Ellopos Blog

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Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, referring to people’s reaction against Russia’s participation in WCC gatherings, remarked that if anybody says the Russian Church ‘should withdraw into isolation and stop bearing witness to its position in a loud voice before the whole world, then this man should prove clearly why we should do it’. (Moscow, November 9, Interfax) 

Fair demand, yet it’s not enough for a metropolitan to ask for the reasons; he needs also open ears and heart to feel perhaps unreasoned hopes and fears. If, as Kirill says, Russia is exceptionally hostile to the World Council of Churches, maybe this common feeling expresses a rejection of conditions and prospects undescribed by the official purpose of the participation to WCC, that is, maybe the faithful of Russia sense some real danger, and even if they can’t ‘prove it clearly’, their bishop should be able to understand or at least try to understand.  

Unless Kirill means that the faithful of Russia are demented, which I don’t believe he means, then why should they object to Russia ‘bearing witness to its position in a loud voice before the whole world’? Do they, perhaps, sense something else besides or beyond ‘bearing witness’? 

First of all, what does ‘bearing witness’ means in the WCC? For example, do Catholics of Protestants need these gatherings in order to know Orthodoxy? If they do, they won’t; if they were not able to know Orthodoxy after so many centuries, why will they know it now by some gatherings?  

The people of the Orthodox Churches perhaps fear that in these gatherings there is happening rather a sort of ‘negotiations’ than a witnessing to the truth. It is their task to understand and explain their reaction, as is the task of the shepherds to explain why these gatherings have indeed a real meaning. If this meaning is just ‘being in contact’, showing ‘good intentions’, etc., let them say so, let them assure the people of the Orthodox Churches that no doctrinal union is machinated or wanted, and then let them keep participating as much as they wish.  

Related (automatic selection):

• Christianity and Islam
• Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue: Understanding the Priorities
• What if a Pope became Orthodox?
• The union of the Churches is the best way to eliminate Christianity
• Phanar and Papacy: the Church as a lobby
• Papacy: The Worst Enemy of Christianity
• Orthodoxy and Papacy : A Discussion
• Catholic-Orthodox dialogue: Let us surpass each other in folly
• A union of Orthodoxy with the papal clergy will destroy Christianity permanently
• The Papal Chrislamism

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