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Alexander Kalomoiros
The union of the Churches is the best way to eliminate Christianity

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 6

Corruption extends : 'faith' of the laboratory 

 

Byzantine music began to be Europeanized and degenerated into theatrical four-part harmony. The icons began to look too austere and ugly to the eyes of the females of the «upper» classes, who wanted «sweet Jesuses» full of indulgence for their iniquities, incapable of evoking awe and reverence. The beards and long hair of the clergy began to bother them, and the clergy, responsive to the demands of the contemporary public, began to groom … Τhe theologians, future priests, and hierarchs were not born in the bosom of the Church, their natural mother, but in the bosom of a state university full of the stench of rationalism and spiritual shallowness, without any possibility of tasting the mystical life of holiness in Christ, which alone makes true theologians. And so there sprouted up, like tares in the Church, theologians who had their minds filled with many philosophical theories of Protestant or Roman origin, but their hearts empty of the life of Orthodoxy.

These people were incapable of seeing the chasm that divides the Eastern Church from the Western «churches». They considered it only a question of dogmatic formulas, not a matter of life and essence. For them life in Christ was a series of emotional states and ethical acts, just as it is for Westerners. The revelation (the inner vision) of God, the living experience of the presence of Christ, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that is, the abiding of truth in a man’s heart, were unknown to them. When they speak of truth, they mean a cut-and-dried dogma. Dogma, however, for them as for the Westerners, was a separate world of intellectual formulas, burdensome enough, whose value, after this split between life and faith, they were incapable of appreciating.

The foundations, then, upon which even our most well-intentioned theologians were going to build in order to defend their Orthodoxy, were rotten to the core. It is frightening, when one considers that the whole of contemporary Greek religious life is built upon these rotten foundations. At one time the piety of the people sprang from the monasteries, which were its spiritual bulwark and guide; in the Greek Kingdom piety came to be founded on the theologian, lay or clerical, whom we have described.

This theologian, imitating Western examples, organized brotherhoods and Christian unions and took preaching and catechism into his own hands. And whereas before, the piety of a place had as its center the local monastery and the priests of the Church, and the Christian of Area A did not differ in any way from the Christian of Area B because all were children of the same Orthodox Church, now the theologian organized factions; and now in one and the same place there are Christians of Faction A and Christians of Faction B, always rivals and distrusting, divided - without either side understanding what their differences are.

But in spite of all the hate and schisms between them, the factions agree that, as far as the Westerners are concerned, «there are more things uniting us than there are separating us», and «we must look to the things which unite us and overlook those which separate us». In other words, they regard union and love with their Western «brothers» (whom they have never seen or known) easier than with their Orthodox compatriots and neighbors, whom they see daily and know. As we have said, today people labor for the love of man, for the abstract love of humanity, at the same moment that they are incapable of loving their neighbor. …

 

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      Cf.  Φώτης Κόντογλου, Κατὰ Ἑνωτικῶν * Pope Benedict XVI, The Papal Science * The Pope wants to baptize Russia! * The labyrinth of Papacy * The Papal Chrislamism * A union of Orthodoxy with the papal clergy will destroy Christianity permanently * The union of Orthodoxy with Papacy : a discussion

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