I was reading an interview with an ex Orthobro talking about it as a cult, and how they were targeting the OCA in terms of challenging the hierarchy of the OCA . He made it sound like it was mostly an American phenomenon. Is this till a problem? Is it mostly an American thing ? The article was from 2023 .
Have no fear , this is not about Greek people .Rather it is about the EO using the name Greek in so many places that aren’t Greek , though some are . Looking at the EO churches , you have
Church of Greece - ( which is the only one to actually be in Greece )
GOA- which does have a lot of ethnic Greeks but many who are not , and who are under the authority of the EP in Turkey
Greek OC of Alexandria - in Egypt
Greek OC of Jerusalem
Greek OC of Antioch- in Syria
And then the OCA used to be known by the convoluted name of Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America, while being totally under the control of the ROC
Why is the Greek designation put on churches that seemingly have no Greek connections ? It seems really that the GOA is the only one outside of Greece itself with any real connection to Greece or Greeks .
Has anyone ever visited an Orthodox monastery ? Are the monks generally accepting of the intrusions of the tourists? Or do they tend to actually welcome tourists as a source of income for the monastery ?
I saw a woman posing in a strange posture once during the DL. It wasn’t a metania or prostration, it was more of a dancers pose , almost a yoga like pose . Is this some sort of standard worship pose? I’ve never seen any information on it and I wasn’t going to go ask her what she was doing . Obviously it was some form of physical worship, I’ve just never seen it described anywhere .
As an aside, one of the things I love about Orthodox worship is stuff like this, where it can be a full body experience. I also love the priest blessing the congregation with the censer. I have never seen that in any other church, Catholic or Protestant . I always looked forward to it for some reason .
So I have a question. Given that any autocephalous EO church can choose to canonize a saint without the permission or cooperation of any other EO churches, do the other churches have to accept the new saint without question and venerate him, even if they thought the canonization a mistake ? Or can they decide to ignore the canonization, since they didn’t have any input into it?
I am thinking specifically of Seraphim Rose , who it appears has both very devoted supporters but also some others question the idea of making him a saint . Given that ROCOR seems to have voted to canonize him, will he be a saint of even EO churches who didn’t support his canonization?
Let me make clear the issue isn’t SR so much as the issue of whether one EO church can unilaterally decide on saints for all the other churches. SR just makes a relevant example of my question.
Does the OO have anything like the tradition of elders/starets/geronda in the EO? Not official abbots , but monks that develop the reputation of near saints that draw other monks and laity to them for spiritual guidance .
I understand that these terms did not exist then, but what did they teach to the early Christians? Can either side in this debate trace their belief back to what the Apostles taught in the first generation of Christianity ?