I am an Orthodox Christian ... Are you?

Jill

April 18, 2008

MariaM wrote:

It all started with Marx.

The situation arose after the Russian Revolution, when the Russian Church, previously in charge of the US and its territories, fell into a shambles, all funds and most communication were cut off, and nobody knew whom to trust.

At that point, the Russian Church already in the US formed the Russian Metropolia as a way to manage until things could be sorted out. They stayed in that "interim" status until the tomos of autocephaly in 1970 or so.

Non-Russians didn't want to get mixed up in the political mess and could no longer get priests from the Russians so they appealed to bishops in their various ethnic homelands, who sent priests and eventually bishops.

Of course it's a bad situation. Everybody has admitted this for at least fifty years that I can remember. The Holy Spirit, as we pray at ordinations, supplies what is lacking and we manage via economia, just as the Church always has.

Never try to apply Western legal principles to Orthodoxy - it's not our tradition and it will only make you crazy.

Maria, the situation is the same in every country where immigrants have settled, be it in the US, Canada, Australia, etc. For instance, the first Orthodox services in Australia were held in the 1890s, some 30 years before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Right from the start, each ethnicity (Greek, Arab, etc) set up its own churches and episcopates, etc. There were instances of priests of one ethnicity serving briefly (as a relief priest, for instance) in another\'s church, but this was very much ad hoc.

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