The Vatican City State
By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou
The death of Pope Francis gave all the television networks and journalists the opportunity to praise Pope Francis’s humble attitude regarding his stay in the Vatican, his way of expressing himself on various contemporary issues and the instructions he gave for his funeral and burial. Every person has his own uniqueness, his gifts, his way of expressing himself and this is also the case with Pope Francis. Journalists and other analysts, as well as people who knew him, publicly praised him for these. However, we must not forget that, yes, people who hold a position play an important role, but in practice they cannot shape or change the institutional system of an organization of many centuries.
It is known that the Vatican is a State with all its powers, with a Prime Minister, Ministers, it exercises diplomacy in various countries with the Nuncios, it has a Bank - the so-called Vatican Bank - with the movement of enormous sums of money about which much is written from time to time. The clergy are divided into pastors and diplomats, the monastic orders have lost the hesychastic tradition and are concerned with social issues.
The most important thing of all is that the Roman Catholics are governed by a particular theology that has differentiated itself from the theology of the Fathers of the Church and the Ecumenical Synods, with so-called scholasticism and neo-scholasticism, with the heresies of actus purus and the filioque that overturn the Orthodox theology of the Fathers. Furthermore, the administration has moved away from the so-called synodal system of administration, while the Feudal system of administration predominates, as they themselves present it in the texts they have published from time to time; the Pope is placed above these Ecumenical Synods as well.
We, especially the Orthodox, cannot forget the Crusades, especially the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, which destroyed the Christian Roman Empire, conquering Constantinople and imposing Frankish rule on all of Greece. We must not forget that we not only went through the horrible Ottoman rule but also the cruel Frankish rule. There are many more recent crimes, such as the genocide of Serbs, Jews and Roma by the UstaĊĦe on the orders of Cardinal and Archbishop of Zagreb Stepinac, who was canonized by Pope Francis.
We appreciate people and Christians who are outside the Orthodox Church and are inspired by simplicity, love for the poor and suffering, but we cannot forgive the harsh feudal structures and the tainted theology, which created much suffering in Europe. As Christianity views it, even the divided Europe comes from these harsh administrative and theological structures of the Papacy. Then at the funeral of Pope Francis, “Christ is Risen” was heard in the Greek language, but we cannot rejoice because of this, when we know that they were Uniates, the product of the provocative actions of the Latins, who have caused and continue to cause numerous wounds in the local Orthodox Churches. Furthermore, the method of electing each Pope is, in one way or another, determined by political and diplomatic factors that vary with each era.
The above is a reality that even Roman Catholics themselves are aware of, and that is why they react to such mindsets. Secularization is institutional and not personal.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
