Public Service Announcement

Dear English-speaking Orthodox Christians,

"Saint" is one of many words in the English language brought to merry old England by the damnable francophone Normans who many nowadays also like to blame for taking England out of Orthodoxy when they arrived on the Isles in 1066. (It's not true - everything credible I've read places England firmly within the Church of Rome and therefore as much outside of world Orthodoxy after 1054 as the rest of Western and Central Europe was. Admittedly things went back and forth till 1204, but that's not the subject of this announcement, so we won't go there :-).) Apparently many people think it's a title and not an adjective, so I'm here to disabuse you of that notion. "Saint" means holy. It is therefore redundant (as well as highly annoying) to say or write something like "Holy Saint So-and-So, pray to God for us." Either say "holy" or "saint" - both are unnecessary, though God knows we Byzantines have a thing for the wordy and the redundant ;-). Perpetrators, you know who you are! Please stop now ;-).

Many thanks,
The Administrator

P.S. Yeah, there's not a lot of news today :-).

OCA/ROCOR Joint Statement

The American Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad have finally released the November joint statement of their dialogue commissions. The statement reviews the long history of the OCA and the ROCOR both in North America and worldwide and commits both to working together for the sake of unity and Orthodoxy, confirming the restoration of full communion between the two churches as a result of the union of the Moscow Patriarchate and the ROCOR in 2007.

The commissions that drafted the statement were led by Bishops Tikhon (Mollard) of Philadelphia of the OCA and George (Schaefer) of Mayfield of the ROCOR (both converts to Orthodoxy interestingly enough), but the statement itself has been approved by both the Holy Synod of the OCA and the Synod Abroad of the ROCOR. The full statement can be found here.

OCA Consistory to Transfer to D.C. in 2011 or 2012

Metropolitan Jonah of Washington of the American Orthodox Church (OCA) has stated that the administration of the OCA will be transferred from New York to Washington, DC, following this coming November's All-American Council in Bellevue, Washington (the real Washington, not the District of Columbia ;-) ).

The statement comes as a disappointment to American Orthodox, the author among them, who had hoped that the OCA would eventually return its primatial see to the more international New York and seek to be a continental, pan-ethnic Local Orthodox Church for both of the Americas instead of continuing to narrowly focus on the interests of the United States' Orthodox Christians. The dream of an international, truly American (in the broadest sense of that word) Orthodoxy that could overcome the narrow ethnic obsessions and phyletism characteristic of Old World Orthodoxy is apparently dead.

More here.