For any Orthodox Converts: Why did you leave the Catholic Church for the Orthodox Church?

[Madaglan]

Thanks Nicholas! I was being sooo ignorant, alas… But what if there is no consensus in the synod?

What if a Papal Conclave reaches a deadlock?

I think Catholics can agree that the Holy Spirit does wonderful things.

 

[ASimpleSinner]

Any how, there are plenty of converts to Orthodoxy just here in the U.S. today - myself and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other individuals over the last several decades - as well as an abundance of entire Protestant churches. 2,000 people together in one expanded Protestant Church acrosss the U.S. in the 1980’s, another Church just 2 years ago in central Virginia and plenty before, in-between and since then. There are several books addressing some of the conversions that are taking place both here an in Europe.

In fact there are NOT millions of converts in the US - not anywhere close to it.

The OCA for example has self-propogated the outlandish figure of “1.03M” members for over a decade. Best guestimates (including one done by Fr. John Ivanov) put the membership numbers well below 50K.

Lies, damned lies, statistics and ecclesial statistics considered… Anyone interested in doing a REAL head count of weekly attendance and contributing members?

. Ten years ago some articles left us wondering if there would be any Baptist/Pentecostal/Evangelical churches left in America. They were all becoming Orthodox!

I do not wish scandalize too much when I say, I think that the early and exhuberrant projections for growth and retention were more optimistic than realistic. Kinda like the one point in my childhood when I thought the Chicago Bulls would win the championship every year for decades…

But if we could look to the OCA numbers…

I TOTALLY dismiss the any number in the 7-figure range at this point. There are NOT 6 Million Orthodox in the US. There are NOT 2 million Orthodox in the Greek Church. There are NOT 1 million in the OCA.

What is the ratio of clergy to parishes, or membership to parishes or clergy to membership? Do more clergy and parishes mean the OCA has grown? Good hard numbers that I trust have been hard to come by. But some of what I am seeing is leading me to indicate that they have been losing ground by not retaining the children of Orthodox families.

With some total 1026 clergy listed in the last year book (2006), 197 of them deacons, 829 priests…

Using the Hartford Institute’s estimated membership of 39,000

You get -
ratio of clergy to laity: 38.01
ratio of priests to laity: 47.04
39,000 / 456 parishes = 85.52 members per parish

Using Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff’s estimated membership of 27,196

You get -
ratio of clergy to laity: 26.50
ratio of priests to laity: 32.85
27,196 / 456 parishes = 59.64 members per parish

(YES, some of those priests are retired. Accounting for that could make some numbers look better, some numbers look worse.)

Where the OCA has grown, has been in their ethnic diocese – through immigration.

Now the OCA is different from the Antiochians to be sure… But If and when I can find statistics on Antiochian clergy, I suspect that there numbers will not be all that different.

The point? Not to attack the OCA… but to be realistic about the convert boomlet.

The point is that we are at worst we are dying. At best we are trading in our ethnic enclaves for essentially social enclaves of small personal chapels of people who take time to explain to co-workers the chotki on their wrist, why they cross themselves funny and on some days of the year are forced to ask for breadsticks without butter and shrimp linguini with red sauce when they go to the Olive Garden for lunch with co-workers. Served by a whole lot of clergy doing the same.

Read the Hopko Letter.

Father laments:

• the virtual reduction of church life among many clergy to liturgical services and ritual practices, with uncritical imitations of old world practices and subjective alterations of our received rites and texts

• the virtual reduction of supra-parochial church life to liturgical services, ecclesiastical celebrations and social events

• our church’s failure to attract American born Orthodox young people to our seminaries and monasteries (for if we did not have the converts, those born abroad, and the clergy children that we do in our seminaries and monasteries, we would have almost no seminarians and monastics at all!)

• our church’s failure to support and foster a vibrant monastic and missionary movement

• the misrepresentation in and outside the church of its statistical figures (such as that our church has 400,00 members when less than 30,000 identify themselves as members)

• dioceses that have fewer members than their cathedral churches alone had 50 years ago

• the point where a church of 200 people is considered to be large

• the loss of the influence and respect that our church and many of its leaders once hand among Orthodox and non-Orthodox in North American and abroad.

When you are a convert reading about other converts in a parish with many converts it is easy to think we are all, well, converting.

Today’s Orthodox convert was yesterday’s Anglican. Orthodoxy has succeeded in supplanting the former as the non-Roman option.

Why?

1. It is more accessible to the English speaker then ever before.
2. Episcopalianism has become less and less atractive to Evangelicals.

Now that the erstwhile Evangelical on the pilgramage trail no longer looks at Orthodoxy and says “Its all Greek to me” or looks at Episcopalianism and says “Now that is some Catholicism I can live with!”

In the last 20 years Icons and chotki have trendily vied with books on “Celtic Spirituality” (20 years on and I still have no clear idea what the hell the latter concretely is - except for any one author’s take on what was done in Ireland 1300 years before he or she was born). At one point I had cynically contemplated setting up an online business to sell packets that included chotki, faux ancient Greek icons and Celtic St. Brigid crosses. I would do a killer business among RC soccer moms and Evangelicals.

If the boomlet gives rise to a serious American Orthodoxy, Lord have mercy and be praised. At this stage there seems to be a vascilation between nationalistic/ethno-centric sentiment meeting converts who traded in their copy of “My Utmost for His Highest” for “The Way of a Pilgram” and who now proof-text with Scipture AND the Fathers. “Our people” versus people who are our “Would-be great-great-grandparents.” (Have you met the young convert couple who has tried to homestead and forgo electricity while living off the heat of a franklin stove and using oil lamps yet? I have.)

The cradle-dox ethnic club types have kept the doors shut for a good many years. (If Orthodoxy is true, why do I have to be Greek/Russian/Ukrainian/Rusyn?) And the neo-dox have left some lamenting Western “Eastern Orthodoxy” as Boutique Religion.

We have had the boomlet already. The boom will begin when a sound, self-confident, self-evident, practicical vision and experience of Orthodox life in Peoria, 2008 (No matter who your grandparents were) is realized.

 

[ASimpleSinner]

2,000 people together in one expanded Protestant Church acrosss the U.S. in the 1980’s,

Worth reading:
Ben Lomond: When Orthodoxy Shunned Its Converts

That 2000+ were splintered with many of the priests being de-frocked and then some being re-ordained by the Patriarch of Jerusalem for a diocese set up with no other purpose than to serve as a rival to the Antiochians.

Also worth looking at a bit…
Metropolitan Phlip responds to Patriarchate of Jerusalem’s action

 

[Nicholas82]

The cradle-dox ethnic club types have kept the doors shut for a good many years. (If Orthodoxy is true, why do I have to be Greek/Russian/Ukrainian/Rusyn?) And the neo-dox have left some lamenting Western “Eastern Orthodoxy” as Boutique Religion.

QUOTE]

I’m Half German, a quarter Polish and a mix of Scottish, Welsh, French and Dutch and I attend an Antiochian parish with sons and daughters of Lebanese immigrants, Arabs, Serbs, Bosnians, Russians, and a Polish immigrant and a priest of Egyptian descent… I’ve never felt expected to be any of those ethnicities nor was I anything but warmly welcomed by all.

Speaking of ethnic clubs, it is interesting that my city has 5 Roman Catholic churches within a mile of each other each traditionally serving an ethnic group: the ‘Irish church’; the ‘Polish church’; the ‘Italian Church’; the ‘German Church’ etc… and yes they are still basically divided in such a way.

 

[Nicholas82]

The cradle-dox ethnic club types have kept the doors shut for a good many years. (If Orthodoxy is true, why do I have to be Greek/Russian/Ukrainian/Rusyn?)

I’m Half German, a quarter Polish and a mix of Scottish, Welsh, French and Dutch and I attend an Antiochian parish with Lebanese, Arabs, Serbs, Bosnians, Russians, and a Polish immigrant and a priest of Egyptian descent… I’ve never felt expected to be any of those ethnicities nor was I anything but warmly welcomed by all.

Speaking of ethnic clubs, it is interesting that my city has 5 Roman Catholic churches within a mile of each other each traditionally serving an ethnic group: the ‘Irish church’; the ‘Polish church’; the ‘Italian Church’; the ‘German Church’ etc… and yes they are still basically divided in such a way.

 

[Mickey]

The orthodox ultimately report to their local governments.

 

[Mickey]

Yes. James was the Bishop of Jerusalem, and he agreed with St. Peter, the Head of the physical Church.

Read Acts 15 again. St James makes the final judgement.

 

[Mickey]

your response as per usual is to offer a meaningless quip

Sigh. More ad hominem.

your trademark glib emoticons

The emoticons are not mine. Sigh. More ad hominem.

It isn’t great advertising

I am not here to advertise.

As to the wrong-headed assertion

Sigh. More ad hominem.

If your wild ideas were accurate

I thought you would rather watch paint dry…

it would ALSO be fair to say that the Muslims are the children of the christologically challenged East, and that the Bolsheviks and their godless reign of terror are the children of Orthodoxy.

To say this would be a figment of your imagination.

ludicrous and problematic your assertions in fact truly are.

Sigh. More ad hominem.

 

[Mickey]

But perhaps you meant
“Mohammedism was not borne of Holy Orthodoxy”?

Oops!

 

[Mickey]

Hi StMarina303ad

Glad to hear that your part Sicilian.

May GOD bless the growth the Sicilian Byzantine culture and I hope to see all of Sicily one day become Orthodox area once again.

Our brothers and sisters need embrace culture as Orthodox Christians and not Latins.

Good to hear from you.

GOD bless you.

Frank J.

I am part Sicilian also. Cool!

 

[Mickey]

Today’s Orthodox convert was yesterday’s Anglican.

Oh, that’s rich.

(20 years on and I still have no clear idea what the hell the latter concretely is…

Please try to reign in your language.

 

[w_stewart]

They do what Tradition taught us to do - they take the issue to a priest. If the priest can’t settle the matter, it goes before the Bishop. If the Bishop can’t settle the matter, it goes before the Patriarch. If the Patriarch can’t settle the matter then a Council or Synod is called and the matter is settled.

Who shall call the council? And what if one local church does not agree the convening of a council? Who has the last to make the decision?

 

[Mickey]

Don’t waste your time. I already tried pointing out the bolded portion above. It bounces off them like rubber, as if it were the most nonsensical rambling that they had ever heard.

Roman Catholicism spawned protestanism well after Rome left Holy Orthodoxy–they are **your **proteges.

 

[Mickey]

Who shall call the council? And what if one local church does not agree the convening of a council? Who has the last to make the decision?

There have never been the fictitious scenarios that you set forth here. Do not play “what if” games with the Holy Spirit.

 

[w_stewart]

There have never been the fictitious scenarios that you set forth here. Do not play “what if” games with the Holy Spirit.

Why? The Orthodox Churches have been paralyzed since they separated from the Catholic Church. No single Ecumenical Council had been convened because of the absence of a single head to authoritatively convene one. My “what if” is based on fact.

 

[Mickey]

Why? The Orthodox Churches have been paralyzed since they separated from the Catholic Church. No single Ecumenical Council had been convened because of the absence of a single head to authoritatively convene one. My “what if” is based on fact.

Your “what if” is based on fiction. The Holy Orthodox Church has not needed a full blown Ecumenical council–we did not have to deal with the
“paralyzation” that the reformation caused the Church of Rome. And Rome is still struggling with that one.

 

[w_stewart]

Your “what if” is based on fiction. The Holy Orthodox Church has not needed a full blown Ecumenical council–we did not have to deal with the
“paralyzation” that the reformation caused the Church of Rome. And Rome is still struggling with that one.

That could be one of the reasons but the fact remains that Orthodox Churches are incapable of convening an Ecumenical Council until they return to the bossom of Rome.

 

[Mickey]

That could be one of the reasons but the fact remains that Orthodox Churches are incapable of convening an Ecumenical Council until they return to the bossom of Rome.

The fact remains that they are not incapable. The Church has no need for one. She is Orthodox. She is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Perhaps Rome should hold a “council” to see how they may reunite with the true Church.

 

[w_stewart]

The fact remains that they are not incapable. The Church has no need for one. She is Orthodox. She is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

Perhaps Rome should hold a “council” to see how they may reunite with the true Church.

Well, the Catholic Church had convened Ecumenical Councils after 1054. She can still hold one whenever necessity arises.

But Orthodox Churches cannot do that even if they need one.

 

[Mickey]

Well, the Catholic Church had convened Ecumenical Councils after 1054. She can still hold one whenever necessity arises.

Are you sure they were true councils without the participation of the Holy Orthodox Church?

There were many innovations that arose from those “councils”.

But Orthodox Churches cannot do that even if they need one.

Sure they could.

You are playing your little “what if” games again. :tsktsk: