www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Those terrible 'Latins' - did this actually happen?

Where is this quote in the first post from? Which website? Does the website cite a source?

I am very skeptical of things I find online, if the website is trustworthy and/or the cite is that is another story. Anyone with time on his/her hands and a little cash can get a website up and put anything on it.

There were martyrs at that monastery, I don't know anything more about it. As other posters have pointed out, tragic things happened in Constantinople in 1204 at the hands of RCs and the time referrenced above it not long after that.

Tony

Dear Annie,

Yes, it was a trade dispute.

St Peter the Aleut refused to 'trade' his Orthodox Christian faith for Roman Catholicism . . .

The Spaniards simply rebaptised the Native converts as Catholics, but Peter refused, saying he was already baptised and showed them his Cross.

Some people, however, don't take "no" for an answer!

As for RC tolerance, we have a recent example in the martyrdom of Orthodox Christians in Kholm during the Second World War.

These have just been glorified as saint-martyrs.

The Orthodox Church doesn't take canonizations lightly.

It may not spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars on doctors that Rome does to "prove" a miracle has occurred, but it does do its research.

I daresay I trust the Orthodox Church to tell me the truth of what happened to Peter the Aleut than later Catholic apologists embarrassed by the sins of their forefathers.

Pope Julius II wanted to canonize Jerome Savonarola, who was burned at the stake in Florence, having been condemned by Alexander VI etc.

When told he would be canonizing someone done to death by Catholic Church authorities, the Pope said, "The confession of sin is not what pollutes - it is sin that pollutes."

Another locally venerated Orthodox martyr in Ukraine is an Orthodox Cantor, Danylo Kushnir, who was pulled out of Divine Liturgy by Uniates and done to death . . .

Again, why is there no doubt that the Orthodox killed St Josaphat, but there is doubt in some that St Peter the Aleut would be martyred by Catholics?

Alex

Does anyone here read books?

The martyrdom of Athonites is an historical fact yet it seems completely unknown to all but a few people here. If you want to check thinks out and don't trust web-sites why not turn to books - and books by trusted historians. Though they are a safer source of information than the net, the world seems to be too lazy to read anything unless it's online.

It's good to able to ask questions here on the forum, but it would be even better if people felt prompted to do a little research themselves.

Spasi Khristos -
Fr Mark.

Bless me a sinner, Father Mark,

Thank you for the compliment!

But I think that ultimately we will believe what we want to believe, no matter where we read about it, on the internet or in books.

Both sides martyred each other.

I understand that even some Old Believers met a martyr's end . . .(!)

Alex

I agree with your words Alex, but still remain amazed when such documented occurences as the persecution of the Athonites is questioned, as though it's a product of spin.

Spasi Khristos -
Mark, monk and sinner.

Greetings all,
I really think that the problem with these accounts is that regardless of the perspective or point of view of people today, they tend to have a lot of legendary accretions. There is a great danger here. Some people will focus on the obvious inaccuracies and tend to regard the whole thing as fiction. Others will note the historical record and find such and such event did occur, and might want to take the story as presented and accept it as accurate.

It just fits peoples need to influence each other, drag up another old story. Like the protestants that play Bible-verse ping-pong the one with the most stories wins. I don't mean to diminish what happened there, murders and atrocities are ALWAYS a bad thing.

Just think of all the different accounts of “Custer's last stand” in Montana? Who are the martyrs there? How accurate are the stories that have been told? There have been books, poems, songs and plays as well as modern movies and most of those accounts contain gross inaccuracies.

During Justinian's drive westward there had been a few unpleasant events along the way but on this thread we tend to forget all that. And history records a number of atrocities concerning the Byzantines in Egypt as well. When we read about these things we tend to forget that much of what is said is reconstructions from the point of view of the storyteller. As horrible and unjustifiable as these things are we must remember that no one's hands are clean and it is not proper for us to judge.

It can be like getting your history from a made-for-television movie. A lot of the dialog and action is patched together and assumed. In literature this can be acceptable even when it is not accurate.

It can be like learning your politics from a Rush Limbaugh type character. You shouldn't expect it to come unbiased.

I wonder how the story of the Esfigmenou monastery will be retold in future times. In the eyes of the monks there the Patriarch might be considered a Papist!

I like Neil's post the best. It said the most with the least words.

But for myself this thread just reinforces my belief that Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable public prejudice.

Michael

Dear Michael,

How are the 26 Zographou Martyrs about anti-Catholicism?

They are about Catholic anti-Orthodoxy!

Neil's post suggested he was "sure" that this happened to the Martyrs of Zographou and other Orthodox Martyrs killed by Catholics.

That's big of us Catholics to acknowledge that our forefathers killed Orthodox Christians.

We're sure they probably did . . .

As for embellishing the martyr stories, everyone is guilty of that - including the stories associated with St Josaphat.

It is quite natural for hagiographers to paint those who killed their Church's martyrs in unflattering terms.

Only those bereft of Christian faith and love could, after all, commit such crimes.

To recognize this as sin is no anti-Catholicism, neither are the Orthodox who celebrate their Martyrs being anti-Catholic.

Alex

I wasn't expressing doubt - just a question. I've seen differing accounts of St. Peter the Aleut. That's true of a lot of saints, really.

It is no secret that people kill, and continue to kill in the name of religion, when nothing can be more irreligious, at least to my own mind. (Honestly: If you really view your fellow man as being made in the image of a merciful God who provided you with the peaceful example of His Son, then would you really then decide to kill someone only because you say he signed on to a slightly different religious program than you have? I think not. Yet history shows us that we do this again and again. We're pretty broken.)

While I've got you though, Alex, a fellow I know (a young Russian) mentioned that the veneration of Tsar Nicholas and his family as saints is actually quite controversial among Russian Orthodox "back home." I asked him what he thought. He didn't want to give his own opinion, but I'm curious, so I had to pry his opinion out of him -- all he'd say is that he sincerely hoped that the Tsar and his family are in heaven and that he knew they died in a horrible violent way at the hands of evil men, but he's not convinced they were actually martyred for the faith in the same sense of the priests and religious who suffered and died in forgotten outposts and workcamps were martyred for the faith. Then he kind of shrugged and said, that, after all, only God Himself can judge a soul and he didn't want to come close to trying to second guess such things. What do you think about any controversy? I guess I really heard his point about the more traditional, religious saints, but history is also full of monarchs who are saints and maybe all monarchs, by virtue of their power, seem to later observers to be somewhat ambiguous.


Oh, and after I asked about that, the same fellow tried to change the subject by asking ME about Joan of Arc! ;-)

Dear Annie,

Yes, I was trying to be cute (don't you think I can be cute?)

If it is any consolation, the Franciscan Fathers didn't really kill St Peter the Aleut - they had the secular authorities do it . . .

St Innocent of Alaska confused the issue when he constantly referred to all RC religious as "Jesuits."

And some Orthodox writers I've come across have talked about the martyrdom of Josaphat of Polotsk in a similar vein - he "deserved it" et al. and I have heard BC's say this as well.

The veneration of Tsar St Nicholas is in a separate category - he was killed by those who were against religion, period.

I look at this at two levels, one religious, the other secular/historical.

Was the Tsar the monster that Soviet propaganda made him out to be?

Today, we can say "No, not at all."

In fact, we know that the Tsar was in favour of reforms within the Russian Imperial State, we have BBC interviews with him where he talks about the "natural breakup" of his empire, land reforms etc. (Robert Massie does an excellent job at reporting this).

If anything, Tsar Nicholas and other rulers of his day were set upon by anarchistic and revolutionary forces BECAUSE they feared their movements would lose steam once the reformist attitudes would take shape in the respective states.

What the Bolsheviks replaced the "oppressive" regime of the Tsars with was much, much worse - of indescribably sad proportions.

The fact is that the majority of the Russian people have steadily venerated the memory of the Tsar under communism and also the memory of St Seraphim of Sarov who foresaw the martyrdom of Tsar St Nicholas and even wrote a letter to the "fourth Sovereign to visit Sarov" predicting his demise to him, but telling him not to lose hope for Russia would be resurrected one day from the grip of godless communism.

When given their freedom, the Russian people have strongly promoted the cult of Tsar St Nicholas et al.

Those against it are residual communists and their sympathizers et al. as well as others who have had years of communist indoctrination on the subject - just as we have had years of liberal indoctrination about the subject of the Royal Family of Russia too.

I had plenty of it in university and, sad to say, I believed it for many years.

But not no more . . .

It was the grandson of the man who led the firing squad that killed the Royal Family on July 17, 1918 that condemned his grandfather for doing what he did - and he was a Soviet admiral.

It was Boris Yeltsin who led the drive to canonize the Tsar and his family - he was, let us remember, the governor of Ekaterinburg wherein the "House of Special Purpose" was located - and who bulldozed it against his conscience when ordered to do so by Andropov.

That House and its site became a spontaneous shrine for Russians who brought flowers to it upon their marriage etc.

The great love and veneration of the Romanovs by Russians is something that even many Saints did not have in history.

If the "vox populi" is any indication, and it certainly is, the Romanovs are truly Saints and Martyrs of God.

As for the historic villification of their reputation, that is to each of us to determine for themselves.

I was weaned on that stuff and came to recognize it as the great Red lie it is and always was.

But the fact that Russians under the sway of such state-wide propaganda throughout their lives can be divided on this issue - that should come as no surprise at all.

What is the real surprise is how the cult of the Romanovs could have survived as it did, and how it flowered as it did with the demise of the "socialist paradise" of the USSR.

St Joan of Arc is an interesting case, especially since she was excommunicated from the Catholic Church by the Church and was condemned as a heretic by church authorities.

She had to be rehabilitated and excommunication lifted before any thought could be given to her Cause.

She would not be the first Saint in history killed by the authorities of his or her own Church and even excommunicated beforehand.

Savonarola's Cause is now up and running again. His Society has proven, however, that Pope Alexander VI withdrew his excommunication of him just before Savonarola's ignominious death in the Florence city square.

The Orthodox Church has also recently glorified St Arsenius Matsievich who was himself defrocked and reduced to the status of a lowly monk before being boarded up and martyred through neglect.

Alex

Dear Friends,

I apologise to any who may feel that I've been excessively hard on you re: this topic.

I shouldn't be, and I'm wrong to be.

I remember when I received my first copy of the St Herman of Alaska Orthodox Calendar.

There were a number of entries therein that enumerated Saints "martyred by the Latins" including St Isidore and the 72 Martyrs of Dorpats.

The Catholic Cardinal in that case gave those Orthodox Christians fair warning to become Latin Catholic or else they would be drowned.

Most of them couldn't swim, as it turned out . . .

And then there was that classic entry "The commemoration of the reunion with Orthodoxy of 3 million Uniates in Lithuania (Met. Josef Siemashko)."

Then there was St Mark of Ephesus . . . he refused to come into union with Rome and that was that!

We Catholics are used to our martyr tradition and the thought that Catholics could make martyrs in other traditions is a shock to our system, to be sure.

Mutual forgiveness goes a long way.

And next comes mutual recognition of our martyrs . . .

Alex

Again in Orthodoxy, let's not forget St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, whose omophorion was taken from him for slapping Arius at Nicea I, but then restored after bishops saw the Theotokos herself giving it back to the Wonderworker of Myra in a dream.

Then of course, there's the more recent example of St. Nektarios, Bishop of Pentapolis and Wonderworker of Aegina, but Alex can tell you all about this Wonderworker who was deprived of his bishopric by envious hierarchs in the Patriarchate of Alexandria.

OrthodoxEast

Dear "brother" OrthodoxEast,

(Do you see what you've started? )

Thank you for making such an important point here!

It's bad enough when other Churches come after you, but to be persecuted by your own is beyond all telling!

Many theological conferences in the days of yore ended in fisticuffs and the Coptic St Dioscoros of Alexandria beat ST Flavian of Constantinople so badly the latter died - the former considered him a Nestorian.

Closer to our own times, the Catholic Bl. Damien of Molokai suffered greatly from his own religious Order whose leadership constantly accused him of seeking glory for himself.

They really treated him like a leper even before he actually became one.

As someone once said long ago (was it St Yuri Konissky of Mogilev?) that our walls of separation don't reach into the heavens.

Fr. Basil Pennington, an RC monk, visited Mt Athos where he came across the cult of the Zographou monk-martyrs.

In his memoirs of the event, he himself refers to them as "Holy Martyrs for Orthodoxy."

I once asked a Roman CAtholic Irish priest about the icon of the Pillars of Orthodoxy - which includes St Mark of Ephesus.

He, this "Latin" told me that "we Catholics are entitled to venerate him privately."

And I've been doing just that ever since!

(Am I great or what, Big Guy? ).

Alex

I have a confession to make, Alex: Whenever I lose or misplace something, like my keys, I automatically invoke the name of the Latin Franciscan St. Anthony of Padua (old habits die hard!) :-)---and my lost or misplaced article is mysteriously found!

OrthodoxEast

Dear OrthodoxEast,

Not all Franciscans were bad, you know!

New Skete continues to venerate Franciscan Saints and even print icons of St Francis and St Clare.

I would keep invoking St Anthony of Padua!

An Orthodox patron of things lost is St Phanourios of Rhodes, as I discovered.

But St Anthony has lots of experience in these matters, as you well know!

Alex

I do like the Franciscans as well as the Benedictines.

james


"Our similarities are different"