Posted by Leo
on 9/19/2009, 3:47 am, in reply to "Re: "Lands of the Barbarians"?"
Hey Al,
Found it here: http://www.exarchate-uk.org/Bishop_Basil/SVS09.html. Almost cured my insomnia, the poor man!
Well, if C'ople would claim only 3/4 of the planet instead of all of it, I guess that'd be an improvement! Making Jerusalem the world's navel, so to speak, is kind of intriguing on a few levels. (Look familiar?) But if the Apostles took the idea of "no terra nullius" seriously, Christianity today would be Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem (not Penna.!), that town where they brew that Palestinian beer, the hometown of St. Photini the Samaritan Woman at the Well, and that's about it! I think the 1100s canonists took a wait-n-see attitude towards Rome because they thought the current breach with them would be short-term, like the previous ones; it's not, but rather 955 years and counting. I think we owe Rome no more nor less than we owe the Syriacs, Copts, Assyrians, Armenians, Malankaras, Ethiopians, Anglicans, Fire-Baptized-Holiness, Mormons... -- certainly not territorial deference: Billions of souls have been lost to Orthodoxy that way down the centuries.
Some people consider the Apostolic approach to establishing new canonical territory mere "flag-planting;" of course, it's Church-planting. But His Grace is right that we seem to forget we're all one family when doing so. It's tragic we couldn't identify an "Orthodox party" in the Patriarchate of Rome before the last couple centuries, as was done in Alexandria and Antioch after Chalcedon. That wasn't done among the Assyrians after Ephesus either... and they went on to missionize as far east as the Pacific, and even had a Mongol Patriarch!
I'll make trouble and say there's already an Autocephalous Church in the quadrant of Earth Bp. BASIL should award to Rome, ie, W. and C. Europe, NW "Aphrica," N. America: The OCA! Maybe Dean's right, and Washington IS Fourth Rome! 
Even Pope John Paul II of Rome is said to have prophesied that Russia would re-evangelize Europe... he probably just assumed the thrust would come across the former Iron Curtain rather than across the Atlantic Ocean! Who's to say the Americas aren't The Very Far East instead of The West?!!
(Well, Jerusalem's antipode is H2O just south of French Polynesia, putting Bp. Basil's New Line of Demarcation through Prince William Sound, and most of Alaska on C'ople's-Russia's side of the line. Fudge it a little like they always do to accommodate actual national borders [at least outside the former Empire of the Romans], and one could argue that at least US and Canada should too... kind of like the International Date Line used to divide Alaska from Canada till the US bought it in 1867, and they pushed it west to the new Russian border in Bering Strait.)
Sure, "Patriarch of Washington and All the (Global) Northwest, First Among Equals, Vicar of the Holy Princes of the Apostles Peter and Paul, Successor to St. Brendan and Leif Ericsson, etc etc etc"!
Intriguingly, Jerusalem could be seen to be kind of near the midpoint of the (truly-)inhabited continents and large islands of the world, bounded by Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego, though supposedly the Holy Spirit wouldn't have revealed that to the Council Fathers....
--Leo
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