Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch – Memory Eternal!

Antiochian.org:

It is with great sadness that we report that His Beatitude Ignatius IV (1920-2012), Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, fell asleep in the Lord today, December 5th, 2012, at St. George Orthodox Hospital in Beirut Lebanon, after having suffered a stroke earlier this week.  There are no details yet available regarding services or the funeral, but these will be announced as soon as they are known.

Read biographies of His Beatitude’s remarkable life of service and leadership HERE and HERE.

Read about His Beatitude’s October 2012 visit to the United States.

We ask the Lord to grant rest to the soul of His servant Patriarch Ignatius IV – May His Memory be Eternal!

 

Antiochian Church Interested In St Alban’s Site

And pray that they get it: yet another a disused Anglican Church building. That, or it it becomes a  block of flats.

The Antiochian Orthodox Church has expressed an interest in taking over the St. Alban’s Church site as a base for its congregation.

A group of representatives from its Council of Management visited the Acton Green site yesterday (Thursday, May 24th).They were accompanied by a representative of the London Diocese of the Church of England who own the land.

The property is the subject of a controversial planning application by a developer who wants to turn the disused church building into ten flats. Local residents want it to be retained for community use and say they have three parties interested in the site, either for use as a church, theatre, or new primary school.

In a letter to Ealing Council last month, the Hon. Sec of the Council of Management of the Antiochian Orthodox Church (a Christian church with roots in the Middle East), Mr. Simon Abdel-Nour said that the church had 500 members on its books many of them living in Ealing, but others local to the site.

If the Antiochian Orthodox Church acquired the premises it would build a community hall on its southern side to replace the temporary one already there. This would be made available to the local community for use-it is used as a nursery at present.

As the church building would be mainly used on Sundays, there would not be an issue of parking congestion, the letter stated. It called upon Ealing Council to reject the application to transform the church premises into residential units .

A decision on the controversial development was expected to be made at a planning committee meeting at Ealing Town Hall last November but deferred. A report by a council official has recommended granting planning permission to the developer, subject to conditions, but the Chiswick-based group,SACA has collected a petition of 4,500 signatures opposed to the plan, and wants the building to be kept for community use.

St. Alban’s, a Victorian red-brick structure which was built in 1888, ceased to be a functioning Church of England parish church in the late 1990s and was then used by evangelical mission the Oak Tree Anglican fellowship, which relocated to Acton in 2006, finding it unsuitable due to the need for renovation and difficult accessibility.

In recent years there has been a growing fashion for former churches to be converted into residential accommodation as the church-going population declines throughout the UK.

The current application before the council is for conversion of the disused church building into ten residential flats and the demolition of the former church hall building and second outbuilding, currently occupied by the Caterpillar Montessori group. This would be replaced with two two-storey’ pavilion’ type structures, one to provide a replacement nursery school facility and the other a detached house. It is understood there is a contract for sale subject to planning permission between the Church of England and a local developer. In 2006 when the vicarage of St. Alban’s was sold it fetched a price of £3.2million, the highest price ever paid for residential property in Chiswick at that time.

The application to convert the building was made last December.

Defending its decision to sell for residential development at the time, the London Diocese issued a statement to Ealing Council explaining that the Church of St. Alban’s, one of three in the parish of Acton Green (the others are St. Peter’s in Southfield Road, and the All Saints Church Centre in Bollo Bridge Road) was no longer required for worship due to “diminishing attendances”.

Source

 

Deployed Antiochian Chaplain’s Afghanistan Dispatches

As of January 27, Fr. Stephan Close, Antiochian Chaplain assigned to Afghanistan’s Kandahar Air Field Chapel, has written fifteen vivid letters to his Bishop, His Grace Bishop Basil of Wichita. With permission, Antiochian.org is republishing the letters as journal entries, and the regular diary essays compose a moving first-hand account of his life in a war zone.

Fr. Stephan’s colorful prose details all the sorrows and joys of a chaplain’s life. “It’s been a rough week,” he writes in Entry 14, “with too many rockets and caskets and trouble and sorrow.” Earlier, in his first encounter of the chapel at Kandahar, he explains, “I was able to serve Liturgy with the Romanians yesterday.  Their chapel  was one of the first constructions when they first came into  theater at  the beginning of the war (about 10 years now, Lord have mercy on us).   It is not a prefab, but was purpose built-some of the interior supports  are  hewn and fitted, not nailed; a beautiful devotion of handiwork.”

Read the full journal here.

Source

Really worth reading.

 

Antiochian Delegation to Damascus, Syria

I rather enjoyed reading this morning, an account of a trip to Syria by Fr Patrick Henry Reardon (Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese) to investigate the internal political situation in that country:

During this past September 13-18, I was part of a delegation sent to Syria by Metropolitan PHILIP to investigate the internal political situation in that country, particularly with respect to its Christian minority. Our group consisted of six priests of the Antiochian Archdiocese: Fathers Dimitri Darwich (our guide and the only Arabic-speaker), Timothy Ferguson, Joseph Honeycutt, John Winfrey, David Bleam, and myself; two Protestant pastors: Bonn Clayton and Norman Wilson; and an expert in international law, James Perry, accompanied by his wife, Martha, who served as the delegation’s secretary. Attached to the delegation as a reporter for Ancient Faith Radio was John Maddex, its executive director.

The following narrative is my own assessment of that experience, along with some account of what I learned…

Do read it as well,  here.

Also, His Eminence Metropolitan Philip letter on the delegation:

Brother Hierarchs, Beloved Clergy, Esteemed Members of the Archdiocese Board of Trustees and Faithful Laity of our God-Protected Archdiocese:

Greetings to you and your families in the name of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ!

As you are all aware, there has been a lot of turmoil throughout many of the countries of the Middle East since the beginning of the year. Many of these uprisings coined “the Arab-spring” have resulted in changes of governments in places like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya and unrest in other Gulf and North African nations. Since the spring, this phenomenon has supposedly spread to Syria, the country of the seat of our Patriarch of Antioch and all the East. The reports we receive on an almost daily basis from our Patriarch and various Metropolitans of the See of Antioch, together with our many contacts in Syria do not agree with the reports we see and hear in Western media such as CNN, Fox News, and others. Likewise, many of the gulf sponsored Arabic news channels like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya seem to portray a dire situation in Syria when the reality based on our many contacts there appears to be something quite the contrary.

Because of this contradiction, and because our office has been inundated with letters, emails and phone calls about the situation in Syria, we felt it necessary to send a delegation made up of a group of some of our convert priests, other religious leaders from non-Orthodox communities, and an international lawyer to see first-hand the situation and report back to me and to all of you, the faithful of our God-protected Archdiocese. This is important because of our deep connection and roots as Antiochian Orthodox Christians (either by ancestral roots or by religious roots or both) to the land of Syria. The consequences of the uprisings in Syria for the Christian community, and all minority communities in Syria, are likely to be drastic should the government collapse as the country will slip into chaos and sectarianism. Syria, despite the need for some reforms, has been, and should remain a secular state in which all people can practice their religion freely and openly.

The group spent three days in mid-September making official visits including a 90 minute meeting with President Assad, another meeting and dinner with the Grand Mufti of the Syrian Republic, a third meeting with opposition leaders and finally a meeting with representatives from our Patriarchate. You will see for yourselves in the following article what their impressions were, what they witnessed, and how they found the state of the country.

Praying for the peace from above that only God can bring, I remain,

Your Father in Christ,

+Metropolitan PHILIP
Archbishop of New York and Metropolitan of all North America