Xenophobia in Orthodoxy

[RaphaelJ]

First of all, I do not mean to offend anyone. I was reading the news and I became shocked that there are reports of Russian Orthodox clergy helping pro-Ukraine rebels. In general, I have noticed the tendencies of Orthodox Churches in their native lands to be very very very nationalistic. I mean this in both the good and bad sense. The Orthodox are able to unite people in these countries in a more centralized way than the Catholics but it seems that many people cannot distinguish between the state of their nations on Earth and the universality of God’s Kingdom. In America I’m sure it is not so marked. For our Orthodox brethren, do you believe that there needs to be change with the system of the Orthodox Church?

 

[randomusername]

That tends to happen when your religious lands are invaded and your religion oppressed for over 1,000 years. It makes you very proud of your faith and country for surviving. Orthodoxy has been pushed back by the Turks, has experienced massacres from us Catholics(4th Crusade), have had to go through Soviet Union state athiesm among other things. I’m not surprised that they are slightly untrusting of others and proud of themselves and their countries.

 

[RaphaelJ]

I suppose you are right. Historically, could the fact that the patriarch was subservient to the sovereign be a reason for it? For Catholics, having a leader that was not under any sovereign did give a certain conflict between Church and state that is less seen in Orthodoxy. This nationalism has been seen in the Russian Orthodox Church even before the rise of the USSR.

 

[SyroMalankara]

This is only true really for Latin Rite Catholics in North America and recent history of Western Europe. The Catholic Church of medieval Spain, Portugal, Gaul, Prussia, etc were not any different. The extreme centralization of the Papacy, especially in regard to other Latin rite bishops, tied in with a weakening of secular authority forced Catholics of the Latin Church in Western Europe to look at the Pope as an emperor over national authority. This also led to positive and negative consequences.

 

[abucs]

We have to remember that medieval Catholic Kings fought and bullied the papacy as well.

For example, when the papacy refused to set up a Spanish Inquisition the Spanish Catholic King threatened not to intervene the next time Rome was likely to be sacked by the muslims.

Once the Spanish Inquisition began the Spanish crown refused to abide by the controls put in place by the church and refused to listen to subsequent papal letters of complaint.

Worldly power tends to be concentrated around who has the biggest army.

 

[Peter_J]

First of all, I do not mean to offend anyone. I was reading the news and I became shocked that there are reports of Russian Orthodox clergy helping pro-Ukraine rebels. **In general, I have noticed the tendencies of Orthodox Churches in their native lands to be very very very nationalistic. I mean this in both the good and bad sense. **The Orthodox are able to unite people in these countries in a more centralized way than the Catholics but it seems that many people cannot distinguish between the state of their nations on Earth and the universality of God’s Kingdom. In America I’m sure it is not so marked. For our Orthodox brethren, do you believe that there needs to be change with the system of the Orthodox Church?

Hi. I’m not doubling your sincerity in saying that you mean it in both good and bad senses, but it is hard to reconcile that with the fact that the word “nationalistic” in and of itself is generally understood to be a negative.

 

[Per_Crucem]

First of all, I do not mean to offend anyone. I was reading the news and I became shocked that there are reports of Russian Orthodox clergy helping pro-Ukraine rebels. In general, I have noticed the tendencies of Orthodox Churches in their native lands to be very very very nationalistic. I mean this in both the good and bad sense. The Orthodox are able to unite people in these countries in a more centralized way than the Catholics but it seems that many people cannot distinguish between the state of their nations on Earth and the universality of God’s Kingdom. In America I’m sure it is not so marked. For our Orthodox brethren, do you believe that there needs to be change with the system of the Orthodox Church?

I have to ask, this is different from Protestant and Catholic American nationalism, or Protestant British nationalism or Irish Catholic nationalism, how?

 

[chimo]

First of all, I do not mean to offend anyone. I was reading the news and I became shocked that there are reports of Russian Orthodox clergy helping pro-Ukraine rebels. In general, I have noticed the tendencies of Orthodox Churches in their native lands to be very very very nationalistic. I mean this in both the good and bad sense. The Orthodox are able to unite people in these countries in a more centralized way than the Catholics but it seems that many people cannot distinguish between the state of their nations on Earth and the universality of God’s Kingdom. In America I’m sure it is not so marked. For our Orthodox brethren, do you believe that there needs to be change with the system of the Orthodox Church?

I think there is a surge of nationalism in every Church whether it is Catholic or Orthodox from any country where Catholicism and Orthodoxy dwells. The only difference may occur in countries where nationalism is not as big as it is the United States and Canada. I don’t know why you think there must be a change within the Orthodox Church since the Orthodox and Catholic do act in the same way. It is like this. The Polish Catholic Church in Poland will never accept for instance hundred of thousands of Hungarians if they immigrant into Poland and they wanted the Catholic Church there to be spoken in Hungarian. And let us say the vernacular language of the country by which the people had come from the Catholic Church were established 200 years ago before Vatican I, it would have present many problems when immigrants were coming from all sort of Catholic countries making their homes in Canada and the U.S.A. The fact that Latin was used up till Vatican II helped the Catholic Church tremendously when many immigrants came over. With Orthodox immigrants coming over to Canada and the U.S.A. the problem was more this language barrier caused by the fact the Orthodox Church had no unifying language agent as Rome had with Latin. This language barrier is causing much difficulty in unifying all the Orthodox here. Is it nationalistic. Well it has to be since these people are not speaking the same language. Will it always be this way? No, for the Orthodox in time will find a more national Church in Canada and the U.S.A to exist upon.

But the question you have asked does present some problems for the Orthodox. For instance how can the Orthodox Church here in Canada and the United States open their doors to the many peoples there when it seems the many Orthodox Churches that are present only speak the language of where these Orthodox people come from. From that perspective yes it is not correct. In fact the Orthodox there actually admit this type of setup is not right. Does this mean there must be a change? No, not really for what the Orthodox have committed in Canada and the U.S.A. actually goes against their own Canon law. Orthodoxy works under a system of Canon law as such Rome has but the North America condition is in violation of that Canon law. It is not the Orthodox Church needs to change their system but they need to obey their Canon law the same as does Rome.

 

[Peter_J]

I have to ask, this is different from Protestant and Catholic American nationalism, or Protestant British nationalism or Irish Catholic nationalism, how?

Interesting question. It has been my general experience that, while differences do exist obviously between different types of Christians, many commentators will also invent differences that do not really exist. Perhaps this is such a case.

 

[manualman]

That tends to happen when your religious lands are invaded and your religion oppressed for over 1,000 years. It makes you very proud of your faith and country for surviving. Orthodoxy has been pushed back by the Turks, has experienced massacres from us Catholics(4th Crusade), have had to go through Soviet Union state athiesm among other things. I’m not surprised that they are slightly untrusting of others and proud of themselves and their countries.

The Ukraine has a long and bloody history of oppressing, invading and conquering Russia? Not that I’ve heard of. Quite the opposite in the last 100 years, at least. I’m not sure this argument holds water in terms of the OP’s question in regards to Russian Orthodox support for the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

 

[cliveklg]

In America I’m sure it is not so marked.

As bad as in Ukraine and Russia? Not yet. And definitely not with the Catholic Church. But you look at the far right Christians and Churches that associate themselves with the far right in the U.S. and intolerance and xenophobia is there in abundance from top to bottom.

 

[Cybophonia]

That tends to happen when your religious lands are invaded and your religion oppressed for over 1,000 years. It makes you very proud of your faith and country for surviving. Orthodoxy has been pushed back by the Turks, has experienced massacres from us Catholics(4th Crusade), have had to go through Soviet Union state athiesm among other things. I’m not surprised that they are slightly untrusting of others and proud of themselves and their countries.

You are right that is the maine reason Orthodoxy is so nationalistic in our home countries.

I am not acquainted by any means of the Orthodox movement in the US or diaspora. I live in Denmark and I know there is a Romanian Orthodox Church here, but I have only been once.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

I suppose you are right. Historically, could the fact that the patriarch was subservient to the sovereign be a reason for it? For Catholics, having a leader that was not under any sovereign did give a certain conflict between Church and state that is less seen in Orthodoxy. This nationalism has been seen in the Russian Orthodox Church even before the rise of the USSR.

The nationalism of the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the complaints of the communists before the Revolution. As far as they were concerned, the church and the Tsar were hand in glove.

It was a situation that gave a lot of clout to Marx’s usually distorted quote -

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

Read in full, Marx could be seen as protesting more about a heartless world, with religion as the protest against the distress. But the Bolsheviks used the bit about “the opium of the masses (people)” as a criticism of the church in Russia in particular, since for the downtrodden peasants it was their solace, but it was also being cynically manipulated by the Tsar and his supporters.

I lifted the following passage from this link. I’m not sure just how accurate it is, but I do know one of the complaints of the Bolsheviks was that that the Russian Orthodox Church was a Tsarist government department.

alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/enforcing-russian-autocracy/

Enforcing Russian Autocracy

Enforcing Russian autocracy required both ideological and practical measures. The tsar claimed to rule by ‘divine right’, his power and authority derived from God rather than the consent of the people. In the Fundamental Laws of 1906, Russians were told to obey the tsar, “not only out of fear but also for the sake of conscience”, as he had been “ordained by God”. The Russian Orthodox Church both supported and was supported by the tsarist autocracy. The church’s governing council, the Holy Synod, was run as a de facto government department; the tsar, a deeply religious man, consulted regularly with its archbishops. The church encouraged ordinary Russians to accept and embrace autocracy; its catechisms taught worshippers that it was God’s will that they should love and obey the tsar.

In a way this was a natural progression from the Byzantine Church with its headquarters in Constantinople. When Constantine created Constantinople as a bulwark against pagan invasions, he also moved his court there. The seat of the old Roman Empire thus moved to Byzantium, and became the new Holy Roman Empire. That is to say the Roman Empire moved East, and was no longer based in Rome.

Protestant fundamentalists please note.

The Emperor was the head of the Byzantine church, unlike in Rome which had by then almost become a backwater, with authority gravitating to the Bishop of Rome. As such he didn’t have the same subservience to imperial authority that was required of Byzantine archbishops.

Nor did they ever have a Protestant Reformation, such as Western Europe experienced. Not that the Reformation meant an end to state domination of the church - in many states, the Protestant churches had their local rulers as their titular head. The Anglican Church still does, possibly because the UK has never since had a revolution or been conquered, which results in others interfering with the rule book.

So the dual challenge of a “stateless” church as tended to be seen in Rome (despite the exception of the miniscule and eventually lost Papal states) and the violently seized opportunity to critically engage accepted dogma and tradition as experienced in the Reformation never eventuated for the Byzantine Church, and it’s later heirs, the various Orthodox Churches.

In short, their tradition has been different.

 

[Cavaradossi]

The nationalism of the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the complaints of the communists before the Revolution. As far as they were concerned, the church and the Tsar were hand in glove.

It was a situation that gave a lot of clout to Marx’s usually distorted quote -

Read in full, Marx could be seen as protesting more about a heartless world, with religion as the protest against the distress. But the Bolsheviks used the bit about “the opium of the masses (people)” as a criticism of the church in Russia in particular, since for the downtrodden peasants it was their solace, but it was also being cynically manipulated by the Tsar and his supporters.

I lifted the following passage from this link. I’m not sure just how accurate it is, but I do know one of the complaints of the Bolsheviks was that that the Russian Orthodox Church was a Tsarist government department.

alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/enforcing-russian-autocracy/

In a way this was a natural progression from the Byzantine Church with its headquarters in Constantinople. When Constantine created Constantinople as a bulwark against pagan invasions, he also moved his court there. The seat of the old Roman Empire thus moved to Byzantium, and became the new Holy Roman Empire. That is to say the Roman Empire moved East, and was no longer based in Rome.

Protestant fundamentalists please note.

The Emperor was the head of the Byzantine church, unlike in Rome which had by then almost become a backwater, with authority gravitating to the Bishop of Rome. As such he didn’t have the same subservience to imperial authority that was required of Byzantine archbishops.

Nor did they ever have a Protestant Reformation, such as Western Europe experienced. Not that the Reformation meant an end to state domination of the church - in many states, the Protestant churches had their local rulers as their titular head. The Anglican Church still does, possibly because the UK has never since had a revolution or been conquered, which results in others interfering with the rule book.

So the dual challenge of a “stateless” church as tended to be seen in Rome (despite the exception of the miniscule and eventually lost Papal states) and the violently seized opportunity to critically engage accepted dogma and tradition as experienced in the Reformation never eventuated for the Byzantine Church, and it’s later heirs, the various Orthodox Churches.

In short, their tradition has been different.

The Roman emperor was never regarded as the head of the Eastern Church. The emperor had the right only to confirm (but not to elect) candidates for certain bishoprics, and often, trying to meddle in church politics could be the downfall of an emperor.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

The Roman emperor was never regarded as the head of the Eastern Church. The emperor had the right only to confirm (but not to elect) candidates for certain bishoprics, and often, trying to meddle in church politics could be the downfall of an emperor.

I lifted this from the following site, which appears to be the “Christian Orthodox Information Centre”. Technically the Emperor may not have been the head of the church, but he was certainly right in the thick of things. And human nature being what it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if at times the emperor was at least the figurative head of the church- the most visible, and the most powerful, representative.

The point I was trying to make is that this is a different experience from either the Catholic or Protestant traditions.

orthodoxinfo.com/general/history3.aspx

Relations between church and state

The ideology that had prevailed since Constantine (4th century) and Justinian I (6th century)—according to which there was to be only one universal Christian society, the oikoumene, led jointly by the empire and the church—was still the ideology of the Byzantine emperors. At the heart of the Christian polity of Byzantium was the Emperor, who was no ordinary ruler, but God’s representative on earth. If Byzantium was an icon of the heavenly Jerusalem, then the earthly monarchy of the Emperor was an image or icon of the monarchy of God in heaven; in church people prostrated themselves before the icon of Christ, and in the palace before God’s living icon - the Emperor. The labyrinthine palace, the Court with its elaborate ceremonial, the throne room where mechanical lions roared and musical birds sang: these things were designed to make clear the Emperor’s status as vicegerent of God. ‘By such means,’ wrote the Emperor Constantine Vll Porphyrogenitus, ‘we figure forth the harmonious movement of God the Creator around this universe, while the imperial power is preserved in proportion and order.’’ The Emperor had a special place in the Church’s worship: he could not of course celebrate the Eucharist, but he received communion within the sanctuary ‘as priests do’- taking the consecrated bread in his hands and drinking from the chalice, instead of being given the sacrament in a spoon - and he also preached sermons and on certain feasts censed the altar. The vestments which Orthodox bishops now wear are the vestments once worn by the Emperor in church.

 

[Rohzek]

I lifted this from the following site, which appears to be the “Christian Orthodox Information Centre”. Technically the Emperor may not have been the head of the church, but he was certainly right in the thick of things. And human nature being what it is, I wouldn’t be surprised if at times the emperor was at least the figurative head of the church- the most visible, and the most powerful, representative.

The point I was trying to make is that this is a different experience from either the Catholic or Protestant traditions.

orthodoxinfo.com/general/history3.aspx

You’re basically alleging some sort of caesaropapism charge against Orthodoxy, which has long been discredited by historians. And if we really wanted to give this sort of argument any credence, we could just as easily convict the Latin Church of being guilty. Let’s not forget the Avignon Papacy, and the long held influence of France and other powers over the papal throne from the Early Modern Period well into the 19th Century. In short, the whole argument that this nationalism problem within Orthodox (which is a serious problem) stems from its very roots in Byzantium is completely unsupportable.

As for the Protestant tradition, the whole split between Anglicanism and Catholicism was rooted in the independent thought of the English crown. The same goes for the German princes who endorsed the various forms of Protestantism.

Furthermore, the same relations between Church and State that you find in Byzantium can be found in almost any medieval state, with the grand exception of pre-Norman England, which is a complicated case all on its own. The Carolingians were particularly keen on adopting Byzantine methods of imperial representation and their role in church affairs. The Merovingians did the same as their Carolingian successors, albeit to a much lesser extent did they ever officially subsume ecclesiastical powers into the royal powers.

Additionally, the Papal State or rather the Republic of St. Peter (after independence from Byzantium) operated in a similar fashion until the papacy was able trump the authority of the local lay rulers. It was only at that point that the Roman Church became synonymous with a political state, a state that was additionally bent upon conquering Ravenna. One measure that the papacy took for conquering Ravenna was to have its head and leader, the bishop/archbishop of Ravenna, submit to his authority. Many often mistake this submission as something to do with ecclesiastical and papal authority, but such a view is wrong. It was actually nothing more than a political move in the name of the expanding political ambitions of the Republic of St. Peter, which wished to cross the Adriatic Sea. There is a great book on this subject that I can recommend in case you are interested in it.

In short, the close trend between church and state within the Byzantine Empire was prominent in almost any medieval state. Furthermore, this really has nothing to do with modern nationalistic tendencies. It’s true that 19th century historians/propagandists used history to foment nationalistic tendencies across post-Napoleonic Europe, but that has nothing to do with the historical reality of the medieval period. Nationalism has its roots in the French Revolution, not the Late Antique or medieval worlds.

 

[SalusaSecondus]

First of all, I do not mean to offend anyone. I was reading the news and I became shocked that there are reports of Russian Orthodox clergy helping pro-Ukraine rebels. In general, I have noticed the tendencies of Orthodox Churches in their native lands to be very very very nationalistic. I mean this in both the good and bad sense. The Orthodox are able to unite people in these countries in a more centralized way than the Catholics but it seems that many people cannot distinguish between the state of their nations on Earth and the universality of God’s Kingdom. In America I’m sure it is not so marked. For our Orthodox brethren, do you believe that there needs to be change with the system of the Orthodox Church?

I actually felt very welcomed by the Russian Orthodox when I was checking out Orthodoxy. The Greeks were much more unwelcoming.

 

[cliveklg]

When you look at the reaction to immigrants, and non-Christians in the far right, it is pretty apparent that xenophobia does exist in the U.S. And it isn’t just the members but the leadership of some of the far right associated churches as well.

 

[abucs]

I am far more concerned with the liberal media brain washing their audience and dictating that all who disagree are xenophobic.

It is a repeated pattern of the doctored presentation of very emotional events and then super-imposing their own politics onto that emotional response.

We are emotional beings. Presenting emotional events and then super-imposing your own political viewpoint onto that emotion is a way of controlling people so as to affect politics.

Hopefully at some stage enough people will become aware of this and turn off the liberal media.

 

[cliveklg]

I am far more concerned with the liberal media brain washing their audience and dictating that all who disagree are xenophobic.

It is a repeated pattern of the doctored presentation of very emotional events and then super-imposing their own politics onto that emotional response.

We are emotional beings. Presenting emotional events and then super-imposing your own political viewpoint onto that emotion is a way of controlling people so as to affect politics.

Hopefully at some stage enough people will become aware of this and turn off the liberal media.

Quite ironic given who Christ would likely agree with, with his whole mercy, compassion, caring thing… Damn those liberals trying to act responsibly like him.