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| Ex Oriente Lux |
“Harmonizing Ukrainian legislation with the European one, we quickly adopt the diseases of the Western society. In European legislation I see no mention of the Christian roots of the culture. We are mistaken if we think that in order to have European prosperity we need to come down with these illnesses,”
He said that in today's society, which does not live according to God's commandments, there are different ideas of morality and values. Often in the name of so-called tolerance, says the head of the church, life is destroyed, which, conversely, must be protected.
“Among the requirements of the European community are pseudo-values. The EU looks like a teenager who is testing the limits of morality and needs a Christian education. Europe was built not on same-sex marriages, but on the respect for human dignity, the protection of human rights and freedoms, on honesty in politics and business. On these foundations Europe arose, but it has forgotten about it. These are the values which today the church defends in our society. When it comes to the protection of life from its natural beginning to natural end, then it is the basis for the opposition to euthanasia, abortion, and other acts that violate the dignity of life”...He refutes the assertion that if Ukraine adopts the law on gay marriage, then it will join the European community. “I can affirm that it is not so. Sometimes our legislators, so as to not implement other bills, implement ones like this. It is much easier for them in Europe and in Ukraine to vote against the traditional family than against corruption, the unfair judicial system that tolerates selective justice. They focus on minor issues so as to not solve the main ones.”
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| The Asado-Yerba Mate-Gaucho Mass ("Missa Crioula") in Southern Brazil |
A good deal of our current malaise, both in the Church and in society more broadly, can be attributed—I think—to a certain disregard for history. In terms of contemporary history, this disregard might be more accurately called amnesia, but equally that might be to give too much credit to those who do not account for the past—as if theirs is a merely passive act. No, I think the problem is worse than that. The problem is much more conscious, deliberate, and even vandalistic. This is in spite of the fact that, to the credit of a few in the media, there have been some recent acknowledgments of the importance of history, not least in relation to Syria and the Middle East, but also in relation to the Church Herself. ...
Developments in the public conversation around human sexuality, meanwhile, represent an act of conscious disdain for history of the sort that has come to characterise most Western dialogue more generally. Saying nothing, for example, about the fundamental rights of people of homosexual orientation, the arguments proffered in the last year by David Cameron’s government in the United Kingdom in favour of same-sex marriage amounted to nothing short of historical sacrilege. Where attention was paid to historical witness it was seldom more than in caricature, while terminology distilled through the process of centuries was disavowed and redefined at the stroke of a pen, the strike of a key, or the sound of an offhand comment. Unfortunately, the voice of the Church—at least in Britain, and at least as it was communicated publically—was no better.
July 28 is the day of St. Vladimir according to the calendar followed by Russian Greek-Catholics, and July 29 is the day of St. Olaf in the Latin calendar. The Saint Olaf Pilgrimage, organized by Una Voce Russia together with two Catholic parishes, the Latin-rite of St. Nicholas in Luga, and the Byzantine-rite parish of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in St. Petersburg, brought together men and women coming from several places in Russia as well as from Poland and Italy, both Greek-Catholics and Latins, to walk about 100 km in four days, spending nights in improvised tent camps, and assisting at celebrations which both St. Olaf, a Viking turned Christian, and St. Vladimir, the 10th century prince and baptizer of Russia, would have easily recognized as something familiar: the Traditional Latin Mass and its Eastern counterpart, the Divine Liturgy in the Church Slavonic language.
The goal of the pilgrimage was the city of Novgorod, where St. Olaf has spent some time as an exile before returning to Norway to die as a martyr in the battle of Stiklestad. Nowadays Novgorod is the center of Russian Catholics’ veneration of this holy king, promoted by the Catholic parish priest there, Fr. Vladimir Timoshenko. Father Vladimir presented to the pilgrims an icon of Saint Olaf and also pronounced a very moving sermon at the Mass celebrated by Fr. Paolo Giacinti IVE, the parish priest of Luga who also travels regularly to St. Petersburg to say the “old” Mass there. Also of particular interest were three lectures delivered by Greek-Catholic priest Fr. Kirill Mironov.
