Lucyna Emailed me last night about an address Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk gave to the Nicean Club in Lambeth Palace (the home of the Archbishop of Canterbury.The Archbishop of Canterbury was there and the Metropolitan spoke bluntly.
He talked of the contemporary rift within the Church between the conservatives and the liberals, the former being the Orthodox and Catholics, along with some protestants and the later being protestant.
He spoke via examples of how liberal Christianity has adopted the ideals of secularism and how secularism threatens European culture and civilization.
The rift to which the Metropolitan refers runs right through the Anglican communion of course and is tearing it apart and the bullet points that those who have reported on this have highlighted are those of women priests and gay clergy.
But the Metropolitans concerns ranged beyond these to divorce, contraception and abortion the whole moral order - a moral order the Metropolitan believes is essential to European survival.
As does Pope Benedict. Indeed Patriarch Kirill and Pope Benedict have openly discussed an alliance to preserve Europe's Christian heritage - something Metropolitan Hilarion said he hoped would occur on the occasion of the Popes election.
This is not the first time an Orthodox Priest has spoken bluntly at a protestant forum - early this year Fr Siarhei Hardun of Belarus who was invited to address the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of the USA had hard things to say about innovations under debate within that body, remarks that received by loud applause from some and stunned silence from others.
I disagree with the catholic church being placed solely in the conservative - in fact the RC church contains many extremely liberal people especially in places like the US and Europe.
ReplyDeleteThe protestant church of course does contain plenty of both.
Except in the Catholic Church, the extremely liberal people cannot, however much they try, change the teachings of the Church. It causes them no end of angst.
ReplyDeleteAndrei, I read some of the article you emailed me in return, but I got stuck on "Unitism", which I'd never heard of. I started researching, and then haven't got back to it yet.
ReplyDeleteI'll read the rest now...
The rest was obviously the good bits!
ReplyDeleteBack to the above... I wonder what the reaction was?