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Territories and Cultures of United European Christendom
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| The territory of The Church and over which the jurisdictional authority of the Church extends includes also and equally those areas pictured in grey on the map above. The jurisdictional territory of the Church is the entire world, yes, but in reality the authority of The Church — the Body of Christ, the Icon of the Holy Trinity, the Perpetual Pentecost — extends to the Milky Way Galaxy with its hundreds of billions of stars and planets, to all the other hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe and to the rest of the universe. But perhaps we can be forgiven for not straying into discussions touching on Proxima Centauri or gigaparsecs. | ||
| The areas which are greyed out are not intended by this device to be set out as unimportant or as un-Christian. And one will at once perceive that these areas constitute more than 50 percent of Earth's land and are home to more than 80 percent of her people. (Well ... we get more land per capita, and they, everybody else, everybody other than the Descendants of European Christendom, get better land. Have a look at what can grow amidst the rock or ice of most of Argentina and Chile, Australia, Greenland, Iceland, northern Canada and northern Russia, to say nothing of those our lands literally within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles.) | ||
| What is intended though is to state the facts that these areas of our World belong, not just to other countries and peoples, but to other Civilizations. What contributions to Healing the Schism(s) within the Church they make, or indeed fail to, will be just that, their contributions, the work of other people. Our focus on these pages here is on the contribution that can be made to the visible unity of the Orthodox-Catholic Church by the members of that civilization which is European Christendom. | ||
| And reflect, it is after all our forefathers, our members who played the leading roles, indeed the only roles, in creating the Schism(s) — Non-Chalcedonian from (Orthodox and Catholic) Calcedonian in and around 451 Anno Domini; then Chalcedonian Catholic from Calcedonian Orthodox between the IX and XIII centuries, with the year 1054 symbolically pivotal — which Schisms must now be unwound. It is, so to speak, our doing, our fault. We embraced Christ and His Church first, but ours were also the pastors and parishioners who left issues unresolved in Schism. This is all the more so the case if the view of who constitutes "Descendants of European Christendom" is understood to include, as the broader Greco-roman-semitic Mediterranean civilization in fact did include, those lands and their peoples, which and whom we are labelling in this project Special Cases, or rather that large sub-group of them in the Holy Lands + Persia. Of course there were later invasions, chiefly by Arabs from the South, and many centuries later by Mongolian-Turkic peoples from the East-Northeast. Still at root one may conclude that in northern Africa and especially in Egypt, in Syria and Lebanon, and in Asia Minor, and also, if somewhat more attenuated, further East into Mesopotamia and indeed onward into Persia, from a civilizational perspective, as also to a significant extent in terms of demographic continuity, such people are us. Or rather they would be but for Islam. | ||
| All this is very painful, and the complexity of related matters can be expanded into realms of the insoluble, the more so since Healing the Schism is so very much about wanting to. In Syria, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, a.k.a., Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East, the Church and Christendom encounter Christians — in many cases the cultural and lineal and linguistic descendants of the earliest communities of converts to God, converts from Apostolic times and in direct line from the very Apostles hand chosen by Christ Jesus — but also Christians suffering, and often dying, martyrs for The Only True Faith, orthodox-catholic Christianity. At the risk of shouldering the intellectual pitfalls of the sweeping generalization, it must nonetheless be recognized that, of the Descendants of European Christendom who have the material good fortune, if perhaps the spiritual and eternal bad fortune, of living within European Christendom, a clear majority can not be understood as being Christian in any meaningful sense other than the Graces they have received, usually Baptism. And even of those Descendants of European Christendom who actually are Christian, how many are willing to sacrifice 5 percent of their luxuries for Church or for Christendom? Middle Eastern (like so many other) Christians are qualitatively separated from us by being better than us. But as nation-states how to consider a country as member of European Christendom when 80 or 90 percent of its population is Muslim? In the case of Anatolia/Asia Minor/Turkey, one speaks rather of a proportion of the population who are Muslims unlikely to be less than 97 percent, and probably more than 99 percent. (Kurds, like Turks, are Sunni Muslim; surviving Armenians in Turkey constitute less than one tenth of one percent of the population; and the Greek Orthodox flock within Turkey of the Ecumenical Patriarch, the Patriarch of "Constantinople", perhaps no longer numbers 2000 people.) | ||
| The answer that emerges, though extremely regretable, is that these once-Christian countries of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East are now overwhelmingly Muslim and so by fact and not by fiat they are not constituent lands of European Christendom. Yet one might hope and pray that United European Christendom will support and defend these heroic Christians to an extent that a dis-United half-European post-Christendom surely will not. | ||
But returning to the rule and not the special cases: Chinese, Mongolians and Manchu and Tibetans; Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Thais and Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians; the Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and Nepalese and Sinhalese and Tamils of the Asian Sub-Continent; the Turkic peoples of Central Asia; the Sub-Saharan Africans; and the Pre-Columbian peoples of Central and South America, with their large Mestizo and Mulatto populations, all of these peoples and their ancestors had very little to do with the Early Church, Her councils and Her conflicts, and so also Her Schisms. A tiny number of Indians are perhaps an exception. The Ethiopian Orthodox are defiinitely an exception, with even a small delegation of bishops attending the First Ecumenical Council in Nicea in 325 Anno Domini, though later their counciliar involvement – and so their involvement in the Schisms – having faded into the un-recorded or the non-existent. |
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| Of course a lack of involvement in problem creation need not categorically mean a lack of involvement in problem solution. Still, as of the writing of these paragraphs in 2016, the present writer is unaware of any major contributions toward resolving the Schisms within the Orthodox-Catholic Church, among — Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Catholics — which are being made or attempted by anyone other than Descendants of European Christendom, be those individuals nestled safely within European Christendom or more or less precariously outside of European Christendom. As for the latter, one thinks of the heroic Copts and Syriacs. | ||
| And there are other issues. Here reference is not to the Egyptians and Syrians and Lebanese and other orthodox-catholic Christian communities of the longest standing, but which are in Muslim controlled lands. As for the rest, Church leaders and their communities of the faithful in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South America, these people have not inherited 2000-year legacies of Christendom building, nor those one millennium's duration. It might be fairly said that, or at least seriously pondered if, their tasks at this time in Church history are different. And high on the list of the obvious in this connection is the task of building Christian countries, little Christendoms within a country if one will. Then perhaps in time regional or even continental amalgamation might emerge. Elsewhere on the pages of this project, reference has been made in the roughest outline form of some issues which might be involved in a hypothetical United African Christendom. And are we all allowed to hope and even to posit that part of the definition of a Christian country, and a vital part indeed, must surely include the notion and the reality that the very people of that country do not wish to flee from that country at the earliest opportunity? — And fleeing invariably means fleeing to European Christendom. — Between civilizations, even if both be comprised of what could be called Christian countries, it is not a relationship among equals when the relative immigration/emigration pressures are a thousand to one. (Within European Christendom the situation is simply different. Swedes and Americans; Germans and Spaniards immigrate/emigrate in both directions. In the Somali-Swede balance, there is no balance, and none is forseable for the coming centuries.) | ||
Mass immigration is not a central issue of this project, but rather a side issue and perhaps an unfortunate one. Of course in the case of Muslims (or Buddhists or Hindus, etc.) prohibiting mass immigration does not present a moral dilemma at all. Simply exclude 100 percent of them from European Christendom, zero additional immigration into European Christendom, and such a stance without hesitation, reproach or qualm. Excluding masses of millions of Christians who want to escape from countries which were never really Christian, if the above criterion is included in the definition of a Christian country, that is, a country, not necessarily rich by any definition, but still, a country from which its own people do not wish to flee en masse, this is a kind of moral dilemma, certainly. But it is a moral dilemma with an obvious solution, and that solution is that this type of mass immigration too has to be postponed, that is, prohibitied, for the indefinite future:
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| But there is another side. Our times are especially auspicious for Healing the Schism(s), and not least because of the work of those who elsewhere we criticize, and with good reason. Pope Paul VI was responsible for the Novus Ordo Mass, which changes brought so much destruction in their wake, also, along with Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I, by Joint Declaration of 7 December 1965 lifted the Anathmas from 1054. Pope John Paul II, raised to the Honors of the Altar in the Catholic Church, was not only about creating the appearance of an heretical embrace of Religious Indifferentism. He was also central in arriving at the Joint Christological Declarations with important leaders within the Oriental Orthodox Communion, which, if they come to be accepted by an authoritative council of the Oriental Orthodox, in effect remove the chief-most dispute in the Schism which the Fourth Ecumenical Council, the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was unable to avert. | ||
| In light of the foregoing, the addition of new divisions and point of contention among Christians peoples which, at the present point in history, is unavoidably occassioned by utterly lopsided mass immigration, even of Christian peoples, would simply not be worth the price, and that even if it were otherwise a good thing, which the above points make clear, it is not. A side issue yes, but still a destructive side issue, destructive to both Church and Christendom. |
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