Search Results for: Jerusalem

Should Antioch Make Its Own Chrism?

Editor’s note: Today, nine Orthodox Churches consecrate their own Holy Chrism: Constantinople, Moscow, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, the Orthodox Church in America, the Macedonian Orthodox Church (or whatever you want to call it), and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The rest of the autocephalous churches – the ancient patriarchates of Alexandria,...

Fifteen Amazing Facts in LOST HISTORIES

As you may have seen, Ancient Faith recently published my book, Lost Histories: The Good, the Bad & the Strange in Early American Orthodoxy. If you like this website, you're the target audience for the book. And while reading it should give you a good handle on the early history of...

Melkite Catholic Identity and Relations with Orthodoxy

Earlier this week, the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch, Yusuf al-Absi, gave a very significant speech at an event celebrating the publication of a volume about the history of the so-called “Zoghby Initiative”, which sought to create a form of double communion for his church with both Rome and the Antiochian...

The Ecclesiology of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew Over Time

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is undoubtedly one of the most consequential figures in modern Orthodox history – not only the longest-tenured Patriarch of Constantinople ever, but also a man whose leadership has proven decisive for Orthodoxy around the world. It is for this reason that, in my article on the political...

St Raphael Hawaweeny vs the Pope of Rome

In 1894, Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical on the "Eastern Rites" -- that is, the Uniates, those groups who use ancient 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 in a...

Patriarch Bartholomew’s Enthronement Speech

On October 22, 1991, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was enthroned in Istanbul. As far as I can tell, his enthronement speech has never been published in English, although a broadcast of the enthronement -- available on YouTube -- conveniently includes an English voiceover. My research assistant Cassidy Irwin transcribed that voiceover....

Freemasonry and the Orthodox Church

If you search the internet for Orthodoxy and Freemasonry, most of what you'll find will be condemnations of the movement. You might also find my 2012 article on Freemasonry in American Orthodox history. But, as far as I know, there hasn't been much work done to document the basic history...

How Did Orthodoxy Get Into This Mess?

It almost goes without saying that the Orthodox world is a mess right now. The situation in Ukraine alone is a disaster: a Russian invasion of the country backed by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the state, and a recognized-by-only-some Orthodox Church of...

A Patriarchate Is Not a Church

The Greek term typically translated as “Church” in the English New Testament (ekklesia, which can also mean “assembly”) is used throughout the Greek Old Testament to refer to the gathering together of the people of Israel. Its meaning is the same as in the New Testament—the Church is the assembly...

Classified British Documents on Meletios Metaxakis

In the fall, I visited Hellenic College-Holy Cross (where I delivered this paper on the EP's "barbarian lands" theory), and while I was on campus, I took the opportunity to visit the school's library and track down an extremely rare collection of 232 once-classified British government documents on Meletios Metaxakis....