AmericanPapist Comments
Do you have some back story on this image?
I know that the Orthodox can show some friendliness to post-1054 saints (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Clergy-Laity Conference and Saint Francis of Assisi) but jumping the gun and putting images of modern Popes in what looks like chapels (who are the others? I can't make them out...) is a new one to me.
My first reaction was, "What are Chuck Schumer and Dick Cheney doing with the Pope?"
Putin and Gorbachev?
Ditto asimplesinner....Huh?
Bush (I) and Gorbachev maybe? I really can't tell... but if it is a tribute to leaders at the time of the fall of the Communist regime... maybe?
I found this via a few Google searches. It appears as item No. 8 in the September 2001 issue of "Orthodox Christian Witness", published by St. Nectarios American Orthodox Church in Seattle WA. It is presented as a report from Reuters, but I wasn't able to verify that. Editor's comments from the newsletter are included following the story.
PETRESTI, Romania, Aug 26 (Reuters) - A new Orthodox church in Romania's mountainous Transylvania features some strikingly untraditional icons -- portraying Pope John Paul, former U.S. President George Bush and ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
"The three should have been proposed for sanctification for changing the course of the history, like Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman emperor who became a famous saint," argues Alexandru Coman, the priest in the village of Petresti.
"I wanted our church to illustrate three providential personalities of the past millennium," Coman, 53, whose church was consecrated on Sunday, told Reuters.
"They made a crucial contribution to demolishing the red plague of communism."
The three faces beaming down from a fresco inside the church porch are powerful symbols to Romanians still struggling to shake off the effects of half a century of particularly repressive communist rule, Coman said.
Beneath the painting, which depicts Bush and Gorbachev making speeches and
the Pope, an inspiration to Poles throughout the 1980s, blessing the faithful, is a short text.
"When man shouted: Stop the world, I want to get off, God intervened through these three providential men to change it."
Coman, who has preached in Petresti since 1973, explained the significance of the message.
"It symbolises the desperate shouts of people living under the communists who could not bear the lies and harsh conditions any longer," he said, adding that the images had been copied from photos found on the Internet and in a papal souvenir album.
UNITING BELIEVERS
Work on the new church began in 1988 to meet the needs of a growing Orthodox community in a village previously served by a small stone church dating from 1849, when just 46 families lived in Petresti compared to some 700 today.
About 500 of these are Orthodox, Coman said, but the area, once populated by Germans, is home to a sizeable Protestant minority, as well as a small number of Roman Catholics.
In 1999, the Pope made a historic three-day trip to Romania, becoming the first Pontiff to visit a mainly Orthodox country.
He and Romania's Orthodox Patriarch Teoctist sat side by side in common prayer in a symbolic gesture designed to narrow the centuries-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
In a bid to unite the faiths in Petresti, which lies 350 km (230 miles) northwest of Bucharest, the church features other icons which make it uniq
Oops. That was too long for the combox. Here's the rest, starting with that last paragraph again:
In a bid to unite the faiths in Petresti, which lies 350 km (230 miles) northwest of Bucharest, the church features other icons which make it unique in Romania, where communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu routinely raided religious property.
"We have painted various Catholic and Protestant prelates inside the church to make our believers understand they have to live like brothers with people of other denominations," Coman said. "It's a church of inter-confessional communion."
About 2,000 Orthodox priests, along with clerics of minority faiths were jailed under Romania's harsh communist-era regime.
Under Ceausescu, hundreds of churches throughout the country were bulldozed or moved out of sight to clear the way for mammoth public buildings, particularly in Bucharest.
The imposing new church in Petresti was built thanks to small but continuous contributions from residents, topped up by a $25,000 grant from the local authorities.
"We all gave something to build our new spiritual shelter," explained Mariana Oprean, a member of its congregation.
EDITOR’S COMMENTS: Surely, St. John the Romanian who was a zealous defender of the Holy Traditions and of the traditional calendar would have never been able to comprehend the actions of this Romanian Church. Saints are those Orthodox Christians who have reposed in the faith and love of our Lord. Orthodox do not look to the Roman Pope, a former American president or a former atheist Soviet leader for spiritual inspiration. It surely appears that we are in end times when clergy cannot distinguish between good and evil.
In case anyone had any guesses, the folks at the Orthodox Christian Witness are more Orthodox than the Orthodox - being old calendarists they are actually in communion with almost no one.
They are the Orthodox-iest Orthodox around!
All 1000 of them.
(Yea, I am just not impressed by the squabling ethno-nationalism and a the failure to comprehend the existence or reality of a Christianity that isn't frozen in the mideieval Greek-half of the Roman Empire...)
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