

The WCC (an organization I generally have little use for) has issued a statement of support for HH +Bartholomew the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and New Rome. This support is in the face of an order summoning the Patriarch to appear before the court and explain why he is continuing to use the title "Ecumenical" when the courts have prohibited him from doing so. This of course raises all kinds of questions about Turkey's ambitions to join the European Union.

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