Bond Note: Vis a vis my last few videos - It is a sad time when we see Michael Voris retreat into fantasy, ignoring the massive role the Roman Catholic Church has played in the construction of this present Tyranny, the apostasy of his Church, their promotion of Cultural Marxism, the promotion of political correctness, the promotion of the LGBTXYZBS agenda, all of these things, including the secularization of the Roman Mass and praxis and the Marxist convolution of Roman theology via the Modernist and Secularists and Marxist in the Roman Priesthood and Hierarchy. I would not be saying a word about Michael's cognitive dissonance if he were not trying to scapegoat protestants. For years he has bragged about the strong Catholic influence in America, the Pro-Life movement, the Catholics on the Supreme Court et al, and now that it has failed, it is all the Protestant's fault. He called "the America of decades ago," “A Protestant Nation,” when for nearly a century, the second largest religious body in America was the Roman Catholic Church before the Damage of Vatican II and the great apostasy and falling away. Michael's scapegoating is despicable. I have said for a decade that Michael Voris was a truth teller inside the context of Roman Error, but since the FBI named Church Militant as a dangerous organization, he immediately caved and became a Papist Reactionary instead of a Truth Teller. His church hierarchs have failed him, his church has failed him, and he stands naked before us, offering a heterodox and apostatized corpse as a substitution for the Body of Christ.

On the other hand, my Orthodox friend, Hilber Nelson, the cartoonist and iconographer, is not scapegoating. Instead of blaming the Romans or the Protestants, he is sounding the alarm bell in the ear of his own hierarchs. Sadly, he doesn't realize that the vast majority of them have already taken their payoff. They took their payoff from the Anglo-Judeo-Luciferian Anti-Christ structure to herd people to Transhuman DNA altering nano-technology they told you were vaccines. There can be no greater betrayal of their Orthodox congregations than this despicable and deadly action. Now, in the face of Tyrannical oppression and massive gaslighting worthy of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World, the Orthodox Bishops in America have no better response and track record for Truth than their Roman and Protestant counterparts. Luckily, the Orthodox Faithful (those who are faithful) still have the words of the Scriptures, the Liturgies, and the Holy Fathers. They may shortly find themselves serving God in the manner of the Old Believers without a viable hierarchical structure. There will remain faithful Bishops, but they are exceedingly difficult to find even now. The open letter to the Orthodox Bishops of every jurisdiction in America sounds to me like words spoken into a vacuum or sweet and polite words before rabid dogs.

orthodoxreflections.com

An Open Letter to Our Shepherds - Orthodox Reflections

OR Staff

9–12 minutes

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Note: To facilitate spreading the message of this letter more widely, click here to download a PDF copy.

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Woke radicals are coming for our families, our children, our churches, our freedoms, and our country. And they’re backed by major corporations, big tech and big media, and every department and agency within our government.

Whether the Orthodox Church will be found complicit, complacent, or courageous depends on its shepherds doing the following:

• Affirm what is our Christian duty in defending the faith against the attacks and lies of our day.
• Teach and train the way of the saints and martyrs, and of the Church Fathers.
• Affirm what is our civic duty in protecting our neighbors, especially our children, against deadly radical ideologies.

Now, more than ever, not only are your prayers needed but your guidance, your voice, and your action.

Sadly, the silence emanating from too many of our parishes and our archdioceses has become deafening, and grievously evermore concerning. To me, the silence has reached the level of the sins of consent and omission, and a capitulation to the mob tactics of fear and intimidation.

The Rainbow Elephant in the Church

The biggest problem with the rainbow elephant inhabiting our parishes today is that both clergy and laity have yet to admit such an elephant even exists, because shepherds and laity don’t want to talk about it, much less deal with it.

Until then:

Our churches will remain filled with unaware, unprepared, and unequipped parishioners against an increasingly hostile pagan cancel culture, will continue to come under the culture’s influence (rather than the other way around) and be at ever greater risk to submitting to it. This is the way of apostasy.

Such blinders will continue to undermine your credibility as capable shepherds that parishioners can turn to for leadership, or as trustworthy role models of faith and courage under fire, capable of publicly proclaiming the truth in love.

You will be seen as preferring to sit on the sidelines of comfort and safety, as people pleasers, or simply indifferent to the destruction happening outside your parish doors.

If you are not willing to be courageous with the relatively small trials we face now, there’s no reason to think you will have what it takes to lead when serious persecution strikes in the future. Wait too long, and mustering the courage of the saints will become impossible.

When Shepherds Stay Away, Sheep Pay

Without your leadership, Wokeism is able to freely seduce your flock away from following Christ courageously. They will think they follow Jesus, but without faith in action, they will become merely His admirers.

Without shepherds, parishioners lack examples of how to counter abortion, predatory Marxist ideology, the poisonous ideology of transgenderism/transhumanism, the indoctrination of children through explicit public school sex ed.

Without a call to moral courage, parishioners will cower to protect their own comfort and survival, and willingly live with the lies of Wokeism as demoralized Christians. Totalitarianism depends and thrives on this demoralization.

Demoralization leads to self-loathing for being a hypocrite, which inevitably leads to mental health issues, and escaping into unhealthy forms of self-soothing (addiction, endless entertainment, materialism) and abandoning our principles.

Once a person becomes demoralized, they’re unable to access true information. Education becomes indoctrination. Entertainment becomes hypnotism. Criminals become leaders and lies become truth.

— Yuri Bezmenov, former KGB informant

Eventually, parishioners will learn to prefer the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty, thereby losing their ability to witness to the world. Conformity is a silent acquiescence to evil.

Without a unified outcry from leadership against attacks on prolife centers and churches, shepherds are sending the message that the unborn and our faith are not worth defending.

Parishioners remain woefully unprepared in defending their faith and families against intimidation, coercion, cancel culture, mandates, and the coming persecution.

Because there is no one to show them the pagan origins behind the meteoric rise of LGBTQ and transhumanist ideologies sweeping post Christian America, parishioners misinterpret these religious-based ideologies as exclusively political and social concerns, and best left to politicians and social activists to tackle.

Thus, too many Christians are woefully absent from the spiritual battlefields of school boards, legislative floors, city councils, and library boards where the powers and principalities of paganism run wild.

The Church is in danger of repeating the same mistakes Russian Orthodox made during the communist revolution. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of how Christians “burned in the camps” in shame for not resisting when they had the chance.

And Our Neighbors Pay

Being complicit and complacent blocks us from being grieved, compassion-based Samaritans to our neighbors who are falling prey to radical woke ideologies, drag shows, corporate and media grooming of children, after school Satan clubs, and explicit public school sex ed indoctrination.

Without shepherds to warn them otherwise, our law-abiding neighbors will continue to naively assume that the woke mob will leave them alone in peaceful co-existence for their good behavior. (Tyrants don’t co-exist; they insist.)

Without Christian leaders to expose the pagan-based ideological lies with biblical truth, our neighbors have no spiritual compass to guide them.

Eventually, our demoralized and isolated neighbors will become too morally compromised to muster the courage to defend their values, their families, and their country.

Neighbors in a constant state of pretending will come to deny the truth they can see with their own eyes. The shame of capitulating to woke bullies will inevitably cause them to give into the chorus of lies, and even join in celebrating the lies.

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Lead With What the Church Has Given You

Thanks be to God who has richly equipped His Church with everything shepherds need to help their flocks defend the faith and publicly speak the truth with boldness and love, to each other and to their neighbors.

• The examples of the lives of the saints and martyrs in the Synaxarion, who toppled pagan temples, took on tyrants, and stormed the strongholds of powers and principalities of their day.
• The writings of the Church Fathers to equip and embolden us.
• The witness of icons to remind us that we are the Church of the saints, martyrs and confessors.
• The sacrament of confession to restore us from the sins of complacency, people pleasing and fearing man more than God.
• The sacrament of communion to empower us.
• The Holy Spirit to protect us.
• Fasting and prayer.
• The anointing of oil before traveling into strongholds of powers and principalities within our schools and woke-controlled institutions.
• Departments and organizations within each archdiocese to train and mobilize clergy and laity, such as Ancient Faith Ministries, Conference and Retreat Centers, Christian Education, Inter-faith Relations, Lay Ministries, Marriage and Parish Family Ministries, publications, and communications.
• The Holy Synod of Bishops, and the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops to rally and guide us.

And we have the Holy Scriptures:

Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely for my account – Matt. 5:11

All who desire to live a godly life in Christ will be persecuted. – 2 Tim. 3:12

Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. – Eph. 5:11

Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that … when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand … and after you have done everything, to stand. – Eph 6:10

Call Us to Courage

Help us become the saints God has called us to be. For we are not called to fit in but to stand out.

And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands – they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we grow to tens of thousands – we will not recognize our country! But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath – we do it to ourselves!

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1974 essay, Live Not By Lies

He reminds us of three realities: First, we must have the courage to refuse to affirm what we do not believe. Second, we must be willing to be vilified even as we speak the truth. Third, we have no idea what God will do with our witness.

Hilber Nelson
Orthodox since 2006
Iconographer
Mental health therapist
hilbernelson@gmail.com

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