Kolo,
Christ is in our mist.
I love you, brother. Genuinely. Deeply. And I have appreciated your wisdom. But I find this comment out of line. Your rhetoric is over the top, and a dramatic overgeneralization. Matthew 7:1-5. If the Evangelical converts in the Antiochian Archdiocese have been too “on fire” then I’m sure +Philip has/will handle it.
If not for those converts, I would not have found Orthodoxy when I did. Or, more appropriately, it would not have found me. Worshipping alongside Arab Christians in an Antiochian Orthodox Parish has helped soften the post-9/11 hardness of my heart toward Middle Easterners. And I thank God for that.
The Lord works in his mysterious was and most assuredly does not need you or me to act as his referee. So, as politely as I can put this - step off with all the “harumph”ing.
El Patriota is a cradle Roman whose disaffection with the abuse scandals in that Communion have led him to seek a home elsewhere, and he is looking to the East.
The convert population definitely needs the discipline of the cradles. At least those - who you yourself guided me to look to - come to Liturgy more frequently than on Pascha. Converts look to cradles for wisdom and guidance and all too often they are LET DOWN.
By the same token, the cradles need a double dose of the converts’ zeal. Maybe triple.
I forgot to add,
Forgive me.
“If the Evangelical converts in the Antiochian Archdiocese have been too “on fire” then I’m sure +Philip has/will handle it.”
So we all hope, Yudan. The activities of some of those evangelicals has been a source of problems here in the States and abroad because of some basic misunderstandings about Orthodox theology and praxis.
“El Patriota is a cradle Roman whose disaffection with the abuse scandals in that Communion have led him to seek a home elsewhere, and he is looking to the East.”
Latins are free to explore Orthodoxy as the Orthodox are free to explore Roman Catholicism. That said, Y, there is a very, very long and sad history of Roman Catholic proselytizing of Orthodox Christians which for many centuries and even to the present in some areas has been a source of great discord between the East and the West. On the other hand, in the last century there were forced conversions of Eastern Rite Catholics back to their ancestral Orthodoxy in places like Ukraine and after the fall of the USSR of very active proseltyzing by Latins in Russia.
As for ““harumph”ing”, the Synod in Antioch very recently did some rather substantial “harumph”ing” on this very subject, in which +Philip joined.
As a general proposition and over the past few years, Orthodoxy and the Latin Church have arrived at a point where it has been determined that it is destructive of potential harmony for either side to seek to convert the other. As a catchumen, you may not have been aware of that. That’s what Campion was alluding to.