Rating: 9|Votes: 1
A photo contest has been announced by The Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy (I.A.O.) and the website Orthphoto.net to present the diversity and beauty of the celebration of the most important feast in Orthodox Church.
Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev)
There is much in common among the three hierarchs and great ecumenical teachers whom we commemorate today: Saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom. All three lived in a time when the Christian Church, after almost three centuries of persecution, received freedom and was flourishing throughout the Byzantine ‘oikoumene’. All the three were involved in contesting contemporary heresies. All the three combined serving the Church in episcopal rank with literary activity, and it is precisely their literary legacy which secured for them the paramount place that they occupy in Christian Tradition. All the three were victims of ecclesiastical intrigues. Their posthumous glory, however, exceeded any expectations their contemporaries might have had, and their significance for the entire Christian Church in East and West cannot be overestimated.
Rating: 10|Votes: 5
A few months later the God-hating communists came to power and began dragging the Church to her Golgotha. It was a time of choice—between a martyric confession and the kiss of Judas. Inspired by that master deceiver and father of lies, the communists tried to conceal their base intent. They were reluctant to make known their militantly antireligious policy, and publicized their actions as assisting the good of the majority, twisting opposing religious conviction into censurable political dissent. But they were hard pressed to catch in their nets Petrograd's chief hierarch
Rating: 8,3|Votes: 43
Having come to know the inconstancy of earthly happiness through the death of her beloved husband, Xenia strove toward God with all her heart, and sought protection and comfort only in Him. Earthly, transitory goods ceased to have any value for her. Xenia had a house; but gave it over to an acquaintance under the condition that it be used to shelter paupers. But Xenia herself, not having a refuge, would wander among the paupers of Petersburg. At night she would go out to a field, where she spent the time in ardent prayer.
In what has become a decades old “Living Tradition,” clergy and faithful alike filled the cathedral for the celebration of the festal Divine Liturgy and the Great Blessing of Water.
