I’m and ex-Catholic who join the Orthodox Church 7 years ago.
My being Orthodox Christian was the best move for me; and I don’t happen to speak for others who have converted to Orthodoxy.
You asked the questions, do I understand your faith? My answer is yes. What you don’t understand is that I felt called to go to the Orthodoxy in the mid-1980’s. I don’t why I felt so drawn to it. GOD calls people and it is GOD who saves not men in robes. I would wait to go for sometime after as you will read on in this chat.
All I can say is that one day I a radio broadcast on my radio and I felt to want to listen to it. When I started to listen to the Orthodox radio broadcast I just had to listen in on it. It was the reason that I started to want to attend Eastern Orthodoxy Church. That radio broadcast was maybe around 1985. It wasn’t until 1992 when I first start to attend my first Divine Liturgy. I wasn’t until around Jan. 7, 2001 that I would convert to Orthodox Christian faith.
As you read on you will see other things that may have or may not haved helped in my conversion to Orthodoxy, but it didn’t hurt.
One of the first introductions to Orthodox belief was from my mother who was of Sicilian back ground. You’re asking why my mother would do that??? She learned to same way from her parents who would teach her the faith. They didn’t know where it came from but they would pass it on down the line of family to family with every generation leading to the first one.
Sicilian people were once part of an great Orthodox country at one time and when the Catholic invaded that part of Italy; they forced Byzantine Christians to adopt Latinize ways. Orthodox faith was lossed. Just look at history of that part of the world.
What didn’t die was the ways they would pratices the faith. Stories told from one generation to the next and the way we would make the sign of the cross with our first three fingers together. and the last two folded down. The first three stood for Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The last two stood for True God and True Man.
I did know at the time about the history of Italy as well as I do now. I was more into US history then European history.
I could say more but I don’t have that much time to do so. You wanted to know more about converts. Ask someone who has converted and they will tell you why maybe.
Got to go.
Orthodox Patriarch Says Unity an Obligation
Sends Message to Vatican on Feast of St. Andrew
By Miriam Diez i Bosch
ISTANBUL, Turkey, DEC. 5, 2007 (
Zenit.org).- It is an obligation to reclaim the spiritual, sacramental and doctrinal unity that Europe enjoyed prior to the schism of the East and West, said the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople.
Bartholomew I said this Friday in a letter addressed to a delegation sent by Benedict XVI to Istanbul for the regular exchange of visits between the two Churches for the feasts of St. Andrew, Nov. 30, and Sts. Peter and Paul, June 29.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, led the delegation.
Bartholomew I affirmed the presence of the delegation “both strengthens and seals the bonds of love and trust between our Churches, bonds which have been cultivated in recent decades, and which have been especially established by the visit” of Benedict XVI in November 2006.
The patriarch also emphasized “that the peaceful coexistence of Christians, in a spirit of unity and concord, must constitute the fundamental concern of us all.”
Battling secularism
Bartholomew I recognized that in an age in which there is a rise of “secularism and relativism, or even nihilism, especially in the Western world,” we must derive inspiration from the example of the Apostle Andrew, who knew how to “remain upstanding through the strength of Christ” in spite of “numerous difficulties.”
The example of St. Andrew offers an opportunity to “pray together more intently for the restoration of unity within the Christian world,” urged Bartholomew I, adding that “the fracture of this unity has been the cause of so much trouble in humanity, while its consequences have proved tragic.”
Bartholomew I emphasized that the Enlightenment philosophy in the West and the French Revolution meant a true “cultural revolution aimed at replacing the previous Christian tradition of the Western world with a new, non-Christian, concept of man and society.”
He said this “gave rise in many ways” to a “militant atheism and totalitarianism which, over the last two centuries, have unfortunately claimed the lives of millions of innocent victims.”
The patriarch continued: "Today, then, it is our obligation more than ever to reclaim the Christian roots of Europe and the spiritual, sacramental and doctrinal unity that it enjoyed prior to the schism of our two Churches.