D
dzheremi
Guest
“Office”? “Enforced”?So you don’t have a teaching office?
So how is this one position enforced?
I don’t understand what you mean by these two words.Orthodox people, generally speaking, want to be Orthodox. To the extent that other things might be entering into the lives of traditionally Orthodox people (particularly in the diaspora in the West, where of course there are many different religious alternatives), it’s generally from ignorance which is corrected as necessary in parishes by priests, by bishops, by the Pope, etc. For instance, my bishop, HG Bishop Youssef has a Q & A section on the diocese website, which people can submit questions to (and has recently been published as a book). So the idea that there should be “enforcement”…on one hand, I can understand since you definitely do need to make sure people are actively engaged in learning and living by the correct faith; on the other hand, not everything that may arise in a particular parish or with a particular person requires the intervention of a bishop, or the clarification of a synod, etc. Usually, it is enough that a person be actively participating in the life of the Church by going to liturgy, paying attention and giving responses, receiving the sacraments, etc. And all told, we do see our bishop quite a lot (in the two years I’ve been attending, the bishop has come to us 4 or 5 times, which is pretty good considering what a tiny community we are, and how much territory the bishop has to cover when get visits the churches of the diocese), so there are many opportunities to hear his sermons, receive his guidance and blessings, etc.
As for offices…I’m not sure how to interpret that. The Coptic Orthodox Church in the UK has a media and communications office, if that’s what you mean? (I suspect not.) There have been, in recent history (since Pope Kyrillos VI), what have been called “General Bishops”, though this is rejected or questioned by many people in the Church on principle (including me, as if anyone cares), since bishops are to be tied to particular geographical locations, not general concepts or activities (e.g., HH Pope Tawadros II is, by tradition, the Bishop of Alexandria). Nevertheless, the future HH Pope Shenouda III was, prior to his elevation, one of these “general bishops” – Bishop of Christian Education. He continued the weekly question sessions he had held since those days (when he was, IIRC, Fr. Antonious al-Suryani) after becoming Pope, sometimes even in English, as appropriate to the setting.
So I would say that these positions, whether as Pope or any other bishop, or as priests, are themselves “teaching offices”, though they are not considered something separate as the RCC might define them.
And, of course, there is the liturgy itself and its hymns, and the Tasbeha/Midnight praises, and various other forms of worship, all of which instruct the faithful perhaps even better than Q&As might (due to their pervasive place in the life of the Church; we really do every year look to Holy Week, for instance, for its very, very long services full of readings, hymns, special melodies and other things that tie us very firmly to the Paschal narrative). It was a few years before I could actually attend a Coptic liturgy, so after leaving the RCC my first real “catechesis”, if you could call it that, was tracking down a liturgy book and learning its hymns in advance of attending an actual church (and later and Agpeya, and a few history books, etc.). They’re very, very instructive. Friends of mine of the Malankara Orthodox Syriac tradition who also know the Coptic tradition have mentioned approvingly that while the Coptic hymns do not often rise to the level of exquisite verbal ornamentation found in the Syriac hymns, they are all the more instructive and beautiful in their earthiness. I agree.
So we might not have exactly what you have in the form you have it, but neither do we worry about that (and neither should you worry about not functioning as we do).
