Handwritings on the Wall

Now a bishop must be above reproach… he must be well thought of by outsiders, or he may fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

(I Tim. 3:2,7 RSV)

The inimitable archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese has done it again. Elpidophoros used the occasion of Bartholomew’s name day, June 10, to make the provocative move of returning to St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan for another service.

St. Bart’s has updated their pride flag since this photograph was taken in 2017.

Now we have the transcript of the little non-homily that he gave at the vespers service there, about which I have some things to say. First of all, the clericalism that spills trippingly from the archbishop’s lips leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Elpidophoros lays the obsequious praise on thick when he says,

“His All-Holiness is the very definition of ecumenicity,” and, “The Ecumenical Patriarch is a spiritual father for all people, whether they realize it or not.”

I write this on Father’s Day. Allow me to use this occasion to say unequivocally that, if Bartholomew is to be termed a father, he has failed miserably in his role.

Take Ukraine, for example. Bartholomew has betrayed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by creating a phony copy of a church by a similar name at the behest of corrupt political leaders in Ukraine and the United States. Now that the war with Russia is on, Bartholomew has nothing to say in protest against the monstrous treatment that the OCU and Pres. Zelensky have dished out to Met. Onuphry, Abp. Pavel, and the monks and seminarians of the Kievan Caves Lavra. UOC clergy and their parishes throughout Ukraine have been placed in the crucible of terrible suffering for Christ. If Bartholomew is a spiritual father, as Elpidophoros claims, he has behaved like a father who has abandoned his children. He needs to be held responsible for it.

Saints of the lavra

Must it be reiterated to a hierarch that we Orthodox refuse to accept the contention that the “Ecumenical Patriarch” is “a spiritual father for all people”? “All people“, you say? An Eastern Pope is he? Elpidophoros is certainly a stubborn man. He just will not drop the heretical notion of primus sine paribus. No, sir, that patriarch – no patriarch – is first without equal, regardless of the personage who occupies that throne or any throne. An incumbent Patriarch of Constantinople may be an unparalleled saint like St. John Chrysostom, but his preeminence among bishops is only one of honor, not one of authority. It was Rome’s own claim to universal and immediate authority throughout the Church that ironically led Rome astray from the Church, where it remains to this day.

“The Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered.”

(Catechism of the Catholic Church, Para. No. 882)

This papist claim is rejected by the Orthodox Church, which maintains an ecclesiastical polity of conciliarity. All ruling bishops are equals who render honor to their several patriarchs, but do not relinquish authority over their own dioceses. When they need to make decisions binding upon the wider Church they meet in councils

“His All-Holiness acts like a spiritual wheel in the world – holding the traditions fast in the hub of the Holy Mother Church. But he reaches out as well through spokes that extend in love and compassion to all people. No one is ever beneath or unworthy of the love of God.”

Elpidophoros

Met. Onuphry, UOC

Yeah, tell that to Metropolitan Onuphry, whom Bartholomew has betrayed. No one is unworthy of love except perhaps the people of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which “His All-Holiness” has abandoned like a deadbeat father! Elpidophoros’ obsequious praise rings hollow when one realizes that he is partly responsible for the current suffering in Ukraine. It’s outrageous.

“Being in this church, borrowed from another Christian tradition, is a sign of our expansive and embracing love for all people. It is a symbolic act that many will try to interpret through their own filters of grievance, prejudice, and lack of basic human kindness.”

Elpidophoros

If Elpidophoros did not know what he was doing the first time he rented all-gay St. Bart’s Episcopal Church two years ago, he certainly must have known this time. St. Bart’s is a buzzing hive of the Woke Gospel of Sexual Deviancy. It is not the behavior of a bishop who is above reproach to purposely leave his own cathedral behind and make a not-so-subtle gesture of solidarity with the flaming heretics at St. Bart’s. Elpidophoros’ very presence there officiating at a vespers service was in-your-face scandalous behavior. He could just as well have conducted the service at the cathedral on 79th Street or down in the Battery at St. Nicholas Shrine, but he was deliberately making a gesture to the faithful of the Greek Orthodox Church and other Orthodox in this country. What gesture, you say? Elpidophoros was raising his proverbial middle finger at us. We know it, and he knows that we know it, but he did it despite of it all. A lot of people are justifiably angry at him.

Ouch!

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord

Ephesians 6:4 KJV

That’s a note for spiritual fathers, as well. Don’t provoke us with deliberate acts of spite and veiled words of scorn.

“Because of this vision, His All-Holiness has stood – an immovable rock of faith and piety – against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the complicity of the Russian Orthodox Church in its shameful support for this unconscionable war of aggression.”

Elpidophoros

War-torn Ukraine

If HAH Bartholomew had not taken sides against the Russians and created a bogus ecclesial structure before the special military operation began, Ukraine might not be in this mess. Certainly the Ukrainian Orthodox Church would not be, since the Ukrainian government would not have a counterfeit church to claim as the legitimate one. Elpidophoros might be able to proclaim the love of Christ for the Russian Orthodox, too. Both he and his boss may be in for an historically rude awakening if Russian wins this war and occupies Ukraine. The vaunted Ecumenical Patriarchate may be taken down a peg then.

“But more than his long and glorious tenure, he (Bart.) has opened the Mother Church’s embrace to the world, by engaging world leaders at every level. And now, with World Orthodoxy on the brink of fragmentation, he has stood firm for the truth of the Gospel.”

Elpidophoros

Oh, please! World Orthodoxy is indeed on the brink of fragmentation, and Bartholomew’s antagonism to Russia and his ultra vires meddling in the affairs of Ukraine have been the direct cause of the split. Perhaps Bartholomew considers himself to be a true disciple of Jesus Christ who proclaimed that he had not come to bring peace, but a sword. (Note the sardonic tone.)

Elpi and Bart

Elpidophoros’ first visit in 2021 to St. Bart’s Episcopal Church was shocking; this second visit is absolutely exasperating. Unconscionable. I know that I speak for many other people when I express my disgust at his chutzpah, a quality of character that is not normally associated with of a bishop who is above reproach. It’s astounding that Elpidophoros has not been deposed for his repeatedly outrageous behavior. How far has the Greek Orthodox Church sunk that they continue to tolerate this man? How long will the other American hierarchs put up with his heresies?

Elpidophoros, the one and only archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, is back at St. Bart’s. Yes, it’s true. Elpi is returning to the grand byzantine structure to officiate at Great Vespers on Saturday, June 10.

Symbolism and virtue signaling are part of the clerical syllabary. Without speaking a word, a bishop uses familiar non-verbal communication to indicate the authority of his office and the policies that he plans to execute. Nothing else need be said in addition to the obvious symbols displayed at the juxtaposition of Abp. Elpidophoros, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church and the Feast of St. Bartholomew.

Patriarch Bartholomew, the Narcissist, appears to give his blessing to this travesty on his name day.

Nevertheless, I am going to say them anyway because Elpidophoros’ plans for tomorrow amount to insult added to injury. This isn’t the first time that the archbishop will have gone out of his way to pray in this most unorthodox Protestant parish. He went to St. Bart’s in June of 2021, not for Vespers, but to celebrate the Divine Liturgy! Even then it was clear to all that St. Bart’s stood for the “queering of Manhattan”. Their website promoted such perverse sexual policies, and the gay flag of many colors snapped smartly outside the west door to the church. It was no mystery that the parish had been captured by the deceptively “progressive movement”.

Even if Elpidophoros had passed under the rainbow flag in a tee shirt, it would have raised eyebrows. But on that occasion, he boldly entered the church, vested in his archiepiscopal finery, and celebrated at the same high altar that is used weekly by heretics and scoundrels. The message communicated by this brazen act was this: We identify with you and concur with your policies. I don’t think that I am reading too much into the symbolism.

St. Bart’s Pride Flag now has a transsexual chevron, evidence of ever-deepening depravity.

That act by Elpidophoros caused a firestorm of protest. We need to pause and remind ourselves that the objections raised by many who were scandalized were not raised on the basis of some novel teaching favored by the masses. On the ontrary, they were made in support of the Orthodox Church’s own teachings against sexual sin. The people said the very things that the archbishop himself should have been saying! Why had he turned the tables on us? Why were the laity put in the uncomfortable place where they felt the need to guard the Faith against its own hierarchy?

One would think that Elpi would have learned from his gross error in judgement two years ago. But no, he certainly did not. He’s back at it again, going to the same parish on the same occasion to do the same thing. This sort of recalcitrant action indicates one of two things: either 1. Elpi is stupid; or 2. Elpi just doesn’t give a damn what the Church teaches about sex and he’s out to overturn the age-old norms. I’ve met his eminence, so I doubt whether he is stupid, but having spoken with him one on one, I suspect he doesn’t give a damn. He has a counterargument for every conventional opinion, whether it be on this subject or on the Ukrainian situation or on issues of GOA polity.

What we’re seeing here is this, folks. Elpi is raising his archepiscopal middle finger to the GOA and to all of the Orthodox paying attention. Remember that your silence will amount to tacit approval.

Some of us will remember exactly where we were when we were told that Pres. John F. Kennedy had been murdered. I was sitting in my fourth-grade classroom at school when Mrs. Kehoe told us that, despite the fact that we may have our political differences, that didn’t take away from the gravity of the assassination of the president of the United States. I had no idea what political differences she might have been talking about, but I guessed that adults just had their political differences.

JFK and RFK

I have my own political differences with JFK’s nephew, Bobby Kennedy, jr., but I hope like hell that, by some fortuitous aligning of the stars, he becomes the Democratic nominee for president. The Manchurian Candidate who is currently pulling our nation apart board by board has just got to go. Biden and Bobby are both elderly Irish Catholic men from the Northeast, but Bobby is a man of integrity, whereas Joe Biden is an apostate puppet with no spine. 

The $64,000 question is whether the Democratic Establishment thinks that Biden can steal his way to reëlection or whether Kennedy has the gravitas to go toe to toe with Trump or DeSantis and is therefore the better bet for the campaign. If the Democrat power-brokers who denied Bernie Sanders his shot at the nomination in 2016 decide that they’re going to stick with Biden next year, just you watch how they turn savage and cut Bobby off at the knees.

Get the book! Read the book!

I’ll probably vote for the Republican opponent, but if Bobby gets the nomination and wins the general election, then the deep pharmaceutical state who prospered so handsomely from the manufactured pandemic, and the dark interior of the federal government will be in grave trouble indeed. So, for that reason, I have ambivalent feelings of both expectation and dread when I consider a Kennedy presidency. Expectation because Bobby will take names and kick ass; dread because Bobby is a Kennedy and the Kennedys have a way of coming to tragic ends.

It’s almost Holy Week so my mind turns toward the liturgies that we will soon sing to glorify Christ’s death and resurrection. The Western Christians, especially the Roman Catholics and other liturgical churches celebrate Palm Sunday today.

The Tridentine (Council of Trent) High Mass, was celebrated (served) as a solemn (incense) sung (Gregorian chant) mass and was a glorious thing indeed. The Low Mass was an abridged daily version of the High Mass. This “Latin Mass” was for four centuries thegolden standard of worship in the Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic (High Church) traditions of the West.

The priest elevates the chalice at the Words of Institution during High Mass

Then the 1960’s happened. The Second Vatican Council was called by Pope John XXIII and continued by Pope Paul VI. An Italian liturgist by the name of Bugnini was commissioned to edit the Sacramentarium and he mucked it up for all time. Him I quote:

“We must strip from our Catholic prayers and from the Catholic liturgy everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethren that is for the Prostestants.” – Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, main author of the New Mass, L’Osservatore Romano, March 19, 1965

Thoroughly modern Novus Ordo, thoroughly lacking mystery.

Having strayed toward Roman Catholicism on my way from traditional Anglicanism to Orthodoxy, I can tell you frankly that the Novus Ordo (New Order) is the religious equivalent of a McDonald’s happy meal. Gone is the penitential spirit, the deep reverence and the transcendental solemnity that was the treasure of the Western Christendom until that liturgical butcher (strong language, I know!) took a meat cleaver to the mass and made it into a drive-in hamburger. (Aside: I remember when McDonald’s ‘burgers cost 10 cents, and that is about as much as they were worth.)

Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand expressed himself in even more forthright terms: “Truly, if one of the devils in C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters had been entrusted with the ruin of the liturgy he could not have done it better.”

Geoffrey Hull’s magnum opus on the Mass

For those readers who are inclined to look behind the curtain and discover the origins of this “new and improved” mass and how it turned the Catholic Church on its head, I cannot say enough to recommend The Banished Heart by Australian philologist Geoffrey Hull. It is a masterpiece of research and yet is eminently readable. Western Christians who read it from cover to cover will say to themselves, “Aha, so that’s how it all came about!”

When one recognizes how faithful the Orthodox Church has maintained its traditions over the centuries, it’s disappointing to realize that the conversion from the Roman mass of yesteryear to the current substandard one has served only to drive the Romans further away from reconciliation with the Orthodox.

(cf. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, Line 33)

Those are the words that came into my head when I watched the news. The punk actor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been elevated inexplicably to president of the largest country in Europe outside Russia is deliberately persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). He has expelled the hundreds of monks and students at the Lavra (large monastery) of the Kievan Caves on the pretense that the ecclesiastical property belongs to the Ukrainian state, which will do with it whatever it will. The ostensible reason for the eviction? They say these religious are accused of having ties too close to Moscow, even though they and the UOC have demonstrated their unfailing loyalty to Ukraine during the year-old war. The UOC has even declared its full independence from the Russian Orthodox Church. This unjustified persecution is an action that is tantamount to expelling the pope and the curia from the Vatican for being good Catholics loyal to the Roman Catholic Church.

Mr. Tough Guy

Tucker Carlson addressed the issue with an Orthodox guest at the thirty-minute mark of his presentation on March 14. They discussed it for three minutes, so now millions of Americans know about the situation, Carlson’s show is so popular. He has brought the issue up before because this is not the first step in Zelenskyy’s crackdown on the UOC. However, what has not been mentioned is the complicity of Bartholomew’s faux church, the OCU. That would be the so-called “Orthodox Church in Ukraine”, a bastard ecclesial group hatched just five years ago by the machinations of the vaunted patriarch of Constantinople, the one and only self-aggrandizing prelate by the name of Bartholomew. Certain members of our own U.S. federal government, specifically the Dept. of State, were involved in the creation of this monstrosity along with Zelenskyy’s predecessor, former president Petro Poroshenko.

Our sorry excuse for a U.S. president is all-in for Zelenskyy and his defense of Ukraine against Russia, so he and his government are partly responsible for this present persecution. As a religionist, Biden is about as unserious as they come, so there’s no surprise there. St. Patrick’s Day has recently passed, but it’s doubtful that our Irish Catholic president is aware that Patrick is an orthodox saint, since the apostle of the Emerald Isle lived and evangelized long before the Great Schism between East and West. If Biden were aware of that little factoid, would he care? Probably not.

Nevertheless, now that we know the ugly truth of Zelenskyy’s persecution of Ukraine’s genuine Orthodox Church, we must ask ourselves whether this means nothing to us. Tucker Carlson raised the question about the church leaders in the United States. Do we hear their voices in protest? Where is the outrage that this persecution of fellow Christians is taking place in a Christian country?

As of the deadline for eviction from the monastery, March 29, several metropolitan bishops have voiced their protests, even some American ones. Most notable amongst the Orthodox hierarchs may be Patriarch Porfirije of Serbia, whom I quote in full:

Patriarch Porfirije of Serbia

Appeal
in connection with state terror
against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Joe and Elpi are chums.

In contrast to that very clear statement by the Serbian patriarch in support of the Lavra, we have this rubber chicken statement today from the archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in America:

“(We) are compelled to lend our voices, our strength, our energy, to the defense of liberty and democracy in every way that we are able. To speak for the voiceless. To advocate for the defenseless. To fight for the powerless, even as we are bold to speak truth to power.”

That was Abp. Elpidophoros speaking in Washington at a dinner on the occasion of the annual celebration of Greek Independence.

High-minded platitudes these are indeed, and yet not a word was spoken by the vaunted archbishop in defense of the innocent monks and seminarians of the largest and oldest monastery in Ukraine on the very day of their eviction! What an opportunity he was granted to support his fellow Orthodox! What a disappointment that he didn’t take it! The man is absolutely tone-deaf. But, of course we know why. Oh yes. Elpi stands in full support of Patriarch Bartholomew, the Grand Wizard of Istanbul, who offered and executed the “tomos of autocephaly” to the OCU. That is the aforementioned Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which is neither Orthodox – because it is an illegitimate organization, nor a Church – because there is only one Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The so-called metropolitan of the OCU is Epiphany Dumenko, a schismatic imposter whose very existence snarls in contempt for the true shepherd of Ukraine, Met. Onuphry of the UOC.

Epiphany and Bartholomew, arch-schismatics

O Bart, Bart, wherefore art thou Bart?! It is at crucial times like this that we look eastward toward the rising sun and to Istanbul, hoping for some utterance of consolation and spiritual encouragement from our Chief Shepherd. But, what endearing words do we hear from his excellency, the Holiest of Holies and most worthy Ecumenical Patriarch?

…The cacophonous sound of crickets on a summer’s night...

So far it appears that Patriarch Bartholomew has had nothing whatsoever to say about the eviction of the rightful residents of the Lavra of the Kievan Caves. At this point, his silence has become deafening. Will we hear from him soon? That’s doubtful. What thief would raise his hand and cry out, “I admit it. I’m the one who stole the money!”? Bart’s uncharacteristic reticence belies his complicity in the overthrow of the Lavra and the UOC in general. He’s the chief conspirator in this confounded intrigue. Church historians will hold him culpable for this bait-and-switch that has led to so much suffering. The schismatic patriarch will be held responsible for driving a wedge into Orthodox unity that may take decades, even centuries, to overcome.

Anaxios!