Posted by George Michalopulos
on 9/27/2009, 7:45 am, in reply to "Re: Scandals, their effects, and Unity"
Tom, I think you miss my point. The lawsuit was a scandal. And thousands of GOA parishioners cheered them on. They wouldn't have done so had they felt that the rupture of the old charter was ok. Again, people were scandalized.
As for your view of the Church of Crete, you make my point. One of the bugbears of the vast majority of non-Greek churches is that the Greek churches have twisted the rules of ecclesiology. Just because the Church of Greece or the EP proclaims some extinct mountaintop a "metropolis" doesn't make it so. The very definiation of the word "metropolitan" has been twisted by these machinations. If this continues, then what's to stop some bishop in Podunk, USA from being acclaimed a "patriarch"? Nothing. Because the words metropolitan has been emptied of its meaning in the GOA, any such nonsense can take place.
If I may say so (and please correct if I'm wrong), the willingness of GOA's partisans to extoll the Church of Crete as "semi-autonomous" gives away the game: the EP will never let go of the GOA and will try everything in its power to make its primate the primate of all Orthodox in America. But it will never consent to his being called a patriarch or becoming fully autocephalous. Instead, they'll continue playing these cat-and-mouse games that they played with Bulgaria back in the ninth century and the metropolitan of Kiev for five hundred years. And in the end, they'll lose. Just like the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Church of Greece, and the Russians, we Americans will take our autocephaly and the EP will be forced to accept this state of affairs.
Of course the reverse nightmare scenario for the GOA will be when some future EP will be a Russian-descended native of Turkey. Then the GOA will move heaven and earth to declare autocephaly.
Responses:
