New Skete and Ecumenism
By Brother Christopher It’s no secret that within the Orthodox Church monasticism has often been extremely critical of the Church’s involvement in ecumenism. Particularly since the Orthodox Church’s participation in the World Council of Churches and the renaissance of Athonite monasticism in the 1970s and 1980s, there have been strong anti-Western and anti-ecumenical voices coming from Orthodox monastics who see engagement with non-Orthodox on social, cultural, and religious levels as leading the Orthodox Church down a perilous path of betrayal, departing from its inheritance of being the one true Church of Christ. The thinking goes that since the Orthodox Church is exclusively the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church on earth, possessing the fullness of truth, the only possible justification for Orthodox involvement in the ecumenical movement is one of witness with the aim of converting non-Orthodox to Orthodoxy. Since that hasn’t happened and the likelihood of...