A Second Open Letter to Clergy
Dear Fathers,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
For some of us, we are in the interval between the Feast of the Nativity and that of Theophany. We are days away from the Julian New Year.
For the rest of us, we are almost a fortnight into the new year.
We all remain troubled by the events of January 6th (which was Theophany on the Revised Julian Calendar). In fact, the distress is only increasing when we see more images and hear more recordings of the violence, and when we read of the deaths that have occurred at the hands of insurrectionists.
It is hard to compare dimensions of trouble, and to determine which is worst.
But among the most painful reports of the terrorist attack on the Capitol on New Calendar Theophany is the report of the involvement of some of our own brethren, actual Orthodox priests.
Indeed, there were some who participated in the riot wearing a cassock and a pectoral Cross.
This one fact is heartbreaking and soul-crushing. It makes any good conscience weep.
I understand that we all have our own political views, and we involve ourselves in varying degrees of partisanship. Some of us are Republicans. Some are Democrats. Some (I think with less justification) are Libertarians.
But as the Wednesday attack on the Capitol has revealed, there is a sharp moral difference between an acceptable array of political speech on one hand, and participation in demagoguery and sedition on the other.
There are those of us who participated in fascism on Theophany, who have aided and abetted the monstrous rise of sedition and autocracy for the last four years.
I am a theological conservative. I hold the tenets of the Niceo-Constantinopolitan Creed deeply in my heart. I am Pro-Life, and I hold to traditional social mores.
But it is hard for me to recognize a common priesthood with clergy who support sedition and insurrection -- because sedition and insurrection are exactly what January 6th was, and what these last four years have been.
I am not suggesting any prescriptions here, because frankly, I do not know what there is to be done about clergy who carried the Cross of Our Lord into darkness. I ask the same question as one of these very clergymen posed over two decades ago, when he was offended, not by some immorality, but by an appropriate exercise of economia:
“What partnership have righteousness and iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial?” (2 Corinthians 6.14-15).
We have many questions to think about, and to mourn about. Why are there so many young adults drawn to sedition? Why, historically, have so many of our faithful been drawn to authoritarianism -- especially now, but also over the centuries? Why is American Orthodoxy still so unprepared to witness to the Ascended Christ's peace, justice, and righteousness in American democracy? Must we always protest pluralism, secularity, and the evaporation of the ideal of America as an exceptional Christian nation?
And this: how was it ever possible for some of our own priestly brotherhood to have participated in a crowd that chanted “Hang Pence” and “Where’s Nancy?” -- a crowd that murdered a Capitol Police officer, and caused the suicide of another?
Was it a catechetical failure? Was it a deficiency of Orthodox dogmatic theology, or a lack of Orthodox spiritual formation? Was it an artifact of pre-conversion fundamentalism? Was it ignorance of rational American history and civics? Was it practice in indecent homiletics? Was it an unrecognized addiction to hate speech -- a sort of “political pornography” that effaces the Face of Christ from the neighbor, and programs extremism in its place?
We have, Fathers, much to think about, much to study, much to pray for, much to grieve.
Fr Jonathan Tobias
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