More trouble with the Episcopal Assembly

Possible resignation by Antiochians from Assembly of Bishops

Important: ROCOR says 'No' to efforts to restore canonical order in N. America

Not particularly surprising, but still disappointing. Read the details here.

Orthodox Episcopal Assembly Writes On Abortion

Forty years ago the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision, known as Roe v. Wade, granting a “right” for women of the United States to terminate the lives of their children in the womb. This decision has resulted in some 54 million children’s lives ending almost before they began.

The Holy Orthodox Christian Faith is unabashedly pro-life. The Lord Jesus Christ was recognized and worshipped in His mother’s womb while yet unborn by the Holy Forerunner who was also still in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:44); St. Basil the Great (4th Century), one of the universal teachers of the faith, dared to call murderers those who terminate the life of the fetus. The Church has consistently held that children developing in the womb should be afforded every protection given to those outside the womb. There is no moral, religious or scientific rationale which can justify making a distinction between the humanity of the newly-conceived and that of the newly-born.

Read the rest here.

Axios!

Vatican II and the Orthodox Bishops

Orthodox Christians devoted to accountability are surely aware that accountability in behavior cannot be separated from accountability in understanding since practice (praxis) is necessarily connected to vision (theoreia).

This conviction inspires me, given the present state of things, to raise the following question: Is it possible that the teaching of the Second Vatican Council about the ministry of bishops in the Roman Catholic Church is now being taught and practiced in an adapted and altered form in our Orthodox churches today?

Let me explain why I raise such a question.

According to the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church, following Vatican I and the Council of Trent, bishops are not organically connected to the specific dioceses in which they serve. They rather have their episcopal position and power by virtue of their personal sacramental consecration as bishops. They are, so to speak, considered to be bishops in their own right, and not in virtue of their ministries as heads and overseers of actually existing ecclesial communities to which they belong. As such, they can be moved about from church to church, and even function in bureaucratic positions with titles of sees that no longer exist and therefore without being the leading member of any particular church, and without having any flock at all.

In this teaching and practice, bishops are not elected by the people of their dioceses and confirmed by all the bishops of the regional church to which they belong who, as brother bishops, affirm their election by first examining their faith and behavior, and then, when all is found to be acceptable, by consecrating them through the “laying on of hands.” They are rather appointed directly by the Pope of Rome. While their validity as bishops derives from their sacramental consecration, their legitimacy as bishops derives from their communion with the Pope, and their submission to him.

Together with the Pope, and under his immediate direction, and in obedience to his unique authority considered to derive directly from God (whatever “politicking” may have produced him by vote of the qualified bishops in the college of cardinals, all Vatican-appointed men with titular pastorates of churches in the diocese of Rome), the bishops as consecrated individuals corporately form a “college” (collegium) that governs the universal catholic Church. And, as just noted, they do so by virtue of their union with the See of Rome and in submission to its bishop who is believed to be the unique “successor of Peter” and “vicar of Christ” and “supreme pontiff of the Church” who possesses direct and immediate episcopal authority and jurisdiction over every member of the universal church, including all the other bishops, and who also possesses the authority to speak infallibly on matters of faith and morals when speaking from the chair of Peter (ex cathedra Petri) not from the consensus of the Church (ex consensu ecclesiae) but rather in, by and from himself (ex sese)...

...The Orthodox Church, of course, has no infallible Pope who exercises direct and immediate episcopal jurisdiction over all the Church’s members in the world, including the other bishops. It has no bishop of any see that can speak in any way binding on all the faithful in matters of faith and morals. It has no curia. It has no magisterium. It has no college of cardinals. It has no international advisory council of bishops from around the world. It has no “ecumenical council”, or a council of any kind, that can be considered authoritative, still less infallible, before its decisions are taken and are universally accepted – or perhaps rejected — by all the churches that recognize each other as Orthodox.

According to traditional Orthodoxy, using the celebrated third century formula of St. Cyprian of Carthage in his controversy with the bishop of Rome, Christ’s Church knows no “bishop of bishops” (episcopus episcoporum). The “episcopate is one” (episcopatus unus est) and all of the Church’s bishops hold the same episcopal authority and exercise the same episcopal service “in solidarity” (in solidum) with each other. The holy hieromartyr also teaches that the bishop of every church who makes St. Peter’s confession of faith and receives the Holy Spirit with the authority of “binding and loosing”, sits on the “seat of Peter” (cathedra Petri.) And St. Cyprian also holds, as proven by his famous letter 69, that the bishop in his own church does nothing by himself, but acts in everything in harmony with the church’s “common council” to which, as a member and head of the church, he is accountable for everything he says and does.

These convictions, formulated so clearly and so well by St. Cyprian, are proclaimed and defended by all Orthodox doctrines and canons through the centuries. They are also demonstrated in Orthodox liturgy, including the rites of election and consecration of bishops. The Orthodox Church unequivocally rejects the teachings of Vatican Council I about the special position, prerogatives and powers of the Bishop of Rome. And today the Orthodox Church, it seems to me, should also reject the explanation of Vatican II about how bishops function in the Church, and how they and their churches are to relate to each other, including even to autocephalous churches and their primates.

So what might a version of the Vatican II doctrine about bishops look like in the Orthodox Church?

Read the rest here .

Original source.

Moscow and the OCA

Owen the Ochlophobist has some fairly remarkable news in line with two previous posts (here and here). Apparently Moscow has offered to take the OCA back under its jurisdiction, and the OCA has declined. See Owen's site for the story. For the moment I think I am gong to resist the urge to comment or leap to conclusions. I don't have enough details (i.e. what exactly did Moscow offer?). This strikes me as a case where the devil may have been in the details.

Things that make you go HMMMM

SYOSSET, NY (OCA) - On Thursday and Friday, August 26-27, 2010, His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah, several members of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Orthodox Church in America, and advisers met at the Chancery here to begin a series of broader discussions and reflections within the Orthodox Church in America regarding our participation in the Episcopal Assembly process.

Read he rest here.

An interesting post on a really boring topic

OK. Let's be honest. In the grand scheme of Orthoblogdom the topic of church administration, (unless we are talking about a scandal) is about as exciting as watching a championship chess match on payperview. And if we are talking about the much discussed Episcopal Assembly and a potential future American Orthodox Church (AOC) we would all much rather expound on why America is not mature and ready for it's own church. And why it's better that we remain under ethnic churches until we get a better grasp of real Orthodoxy and purge all of the Protestant baggage from recent converts. Never mind that as long as we are taking converts that will be a never ending battle (presuming the problem is in fact as bad as some claim). And of course totally ignoring the fact that our current ecclesiological structure here is absolutely non-canonical and that the state of the Orthodox Church in N. America is and will perpetually be one of open scandal until we put an end to the multiplicity of jurisdictions here.

But I digress.

A really important but deathly boring topic relevant to any future AOC is church administration. I am talking about the nuts and bolts of making it work. Yea yea yea, I know. Can't we just get on with a fun debate about how Catholics are really heretics and just how far the Anglicans have fallen? But this is actually an important topic. So bear with me please.

There is a new website (blog?) up called Suggestions For the Episcopal Assembly. (Hat Tip: Byzantine Texas) It's not really clear who is running it other than that it is not an official site. But I like the concept. It is a venue for constructive suggestions on how to get a future AOC up and running. The EA hopes to present some sort of viable plan to sort out our jurisdictional chaos for the consideration of the Great and Holy Synod that has been on the drawing boards for about a century now.

Which brings me to the very first post. And it is an impressive one at that. The author presents a fairly detailed suggestion for how we can carve up the United States (sans Canada) into Eparchs with each one containing multiple dioceses. He suggests that the Eparchs roughly correspond to the ten Administrative Regions used by the Federal Government. You can read the details of his (or her) suggestion here.

Are there some issues? Yes of course. But after reading the suggestion several times, I think the author has actually come up with a plan that could serve as the basis or framework if you will, for organizing the AOC into viable dioceses and lay the groundwork for a national Holy Synod.

Please leave your comments on the original post.