"Except by Prayer and Fasting"

The purpose and pattern of our lives is sanctification. In Holy Orthodoxy, we say theosis or deification. God has made us to be holy as He is holy. This is the meaning of "made in His Image." And He has set us in a place of freedom that we might have the fullness of that holiness, choosing for it, striving for it. As the great Feast of the Transfiguration, the crown of theosis, lies just ahead, we are called to prepare ourselves today. We embrace the tradition of ascetic life, said to be the path leading to purification, recalling that the word ascesis means training in Greek (as for a wrestling match). Yet, we do not claim that holiness is achieved by ourselves. Holiness is found in God alone. Our part is to receive a share in it. As St. Peter has written,

Our share defines us, manifest at our birth: a holy innocence. No one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus teaches, without reclaiming (or retaining) this essence (Mt 8:2-5). Perhaps you have met the saints of God, who have retained it, choosing never to betray God's mutual and holy love.

Listening to Orthodox podcasts in this season of holy preparation, I was unsettled to learn this subject is controversial. To strive for personal holiness, one widely-read priest said, is the mark of the "proud Pharisee," the heresy of the Donatists (Christians who emphasized purity, but more on them later.)

My pastor's heart aches to hear these things from Orthodox priests. Have we not been witness to a heart-wrenching lesson this past half-century? How could we have forgotten? But if we have forgotten, then a pastor's unhappy duty is to remind.

The setting for our Gospel lesson is the demonic character of the elemental world (fire and water). Our faith must play a central role, Jesus says. Then in the closing sentence, He reveals the scale and scope of this struggle: the murder of God by evil men, a cosmic struggle between Divine goodness and a faithless world with its unsteady heart. Our part in this struggle is holiness: not only our whole faith but also our holy life of prayer and fasting.

As a former professor of Roman Catholic theology, I am familiar with the rejection of personal holiness. In seminary a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk laughed at my embrace of the threefold path going back, at least, to St. Dionysius the Areopagite and certainly attested in the Torah.

"Oh, that!," he exclaimed. "No one does that any more! We've all gone straight to the unitive path! The paths of purification and illumination are passé." "How arrogant," he sniffed, "to believe that we could purify ourselves!"

I recalled St. Basil the Great's landmark work On the Holy Spirit. Basil observed that we frequent secret places far away from the light of day to feed on the garbage of sin. We cover ourselves with filth. So thick is the mud that accretes over our souls and minds that the vivifying rays of the Holy Spirit no longer penetrate. Yet, should even a chink of mud fall off (corresponding to a holy thought or moment of remorse), the Holy Spirit's rays flood into us. Good thoughts and impulses influence us prompting us to cleanse ourselves further .... making us more sensitized to the stench and ugliness of mud. After a time, becoming purified, we are filled with illumination. For nothing remains to block the healing rays of the Spirit.

But the monk stood fast. "Love is all you need," he said. "Love God, and love your neighbor. That is all. Everything is encompassed in Divine flames of love!" he declared.

I heard this echoed at the monasteries I visited for retreat. At one Trappist abbey, my own bishop's spiritual director, upon hearing my confession, said, "No sin! No sin! So long as you love God and love your neighbor, there is no sin!"

Over time, I came to learn that this theology was the foundation for a worldwide, unrestrained homosexual culture within the Roman priesthood (about 60% according to one poll). Well, the practical implications were obvious: if you refuse to repent of your gravest sins, and if you refuse to step down from your duties as a priest or bishop, then you must cobble together a theology that accommodates all contradictions. I was reminded of the Roman Senator Cicero, who wrote that the lawyer's first duty is to demonstrate that his client did not commit the crime. Failing that, he must demonstrate that it is not a crime.

The whole world would learn that this priestly culture represented a historic movement. This was no isolated thing. Writing on February 12, 1979, Humberto Medeiros, Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, pleaded with the newly elected John Paul II. He described a large, coherent, even militant priestly culture in Boston, not seeking forgiveness, but rather preaching the moral acceptability of their lifestyle, even "assert[ing] that homosexual acts under certain conditions are not sinful." These "conditions" are grounded in the unitive path. Sexual relations with boys would also be defended under these same theological categories. "Everything is love!" I was told, and the unitive path will lead you there. "It is all love!"

If I should balk at this, then it was obvious (I was told) that I was not open to love the Other, which was likened to the leper St. Francis brought himself to embrace and kiss. The Other, I was told, is where we meet with God.

But let us steady ourselves here. The Lord Jesus taught,

Surely, by the year 2023, the fruits of these prophets have been widely publicized. So let us ask the question bluntly and directly. Where exactly has this unitive path led? It has led to the molestation of millions (yes, I said millions) of boys, 333,000 in France alone.

I have heard the claim that there is no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, so let us consider another fact: the magisterial John Jay Report on priestly child abuse within the U.S. found that 81% of the victims were boys molested by men, 22% younger than ten-years-old, 51% between the ages of 11 and 14, and 27% between 15- and 17-years-old. That is, these crimes grievous to Heaven — Jesus said, "It would be better .... a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea (Mt 18:6). — are fundamentally homosexual.

"Then, the Church must reform!" you say? Many believe it already has. But is it not clear to everyone by now that the Roman Church will not reform? The Roman Church has become this culture, and this culture has become the Roman Church. Pope John Paul II declined a reply to Cardinal Medeiros because he recognized this. Later, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger would declare, "We must root this filth out of the Church!" And as Pope Benedict XVI, he would promulgate a directive to deny ordination to any seminarian pursuing the homosexual lifestyle and to deny such applicants admission to seminary. Not long after, he would announce his resignation. As Cardinal Medeiros discovered and as one of the greatest philosopher-kings in the history of the Roman Pontificate learned, this juggernaut cannot be reversed.

So where do you go theologically when so many priests have militantly committed to a lifestyle incompatible with priestly life? You go to Augustine of Hippo. As Augustine asserted that all of us are born with evil at our core, which he termed "Original Sin," so he also defined a theology denying the importance of personal holiness. The context for the latter was a centuries-long crisis known as the "Donatist controversy." Certain faithful, called Donatists, refused to accept sacraments from morally compromised priests. Augustine's remedy was expressed in the Latin phrase, ex opera operato — that the sacraments "work because they work" as an intrinsic property of priestly character irrespective of any particular priest's conduct. Personal holiness, he argued, is irrelevant.

But Holy Orthodoxy has never endorsed this patently absurd theology. As our great teacher Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev has written,

Met. Alfeyev continues,

You see, only priests who "serve the Gospel" and who live "spotless lives in humility" are able to act as God's agency to absolve sin. It follows that if your sins have been "absolved" by priests who have not lived spotless lives, then your sins continue to be piled high upon your souls. (We recall that only three men in the history of the Church have been styled "the Theologian": the Apostle St. John, St. Gregory Nazienzen, and St. Symeon.)

Symeon concludes,

Yet, throughout the West and even among many Orthodox priests in the U.S., the case continues to be made that personal holiness has no place at this table.

Augustine's essay against the Donatists is not about doctrine. It was written to break a logjam which threatened the survival of the Church. Today, its application is no less practical. For it is the primary shield behind which a priestly homosexual culture — found now in every diocese of the Roman Church and reaching the Church's highest levels of the hierarchy (Frédéric Martel, Sodoma, Paris, 2019) — continues to expand and to remake the Roman Catholic Church after its own image. The sexual rites practiced by this culture are self-understood to be nearly a sacrament, a unitive sacrament.

Appointments to positions of influence and power throughout the Roman Church, especially in recent months, demonstrate that reform is not on the agenda. Far from it! Indeed, Roman Catholic leaders see the world as being on a tipping point. They have been the prophets who have helped usher in this new LGBTQ world. And now they are poised to reap the benefits of their labors: to become the Church to a global woke world.

Is this not also the cause which centrally informs U.S. foreign policy? I am not saying that U.S. foreign policy is an instrument of the Roman Catholic Church. But is this not the same cause which explains why rainbow flags fly from every U.S. Embassy in Eastern Europe and into Asia? Is this not why NATO troops and weapons are deployed even within historic Russia, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war?

If you deem this perspective not credible or unworthy, then I urge you to read a watershed article published only weeks ago: Matthew Dal Santo, "Theopolitics of Ukraine," First Things, August, 2023. This will later be seen as a landmark article, setting out the details of a cogent argument that we do not have time to address.

Needless to say, the elderly nuns at the Hermitage who have poured out their lives in the Third and Fourth Worlds giving succor to the powerless and the suffering can only grieve at war .... at all wars. Their servant priest can do no less. Our Church, the Russian Church Outside Russia, presently celebrating its 100th year in the U.S., works tirelessly to bring relief to the war-torn refugees of Ukraine. Our Primate (of blessed memory) who ordained me was Ukrainian.

As with so many devout Christians of the late twentieth century, we at the Hermitage have been defined in our seeking after the true Church — a vocation we never wanted but which was thrust upon us. We had no choice. For we all must seek the faithful Church who teaches the three-fold path, who pastors us in our endless quest for purity and illumination, and who will guide us in our journey of theosis. These things are primary, necessary for salvation. All this we have found in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

By contrast, do we believe that priests roving from orgy to orgy, with multitudes of wounded boys in their train, could also be vessels of grace through which absolution flows? Leading Fathers of the Church don't think so. Could we ever believe that a priest molesting a boy in the sacristy one moment could then lightly step into the sanctuary and be the Divine agency through which the All-Pure and All-Holy God appears in the Eucharist? What black magic is at work here that people have come to accept such things?

"Beware ravening wolves," Jesus taught. "You shall know them by their fruits." And the sentient soul does know. We do not accept Augustine's teaching on Original Sin, for we have known holy people who have retained their original innocence. (No, they are not "free of all sin," but they live constantly above it in serene lightness of being.) We do not accept Augustine's teaching on ex opere operato, for we have spent too many years in desolated churches, where priests mock holiness. The sensitive soul perceives vacancy here .... and worse. And we have spent many, many happy hours among holy people where God's graces virtually overflow like palpable myrrh. Through the prism of our souls, we have experienced this great difference, and we cannot now say, before the Living God, that we have not.

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Holy life is primary. Faith is the gateway into the Kingdom. Yet is it only a beginning. The Lord's stepbrother James would comment, "Faith? You do well to believe. Yet even the demons of hell believe .... and tremble" (Jas 2:19). We say, "a beginning" .... then something more, a whole journey more. By praying and fasting and pursuing holy life, we imitate the Lord until over time we are transformed unto Him. We call this theosis.

Before we take our leave, let us take a few paces back to view our lesson in a wider frame, for the Lord Himself insists on this re-focus:

We are called to essences. For here is the frame through which we understand our entire lifeworld, indeed, the frame through which we understand the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy God is born into the world and immediately enters an agon: the death wishes of men pitted against the Divine Life of God.

But let us return to this theme in six days as we ascend a high mountain this Saturday, not far from Caesarea Philippi, and behold theosis with our own eyes and enter union at least from a distance with the Holy God Himself. Until then, may God continue to lead us all into holiness.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.