Dear Kollyvas,
If it is a heresy to change the day of Pascha, if it is wrong to celebrate Pascha with the Pope, then what do you say of the Church of FInland with which you are in communion that does this very thing, being on the Gregorian Calendar and Paschalion? Do you think it will be very long before the EP follows suit in celebrating with the rest of "Christendom"?
Evlogeite Pater.
It gets much worse with the Church of Finland as they are in intercommunion with the evangelical lutheran church of finland and by extension its sister churches. In the past, I have said and maintain that the Church of Finland is in schism due to sergianist pressures revising the Paschalion and faling under Nicea's anathemas and should be excluded from Communion: I wouldn't commune in any of its institutions. The whole argument of apostasy by association was once maintained (still is?) by hocna who with such reasonings condemned ROCOR for being ecumenist while maintaining Eucharist Communion with ROCOR's sponsoring church, the Serbian Patriarchate, which engages in ecumenism. Then and now, I don't do these things or recognize them as valid. The MP broke off dialogue with the Swedish evangelicals over their moral relativism, and at Porto Alegre it expressed itself clearly that the only common date for Pascha for all was already determined at Nicea--the Orthodox date, and no other would even be considered. Moreover, our relations with the ep are far from even cordial and its unionism and neo-papal pretensions are only really effectively opposed by us. So what will I do? Support the MP in opposing ep errors and political ambitions and await the Council to condemn the waywardness of the Church of Finland (if it survives) as the Fathers did before me. Moreover, changing calendars and dates of Pascha isn't heresy, although its motivated by heresy for the most part--it's the violation of disciplinary Canons which makes such lawlessness schismatic. Only in the broader sense of a type of iconoclasm can it be argued to be heretical, but that rises or falls on the basis of how much one can incarnate the idea of Ecumenical Councils as Icons of the Church and their disciplinary Canons as christological/theological statements. That gets tenuous.
Orthodoxia I Thanatos!
Rostislav
Love is a holy state of the soul, disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things. We cannot attain lasting possession of such love while we are attached to anything worldly. —St. Maximos The Confessor
