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The Russian Church undoubtedly has access to wealth, but mainly as a supplicant to an increasingly authoritarian and anti-Christian government. I've been to Romania, and if the Romanian Church has any wealth, it hides it well. I was surprised to see so much back-breaking poverty in a European country. Even in Bucharest, there are parishes in which the fabric of the building is crumbling and the priest's vestments are threadbare. In the countryside, anything a Western visitor has to offer is gratefully accepted--including clothing, toiletries, medicines and other essentials for Church-operated orphanages and schools. Greece overall is on the verge of economic collapse, so get back to me next year.

You left out Antioch, which most certainly does depend on the alms of its North American archdiocese, which in turn is composed largely of non-Arab converts. Most of the jurisdictional problems of Orthodoxy in the United States can, ultimately, be traced to the desire to maintain control over the collection plate of what is, far and away, the wealthiest set of Orthodox parishes in the world (not that they are particularly wealthy by Western Church standards).

That aside, for the past half century, North America has been the center of the most dynamic schools of theology in all of Orthodoxy, and slowly but surely, most of the great names of the last century gravitated here. North American Orthodoxy may be small, but its influence has been large.

On the North American Consultation, it involves most of the Orthodox jurisdictions here, as well as Roman Catholics and even Greek Catholics (old world prejudices do not carry over here). Its meetings and publications, far from being obscure, have frequently been in advance of those coming from the International Commission, and have been the foundation for inter-ecclesial relations, particularly in pastoral areas such as mixed marriages and conversions.

Could you put names to the North American schools.

Schmemann and Meyendorff were banned from the libraries of Russian seminaries in the decade after Perestroika. I shall make enquiries to see if seminarians are yet recommended/permitted to read them

Were they having American authors in 19th century Russian seminaries? No, they were not!

I suppose you would like Russian seminaries to go back to teaching in Latin, Father?

Not the 19th, but definitely the early 20th, for St. Tikhon was a theologian, bishop of the Americas, and patriarch in the early 20th C.

Is outrage! If you meant to interject also a tad of humor, thank you. Fr. Vasileivich is much beloved in my imagination. To every thing there is a season, and may humor be among them.

I'm grateful that although this is, I think, an intense thread it is also remaining audible to me.

As you mentioned earlier, Stuart, "...One can find equally strident anti-ecumenist statements originating from within the traditionalist fringes of the Catholic Church..." On another forum site these pop up instantly, and soon strident Orthodox join them. They toss the same pieces of canon law and conciliar history back and forth, back and forth, on every thread they join, regardless of what the original post began as. It quickly becomes impossible to hear any whispers of Christ in our midst. It makes me think there should be an Onion Dome for the strident RCs.

I see a difference between simply not having 19th century authors (whoever they are) and actually banning two specific 20th century ones. Do you not see the difference?

My point is this: Russia from the time of Peter the Great ceased to be a center of original Orthodox thought; those Orthodox theologians who exhibited the least bit of originality, like Nicholas Afanasiev, did so from outside the system of seminaries and theological institutions, all of which--all--were modeled on the Latin seminary system, taught according to Latin models using Latin methods and categories, and in which all classes were actually taught in Latin. The Russian Church lost its independence in the late 17th century when it became a bureaucratic department of the Tsarist government, and from then, until the abortive Synod of 1905, nothing of any interest happened from within the Russian Church. Sobornst, pan-Slavism, the mystical speculations of Berdaeyev--all from the outside. Something good might have happened in the wake of the 1917 Synod, but for the Bolsheviks. And because of the Bolsheviks, the Russian Church for some seventy years remained an intellectual and theological backwater--because that's how the Soviets wanted it to be. The "intellectual captivity" continued in Russia, but it ended in Paris and New York.

So, forgive me if I remain unimpressed by the Patriarchate prohibiting Schmemann and Meyendorff. If they were around today, I am sure they would consider it a badge of honor.

How many Australian theologians do they read in Moscow? What Monty Python could do with a meeting of the All-Australia Orthodox Theological Academy (or, at least, the Onion Dome).

O lordie, Stuart... "original Orthodox thought"..... I think this phrase is a great illustration how far the East is from the West and how much Catholics fail to understand the Orthodox. You have used the anathema word "original." Believe me, the Orthodox have no taste for "original" theology! LOL!

Where is the original thought in the non-enslaved Churches? Jerusalem, Greece, Antioch, Alexandria, all of whom were free of the Communists....?

How many Australian theologians do they read in Moscow? None. Why the "itchy ears" for novelty and originality of thought?

Only someone drinking his own bathwater takes the Orthodox claim of immobility seriously. For the first thousand years of the Church, it was Rome that was the bastion of conservatism, and the Christian East that was the hotbed of novelty.

Indeed yes, the East was, more accurately, the hotbed of heresy. You want us to return to those days? Is church life in need of some excitement?

Could you take a moment to detail the original theology which has come out of Greece or Alexandria in the last hundred years, or from any Church? And how has it been accepted by the pleroma of Orthodoxy?

Your admiration for the Paris school may be misplaced - what did they try to introduce into Orthodox theology? The theology of Sophia as the Fourth Hypostasis of the Trinity? Later toned down to "not a hypostasis" but something other than the other three hypostases. Or Berdyaev's Ungrund, a nothingness which exists prior to God and beyond Him?

Please, the Orthodox do not need these "original thoughts" and "mystical speculations"? If they are compatible with Catholicism... welcome!...take them... they are yours.

There is a middle ground between heresy on the one hand, and mindless traditionalism on the other (I never use the term "traditionalism" in a positive manner--"The dead faith of the living", to quote Jaroslav Pelikan). That middle way is living within the Tradition, which is so much more than rote repetition of things we have always done, but an attempt to understand and penetrate the meaning of what we do--to think as the Fathers thought, rather than simply to do what the Fathers did (though, if you were honest with yourself, you'd have to admit that most of what the Orthodox Church does today would certainly surprise--and in many cases, distress--the Fathers).

On the subject of Orthodox theologians, Metropolitan John of Pergamon is widely considered one of the leading theologians of the Orthodox Church, as is Metropolitan Kallistos, Fr. Stanley Harnakas, and innumerable others who probably don't meet with your approval. I would have mentioned Romanides, but as David Bentley Hart (another one of those progressive OCA theologians) noted, not too many people still take the dyspeptic Greek seriously (one of the positive results of Orthodoxy's exposure to the West has been the need to adopt Western norms for scholarship, which means mindlessly repeating old myths and polemics about the other won't cut the mustard anymore).

By the way, your assessment of the Paris School is exactly what I would have expected of a ROCOR cleric, nothing more nor less.

It is not always an easy matter distinguishing between an originality that is heterodox and innovatory and an originality that is orthodox and traditional. Often it takes the Church one or more generations to see things clearly. Athanasius and his homoousion is a good example (see R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God). Compared to the orthodoxy of the second century, Athanasius's assertion of the homoousion was clearly untraditional, yet the Church ultimately realized that in this formulation the tradition was to be decisively found. Sometimes mere reiteration of traditional ways of speaking and thinking is insufficient--and sometimes reiteration is absolutely necessary. It's a fine line to walk.

That is wrong and a little snide. I have been in the Russian Church (Abroad) only for the last few years. None of my time in ROCA has been really formative since I am too long in the tooth and past the time of being "formed." I have spent my life in the Serbian Orthoodx Church and it is there I learnt my theology, from both the Serbs and the Greeks -the Serbs use a fair amount of Greek theological writings in their seminaries, Rhosse, Androutsos, Dyobouniotes, Mesolara...

You have not answered my question? What "original thoughts" have been introduced into our theology by these gentlemen? What are these thoughts specifically? How have they been accepted by the pleroma of Orthodoxy?

Not so much original thoughts as the clearing away of the cobwebs that grew over the pristine patristic Tradition during the Turkokratia and the captivity of the Russian Church, first under the Tsars, then under the commisars. And, of course, they have been accepted by the pleroma, because they were the original pleroma after all.