Michael Bauman

Our personhood is an ontological reality, not a philosophical construct subject to a manipulation that justifies all types of dehumanization. Personhood is deeper than what desire, rationality, or biology can explain. It is an essential mystery expressed in the longing and realization of communion with a loving Creator.

The fact that in the intervening twenty-five years nothing has changed emerges clearly from the text we print below. On 18 March 2002 Patriarch Alexis wrote to Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople outlining the position of the Russian Church regarding the claims to the Ecumenical Patriarchate to jurisdiction over the worldwide Orthodox ‘diaspora’, coming to the same conclusions as did Archbishop Paul. More recently there has been a further exchange of letters, but none has gone over the ground as thoroughly as does the present text. The English version given below is translated from a French version of the Russian original. To His Holiness Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch and Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome

Your Holiness, how do you evaluate the results of John Paul II’s pastoral ministry?

I believe that only history can give a complete and objective evaluation of the church ministry of His Holiness John Paul II. His Holiness’s sermons, teachings and moral instructions have not only strengthened in faith Catholics throughout various corners of the globe, but also bore witness to Christianity in the complex world of today, which is subject to the imposition of the ideology of secularism as though there is no alternative to it.

Beloved in the Lord your graces the archpastors, honourable presbyters and deacons, God-loving monks and nuns, dear brothers and sisters - faithful children of the Russian Orthodox Church! From the depths of my heart, filled with joy in Christ who has risen from the dead and has raised up with Him the human race, I turn to you with the words of the good news which have resounded throughout the millennia and manifest the triumph of Christian faith: Christ is risen!

Fr. Alexander Schmemann

What do we mean when we speak of the Orthodox theological task in America today? It is proper to begin with this question because the title of my paper may seem to suggest a theological orientation of which Orthodoxy is suspicious, but which seems to predominate in the West today. It is the reduction of theology to a given “situation” or “age,” a stress on “relevance” understood almost exclusively as a dependence of theology, its task, method and language on the “modern man” and his specifically modern “needs.”

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