Speaking in Moscow, the Orthodox prelate charged that Catholic clergy and religious still maintain “an ultimate goal of proselytism among the Orthodox population” in Russia, the Interfax news service reports. Catholic officials have repeatedly denied such a goal.
Oh Balderdash!
He either just doesn’t get it… or just doens’t want to see.
What is Patriarch Aleksy -or “Comrade Drozdov—the ‘blackbird’”, as he was known in the KGB parlance – afraid of? Less than 700K Catholics against the state church that is full of priests, monks & seminarians, has history, state support, and the culture behind it.
You know if JP2 of blessed memory, had designs on a “uniate invasion” of Russia, it certainly could have been started.
From around the world it is easy to imagine 1000s of priests and religous mobilized and sent forth – a few dozen Jesuits here, a few dozen Franciscan there, toss in some Dominicans, some Divine Word missionaries, a cadre of Oratorians, a couple of Missionaries of the Poor, toss in some Opus Dei, add a few Miles Jesu members, grab a handful of Legionairies, relieve the over-flowing Benedictines of France of a few members, and relocate some Norbetines, a few extras from the FSSP, some diocesan priests, and a few busloads of newly ordained, rosy-cheeked 20somethings fresh out of the Ukrainian underground and before you know it, you have the makings of a unia and you could be doing land-office business. 4 Million baptists in Russia, you know… Heck, open up a university, and start opening Catholic schools, and they would have filled.
Hey, we all know that there are convents full of little old Fillipino and Italian nuns that can make rosaries faster than you can tie a shoe! Statues of OL of Fatima and scapulars enough for every man woman and child could have flooded the land. Priories, novitiates, seminaries, and other houses of formation could have been filled up. I truly believe more than a few Orthodox priests could have been entreated to enter a unia.
But we didn’t. The Pope didn’t direct that. Some of us might even be tempted to say placation was the order of the day. How many Ukrainian Catholics were exiled? How many parishes do they have in Russia?
Inconvienant fact #1: Catholics who were exiled into the depths of Russia are still Catholic, they live there now, they deserve priests and parishes. It isn’t a Vatican conspiracy. We didn’t plant them there as fifth-columnists. Remember who did.
Inconvienant fact #2:]: There is no “Orthodox gene” in Russian DNA. Holy Osmosis has not set in. The idea that the whole of Russia is Orthodox is blind hubris. [url=http://www.ecpat.net/eng/Russia.asp] Russia is now one of the main producers of child pornography in the world, 6 out of 10 pregnancies in Russia end in abortion. The black market is thriving, drugs & HIV infections are worse than ever… This is not a nation that has wholesale turned to Orthodoxy. I wish to God it were, that’s for sure. But it isn’t.
Inconvienant fact #3: Some Russians – I met two a decade ago in Chicago – have read their way into the Catholic Church. Having access to the world wide web and a command of (in this case Englisyh & German, some Polish) they read about the Catholic Church, and found they agreed with the claims made therein. Some Russians have come to accept the apologia for the Roman Church on their own. Others, not forgetting efforts by the KGB to infiltrate the ROC, do not want to belong to it. We didn’t go looking for them, they came looking for us.
Inconvienant fact #4: Islam is gaining ground in a real and serious way in throughout the whole of the Russian Nation. Does the Patriarch prefer to stymie the growth of the Catholic church so he can deal with that? How does “Catholic proselitizing” compare to the Saudi money that is funding the growth of Islam in Russia and the ex-USSR?
From The Wikipedia article, Religion in Russia:
Using these numbers, one attempt to estimate numbers of practicing followers of different religions in Russia arrives at the following results: 3-15 million Russian Orthodox; 2.8 million Muslim; over 1.5 million Protestant (including at least 900 thousand Pentecostals); no more than 500 thousand Buddhists; 300 thousand followers of New religious movements; 60-200 thousand Roman Catholic; 50-80 thousand Old Believers.
What if the methodologies in that study were problematic and the numbers were double or triple or quadrouple what was reported? That still leaves us with a window of 12-60 members out of a population of 141,377,752
Its time to give up the ghost and quit the saber rattling that “The Catholics are coming! The Catholics are Coming! Jesuit uniate-makers have been spotted on the horizon!”
It is old, it is tired, it is false, and his time and efforts to oppose Catholicism would definately be better spent trying to grow and teach his own faithful.
One wonders, what is he really afraid of and why?
Simplesinner.
Sadly, your analysis is spot on–the concerns of the Orthodox Church in Russia in general and the MP in particular are certainly not empirically justified.
Let me go further. I would suggest that the existence of the “unia” is less a matter of Catholic proselytizing and more of the internal (sadly, often ethnic or nationalistic) tensions within Orthodoxy itself. Currently, to take one example, the ethnic Arab Orthodox Christians are being neglected (to understate the matter) by the ethnic Greek patriarch and bishops of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. In the past, such neglect of the Arabs by the Greeks contributed to the creation of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. Similar circumstances have contributed to the existence of Greek Catholic communities in Eastern Europe, even as the growing neglect for their own liturgical and moral tradition by some Western Christian communities has lead to a growing Western rite in the Orthodox Church.
So to answer your question: The MP, I suspect, is afraid that the situation in the Orthodox Church in Russia (not all of which is of our own making) will encourage people to join the Catholic Church. This is something that we Orthodox don’t seem to get–in least in part, we “forced” the creation of the “unia” by our own pastoral and ethical failings. However comforting it might be to think otherwise, while dogmatic theology and church history play their part in people moving between Christian traditions, often internal failings of the tradition of origin are as much, if not more than, the cause.
Again, well done.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
I pray and hope for unity.
I fear it may take the next (uncompromised) Patriarch to allow for possible unity.
Yes, bravo Simple Sinner! I’ve never understood where the MP was coming from on this. It rather seems like a Walmart Superstore worrying about a small mom & pop shop opening up in the area.
“one wonders, what is he afraid of and why?”
I think it is like how SSPX radicals blame everything on their phantom enemies the Freemasons, only imagine an SSPX that has a history of over 600 years blaming everything on Freemasons.
Only for the Russian Orthodox elite the age old enemy is Roman Catholicism, which to them is the religous incarnation or rather in their current view the ghost of the Western empires and kingdoms of which Moscow had warred with for centuries going back to the early days of the Tuetonic Knights.
First of all, let me apologize for getting behind on my comboxing. Where I live, a sizeable percentage of the population was without power for a week – making my workload far heavier than usual. Not as an excuse, but just to let it be known that I certainly was moved by the heartfelt and candid responses – most especially of Father Gregory.
One of the reasons I am generally disinterested to go into what could degrade into Polemics all too easily with Orthodox interlocutors is because it could all too easily get me (or us) branded as anti-Orthodox here at The Black Cordelias. Little secret? When Ben Lomand and the Evangelical convert boomlet was in full swing, you would have been hard pressed to find a more enthusiastic supporter of that effort. I bought and still listen to some of the truly magnificent recordings done at Ss. Peter & Paul.
I feel, today, the same way about the whole of Russia as I did then about the efforts of the “Evangelical Orthodox” – initially enthusiastic about the (re)emergence of Orthodoxy among the unchurched and Evangelicals, supremely saddened that the roots did not manage to grow far, far deeper.
I commend in my prayers the whole of the Russian nation to discover the ROC, to join it, to fast, to pray, to grow in holiness and become part of the Russian Cloud of Witnesses, the likes of which include such a beautiful luminary as St. Seraphim of Sarov – a true inspirtation to all Christians everywhere.
All the same, it has been a source of sadness to me (there is no triumphalism in saying this) that the culture of death still reigns supreme in a nation that the Servant of God Fulton Sheen (who wore a 17th century pectoral cross from Russia, keeping it always close to his heart) once predicted would emerge from the woes of communism as a luminary to the World of the Word. From that sadness I can feel nothing but angst and frustration that – for as close as we Orthodox and Catholics are in our fight against common enemies and our common mission of redemption and sanctification – the Patriarch of Moscow looks past all the woe and misery among “his own” to demonize and denigrate the noble efforts of Catholics among our own tiny (by comparison) flock. We aren’t his worst trouble. Would that we were – I would move there tomorrow.
Father J and I were recently in Saint Louis on a fact finding mission of sorts (ok, it was more of an architecture tour, one of these days we will have the photos to post) and we spent a memorable evening with a Maronite priest who is rector of Saint Raymond’s Cathedral for the Maronites of the Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon. This gentle priest was hopeful and enthusiastic about the realities of Catholic/Orthodox/Oriental reproachment taking place in the middle east where all parties are surrounded on all sides by folks who want them gone. His parish is home to a number of Antiochian families, and he has commended a number of Maronite families who find themselves without a Maronite parish to seek out the Antiochians…
When abouna asked how it was for the Greek Catholics and Orthodox of the Middle East, I could only shake my head and note that we aren’t anywhere near as close… It will probably take dhimmitude for us to get serious about the matter.
Wow. Churchgoers in my area are fortunate; we have a wide variety of Catholic and Orthodox options, including Maronites and Antiochians. Never mind those other guys.