Tuesday, May 7, 2013
I attended a lecture given by Fr. Dimitri Cozby. He's a prayerful, kind man. If you get the chance do listen to him speak or visit his unique parish in Victoria, TX. I miss Cinco de Mayo in Texas. The food was fabulous and, despite not being able to walk around at night for fear of falling bullets, it's a favored holiday (more so on this side of the border than in Mexico).
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| Photo Courtesy: Rusyn Memes |
(Victoria Advocate) - Standing at the altar of All Saints Orthodox Church, the Rev. Dimitri Cozby holds a lit, long-stemmed candle in the air and faces his congregation.
Wearing a crisp, white vestment and purple clergy hat, Cozby smiles and then shouts, "Christ is risen!"
For every other Western church in town, the celebration of Christ's resurrection has come and gone. Drugstores and grocers have marked down Easter candies, stuffed bunnies and woven Easter baskets to half price; little girls have hung up their Easter dresses for the year.
But for Orthodox believers, Pascha, or the Easter feast, arrived Sunday - a few weeks late.
Easter in Orthodoxy follows the Julian calendar, rather than Gregorian calendar, which is used in Western Christianity to determine the holiday dates. So Roman Catholics and Protestants will never celebrate Easter on the same Sunday as the Orthodox Church.
What Cozby didn't anticipate this year, however, is Pascha sharing the calendar with another annual celebration.
This year, that celebration was Cinco de Mayo.
"We all sort of laughed about it," Cozby said. "Cinco de Mayo isn't celebrated widely in Mexico, but in this country, it's a good excuse to drink beer."
Rather than ignoring the collision of the two dates, Cozby integrated a Cinco de Mayo message into the Pascha service.
"What does Cinco de Mayo celebrate? It's the anniversary of a battle. The Mexican Army defeats the French Army," he told his church. "We are engaged in a spiritual war. Part of the problem is that we're on the wrong side. We are fighting against ourselves."
Cozby emphasized in the sermon that the spiritual battle many are fighting can only be won when followers of Jesus allow themselves to submit to the death and resurrection of Christ and accept forgiveness.
Today, "Cinco de Mayo can remind us that we're involved in a spiritual warfare," he said.
Members of the small Orthodox congregation are widely international; there were almost as many nations represented as there were bodies in the sanctuary.
A passage from John was read by lay members during the service, detailing some of Jesus' first encounters after rising from the dead. At least five languages were spoken: English, Spanish, French, Latin and Greek.
Cozby said Sunday's vespers was not the official Pascha service.
They, like many countries abroad, celebrate Easter around midnight. The official service began at 11:30 p.m. Saturday and concluded at 2:30 a.m. Sunday.
"We have the service the night before because we don't really know when Jesus rose. We know the women were at the tomb in the early morning," Cozby said.
Even with little sleep, members were energized to sing and praise God during Pascha vespers.
Katerina Riley, of Athens, Greece, said Pascha is always a significant day for her. Riley has been a member of All Saints for more than seven years and said she enjoyed Cozby's Pascha message about spiritual warfare and how he related it to Cinco de Mayo.
"Cinco de Mayo was a fight for freedom. And with Christ, it was, is and will always be a fight." Riley said. "But if you have Jesus in your heart, it will never change you."
Riley said the traditions of Pascha in the Orthodox church are celebrated slightly different than Western Easter celebrations.
In Greece, where she grew up, there are typically no bunnies or egg hunts, but Orthodox members will dye hard-boiled eggs red, and people will crack them together and say, "Christ is Risen!"
"The traditions are not exactly the same in Orthodox church, but when I was raising my kids here, we celebrated both (Easter) holidays," she said.
Cozby said Easter egg hunts are catching on in American Orthodox churches, but they are not yet as popular.
"We still don't have bunnies," he said.
Following Sunday's vespers service, Cozby met a few members of the church for community dinner.
He said he's finally ready to celebrate the joyous season, which will last for the next 40 days.
"I'm just glad I can finally say Happy Easter. People would say it to me, and I would respond, 'Not yet, It's not until May 5, Cinco de Mayo,'" he said.
(Yahoo News) - Candida Moss, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame and a practicing Catholic, wants to shatter what she calls the “myth” of martyrdom in the Christian faith.
Sunday school tales of early Christians being rounded up at their secret catacomb meetings and thrown to the lions by evil Romans are mere fairy tales, Moss writes in a new book. In fact, in the first 250 years of Christianity, Romans mostly regarded the religion's practitioners as meddlesome members of a superstitious cult.
The government actively persecuted Christians for only about 10 years, Moss suggests, and even then intermittently. And, she says, many of the best known early stories of brave Christian martyrs were entirely fabricated.
The controversial thesis, laid out in "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom," has earned her a lot of hate mail and a few sidelong looks from fellow faculty members. But Moss maintains that the Roman Catholic Church and historians have known for centuries that most early Christian martyr stories were exaggerated or invented.
A small group of priest scholars in the 17th century began sifting through the myths, discrediting not only embellished stories about saints (including that St. George slew a dragon) but also tossing out popular stories about early Christian martyrs.
Historians, including Moss, say only a handful of martyrdom stories from the first 300 years of Christianity—which includes the reign of the cruel, Christian-loathing Nero—are verifiable. (Saint Perpetua of Carthage, pictured in the stained glass window above, is one of the six famous early Christian martyrs Moss believes was actually killed for her faith.)
Moss contends that when Christians were executed, it was often not because of their religious beliefs but because they wouldn't follow Roman rules. Many laws that led to early Christians’ execution were not specifically targeted at them—such as a law requiring all Roman citizens to engage in a public sacrifice to the gods—but their refusal to observe those laws and other mores of Roman society led to their deaths.Moss calls early Christians “rude, subversive and disrespectful,” noting that they refused to swear oaths, join the military or participate in any other part of Roman society.
Moss can at times seem clinical when attempting to distinguish between true and systematic persecution of Christians for their faith and intermittent violence against them for refusing to conform.
"If persecution is to be defined as hostility toward a group because of its religious beliefs, then surely it is important that the Romans intended to target Christians,” she writes. “Otherwise this is prosecution, not persecution."
With true government persecution, victims have no room to negotiate when trying to convince the government to stop targeting them, Moss said. But when the government’s laws inadvertently lead to the persecution of Christians, there remains room for dialogue and debate over changing those laws.
“The reason I make the distinction is in the case of people seeking you out, torturing you just because you’re Christian—which did happen for a few years—in that situation, you can’t negotiate,” she said. “You have no opportunity to resist or to fight back. In a situation where there’s sort of disagreements … there’s room for debate.”
Moss pointed to the new U.S. health care law's requirement that insurance companies cover contraception as an example of a law that inadvertently targeted Christians but was interpreted as a direct attack on the faith.
Much like the Emperor Diocletian’s edict that all Romans make a sacrifice to the gods (which Moss describes as being like a mandatory “pledge of allegiance”), the contraceptive mandate was not designed to target or single out Christians, she says. (Christians and others who refused to make the sacrifice in the fourth century were slaughtered. Christian organizations that do not want to provide contraception under the 21st century law will be fined.)
Notre Dame is one dozens of religiously affiliated universities that sued over the birth control mandate, saying providing its employees and students with health insurance that covered contraceptives would violate the university's religious freedom.
Some in the religious community framed the contraceptive mandate as a deliberate persecution of Christians, rather than as bad policy, Moss says, in a way that’s made it difficult for them to negotiate.“Labeling it persecution is saying, ‘We’re under attack, we’re persecuted. The other side has no reason to do this and we have to fight. We shouldn’t have to negotiate or compromise,” she said.
Moss says she is personally against her university’s decision to sue over the mandate.
“I think that the University of Notre Dame does not control how I spend my salary, therefore controlling what kinds of health care people have access to is maybe something we should not be trying to do,” she said. “I think Catholic institutions should trust their employees not to use contraception.”
Moss said the early Christian “persecution complex” influences the present-day political debate in America. The cable news hobbyhorse that there’s a deliberate “War on Christmas” in America is one example of a modern day martyrdom myth, she said.
When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich argued during his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination last year that there was an “aggressive” war on Christianity waged throughout the country, Moss also heard echoes of apocryphal martyrdom.
Moss says she thinks dispelling the myths of martyrdom of the early church will not minimize the true instances of religious persecution occurring around the world.
“I completely sympathize with [my critics'] concern that in writing a book like this maybe I will make people less interested in persecution that is happening around the world,” she said. “I do care. I think we should care about those who are oppressed. I don’t think misusing the category here in America draws attention to persecution around the world. I think it cannibalizes those experiences. It steals their thunder.”
(Fox News) - A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway. Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.
We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world, much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian, came into being.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.” In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”
Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion: Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators.
In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.
The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.
Now, as the U.S. supports the jihad on Syria’s secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived for centuries before Islam came into being have now been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque calls telling the populace that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away.
In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered. One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians…. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”
In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.” In September 2012, the Sinai’s small Christian community was attacked and evicted by Al Qaeda linked Muslims, Reuters reported. But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat.
Displacements began in Ameriya [62 Christian families evicted], then they stretched to Dahshur [120 Christian families evicted], and today terror and threats have reached the hearts and souls of our Coptic children in Sinai.”
Iraq, Syria, and Egypt are part of the Arab world. But even in “black” African and “white” European nations with Muslim majorities, Christians are fleeing.
In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, churches and other Christian property have been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.
Even in European Bosnia, Christians are leaving en mass “amid mounting discrimination and Islamization.” Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.
Problems cited are typical: “while dozens of mosques were built in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, no building permissions [permits] were given for Christian churches.” “Time is running out as there is a worrisome rise in radicalism,” said one authority, who further added that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were “persecuted for centuries” after European powers “failed to support them in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire.”
And so history repeats itself.
One can go on and on:To anyone following the plight of Christians under Islamic persecution, none of this is surprising. As I document in my new book, “Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians,” all around the Islamic world—in nations that do not share the same race, language, culture, or economics, in nations that share only Islam—Christians are being persecuted into extinction. Such is the true face of extremist Islamic resurgence.
- In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”
- In the Ivory Coast—where Christians have literally been crucified—Islamic rebels “massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands” of Christians.
- In Libya, Islamic rebels forced several Christian religious orders, serving the sick and needy in the country since 1921, to flee.
(Hurriyet Daily News) - The legal status of Catholic foundations and other minority institutions in Turkey will be negotiated at a conference in Ankara on May 13.
Led by Laki Vingas, who is in charge of minority foundations in the General Directorate of Foundations, the conference will begin at 10.30 a.m. on May 13 at Ankara University Political Science Faculty’s Human Rights Center. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, Interior Minister Muammer Güler, EU Minister Egemen Bağış and Foundation Director General Adnan Ertem were invited to the meeting.
Many institutions belonging to religious or ethnic minorities such as churches, cemeteries, and hospitals are deprived of legal entity rights including the Fener Greek Patriarchate, Turkey’s Armenian Patriarchate, Jewish Chief Rabbi’s Office, and various Catholic institutions. Vingas said the issue of legal entity was one of the leading problems they often came across.
“Over my five years in office, I observed that the institutions could not work effectively due to the issue of legal status, and cannot comply with today’s conditions,” Vingas said. “Formerly we used to have difficulties in going to Ankara and expressing our problems there. Now such a problem does not exist,” Vingas said about the location of the meeting.
“Patriarchates, chief rabbis, and Catholic churches do not have legal status. There are political relations with Vatican; but still, Turkey does not recognize churches,” Vingas added.
“We are talking about institutions that have at least 150 years of history. Not only religious institutions, also nursing homes, hospitals, and cemeteries lack legal entity rights. We receive complaints from Adana and Adıyaman with regards to cemeteries, but we cannot do anything. We want to immediately discuss the problem and try to offer solutions through dialogue,” Vingas said. Vingas is currently attempting to bring together all the foundations under a federation.
Monday, May 6, 2013
As a point of clarification, the Syriac Orthodox Church is in communion with the Oriental Orthodox.
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Cedar Grove, NJ (SCOOCH) – The members of the Standing Conference of Oriental Orthodox Churches were informed at their April 2013 meeting by H.E. Mor Cyril Aphrem Karim that the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch has received into Holy Communion thousands of members of an independent Roman Catholic body formerly known as the “Renewed Ecumenical Catholic Church of Guatemala”.
The movement, based in Guatemala and southern Mexico with a substantial membership in the Western United States, embraces a community of between 600,000-800,000 members, the overwhelming majority of which come from indigenous ethnic groups and live in extreme poverty. It uses a modified Roman Catholic liturgy. The group’s leader, Eduardo Aguirre Oestmann, who had previously been consecrated as a bishop by a prelate of the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church (of the vagante Duarte Costa line), was received into the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch as Archbishop Mor Yacoub and invested with the staff of the Patriarchal Vicariate of Guatemala on March 6, 2013 at the Monastery of St. Jacob Baradeaus in Atshaneh-Bikfaya, Beirut, Lebanon.
The Standing Conference congratulates the members of this community on their reception into the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and prays for the growth of Orthodox faith and practice among their faithful.
(New American) - Following an uproar over a Defense Department statement saying that military personnel could be court-martialed for sharing their faith, the Pentagon has backed down on that position and now says soldiers are free to proselytize, as long as they don't harass others. “Service members can share their faith,” clarified Navy Lieutenant Commander Nate Christensen in a statement, “but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one's beliefs.”
Earlier the Defense Department had released an alarming statement saying: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense.... Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis.” That statement appeared to come as the result of an April 24 meeting between military officials and Mikey Weinstein of the atheist group Military Religious Freedom Foundation, in which Weinstein pressured Air Force officials to enforce a policy that supposedly bans Air Force personnel from openly expressing their religious faith. The Defense Department has reportedly turned to Weinstein's group to hammer out policies on religious expression in the military.
Weinstein has gained notoriety for his aggressive campaign to sanitize the military of overt faith expressions by service members. He told Fox News that “until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing and oppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behavior.” Weinstein was referring to examples of supposed religious persecution within the ranks, and said that his group “would love to see hundreds of prosecutions to stop this outrage of fundamentalist religious persecution.”
The outcry from chaplains and religious leaders over Weinstein's rhetoric prompted the Defense Department to issue its updated statement backing down from implying that service members might be targeted for sharing their faith. According to Charisma News, the clarification came after the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking a clarification from the Defense Department on the issue.
“Members of our military should not be denied the very freedoms they fight to defend,” explained ADF Legal Counsel Joseph La Rue. “Freedom of religion and speech are paramount among those freedoms.”
La Rue noted that since there is little evidence of a crisis concerning overt religious proselytizing in the military, “we are still troubled over what motivated the original comments” from the Pentagon. He added that his group is seeking “to ensure that the Pentagon does not deny members of the armed services the basic freedoms that the Constitution guarantees all Americans.”
In his updated statement Lieutenant Commander Christensen insisted that the Defense Department “has never and will never single out a particular religious group for persecution or prosecution. The Department makes reasonable accommodations for all religions and celebrates the religious diversity of our service members.” He added that “when religious harassment complaints are reported, commanders take action based on the gravity of the occurrence on a case by case basis.” He did not elaborate on the actions that might be taken, but the previous Defense Department statement seemed to indicate that penalties could range from non-judicial punishment to a full court-martial.
In an e-mail Christensen explained that the Defense Department would work “to ensure that all service members are free to exercise their constitutional right to practice their religion — in a manner that is respectful of other individuals’ rights to follow their own belief systems; and in ways that are conducive to good order and discipline; and that do not detract from accomplishing the military mission.”
Nonetheless, at least one veteran military leader is concerned about a crackdown on religious expression among service members. Speaking at a gathering on Capitol Hill during the May 2 National Day of Prayer, Rear Admiral William Lee of the U.S. Coast Guard said he is convinced that there is an increasing effort to shut down expressions of faith throughout the military. “As one general so aptly put it,” Lee told his audience, “they expect us to check our religion in at the door — don’t bring that here. Leaders like myself are feeling the constraints of rules and regulations and guidance issued by lawyers that put us in a tighter and tighter box regarding our constitutional right to express our religious faith.”
Lee recalled that in 2012 there were a record high number of 349 military suicides, and recalled the story of a young soldier who had attempted suicide but survived. “When I looked at that young man and heard his story, the rules say, 'Send him to the chaplain,’” Lee said. But “my heart said, 'give this man a Bible.'”
The retired admiral pointed out that under changing military policy giving a soldier a Bible would be potentially punishable. He expressed his shock that an officer could now be reprimanded for “as much as whispering to a young man who is on his last hope — that there is hope. That I can just simply whisper, ‘here is the answer – take it home – I’ll talk about it if you want to.’”
He noted that “the lawyers tell me that if I do that, I’m crossing the line,” but added that “I’m glad I’ve crossed the line so many times.”
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