Author: Matthew Namee
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The Donation of Mehmet: The Myth of Orthodoxy under the Ottoman Empire
In 1054, Pope Leo IX of Rome wrote a letter to Ecumenical Patriarch Michael Cerularius, defending his claims to supremacy by citing a document known as the “Donation of Constantine.” This document purported to be a decree of St Constantine the Great, endowing the Pope of Rome with temporal imperial powers over the western part…
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When a god visited Congress
In 1934, St John Maximovitch was ordained ROCOR bishop of Shanghai and sent to shepherd the Russian exiles in China. Even before his episcopal ordination, when St John was teaching at the Bitol seminary in Serbia, the great Serbian bishop Nicholai Velimirovich famously said, “If you desire to see a living Saint, go to Bitol…
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Non-Fasting Between Pascha and Ascension
In all but one of the world’s Orthodox Churches today, after a fast-free Bright Week, the Wednesday and Friday fasts resume. This happens even though we continue to exclaim “Christ is risen!” until Ascension, and we don’t kneel until Pentecost. The bizarre result of this is that the non-fasting period after Christmas is actually longer…
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Chinese Orthodox Martyrs: A Firsthand Account of the Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising in China at the turn of the twentieth century. Its victims included a group of Chinese Orthodox Christians, who were brutally martyred on June 11-12, 1900. The following April, the Russian Orthodox American Messenger — the official magazine of the Russian Church in America, edited by St Alexander…
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Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical to Greece, and an Orthodox Response
The new Pope of Rome, Leo XIV, has made it clear that he chose his name in honor of his predecessor Leo XIII. This is especially interesting to me as an Orthodox historian, since Leo XIII took a particular interest in Orthodoxy, and at the turn of the last century, Orthodox leaders and scholars (including…
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St Raphael Hawaweeny vs Pope Leo XIII
In 1894, Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical on the “Eastern Rites” — that is, the Uniates, those groups who use traditional Orthodox liturgical rites but submit themselves to the Pope of Rome. In 1898, St Raphael Hawaweeny, then an archimandrite in New York, published a response to the papal encyclical in a periodical…
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Stalin’s Revival of the Moscow Patriarchate
“When Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941,” writes historian Jordan Hupka, “Stalin again changed the Soviet position on religion. All anti-religious publications ceased and some churches in major urban centres were allowed to open.”[1] Stalin was a shrewd man; as Steven Miner writes in Stalin’s Holy War, “Very early in the war, Stalin grasped…
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The Orthodox Baptism of a Civil War Veteran
Last week, we published the story of William Hoskins, an 89-year-old veteran of the American Civil War who traveled from Los Angeles to San Francisco in December 1900 to be baptized into the Orthodox faith by St Sebastian Dabovich. Shortly after this, Fr Kirill Sokolov, dean of Holy Trinity Cathedral (OCA) in San Francisco, sent…
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US Civil War Veteran Baptized by St Sebastian Dabovich
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of Orthodox in America had not reached 50,000, but it already had several distinguished converts to the Orthodox Faith from Protestantism and Roman Catholicism: William Hoskins, an eighty-nine-year-old Civil War veteran who was a Baptist from Los Angeles, who traveled to San Francisco to meet a…
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Karloutsos and Biden
This is the fifth article in our series on Fr Alex Karloutsos. Here are the first four: The Father Alex Karloutsos Origin Story Karloutsos and the Rise of Bartholomew Father Alex and the Mother Church Karloutsos and 9/11 “I first met Joe Biden in 1987, when he ran for President of the United States,” Fr…