“Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them,

and they that are great exercise authority upon them.

But it shall not be so among you:

but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;

And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:

Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto,

but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25-28, KJV)


The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklesia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church
(and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word,
which connoted equal participation in all deliberation by all members,
came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia -
which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times,
who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)

- Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter




ΦΙΛΟΤΙΜΟ: THE GREEK SECRET


Sunday, September 9, 2012

John Saltas Responds to Metropolitan Isaiah's Letter

After reading the latest nonsensical and divisive letter from the Metropolitan, the obvious becomes even more so:

The single common thread of 50 years of confusion in the Salt Lake City Parish is the Metropolitan himself.

  • This community has behaved honestly and ethically--he has not.
  • He disavows fair elections.
  • He makes excuses and false rationale. 
  • He sets a bar, then moves it. 
  • He orders secret acts (establishing Prophet Elias as a corporation for dubious reasons) from parishioners then seems amazed at what comes. 
  • How many good people--our friends and neighbors--have left due to his behavior? 
  • How much has that cost this community in hurt feelings? Hurt our image? Hurt this community financially? 
This is not a Salt Lake City problem. This is not a problem of the people comprising this parish. This is a problem of the clergy and leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church and it is rooted in the Metropolitan seat in Denver.

1 comment:

Barbara Colessides said...

This problem is rooted in the FACT that the Patriarch, fearing the emergence of another Archbishop Iakovos, made our Archbishop in the country a mere figurehead (especially in the minds of our Metropolitans - MOST especially the one Denver, who has no problem throwing our Archbishop "under the bus").

Having vivisected the church in this country, the Patriarch has practiced the well-known dictum of "divide and conquer". In doing so he thinks that he has vouchsafed his American cash cow.

A lagniappe to it all, for at least his Turkish masters, is that he has also diluted the political effectiveness of the Greek Orthodox Church in America as an arm of the Greek Lobby.

Win-win for everyone but us!