Debates

Motto:

«… and shall wear out the saints of the Most High; and he shall think to change the times and the law…»

Dan. 7/ 25

«… It was written by the prophet Daniel that the power of the holy people will be worn out, and the people of the church of today do not even thing to turn their faces back to their parents and the parents to turn their faces to them, lest I come and smite with a curse the iniquity and her sons. The fasting before the holy apostles is no longer, because the people have made bold to change the times, as it was prophesied that it would be. Oh, this lawlessness cannot be done over the church. How long? Oh, how long, really? I have been crying with the voice of the saints and the saints have been crying over the earth with My word: „How long? How long? Oh, how long, really?“. I have been measuring the time for the man otherwise. I set the measure of the day as one evening and one morning, and the people have broken down My measure. Oh, where are the feasts of the saints? How long will this lawlessness take place?

Oh, Romanian people, you have no longer wanted to be a true Romanian, you have no longer wanted it. Where are your days of heavenly feasts on your land? What have you been delighted with? Why have you been careless? Why have you no longer been a Christian, a true Christian? There has passed seventy years over you since you spoiled your ancestral faith, and after seventy years I have set back the heavenly feasts on your land, and I have warned you to turn your face back to your holy forefathers, who have been crying to Me: „How long, Lord?“. I want to forgive you, My Romanian people, for you are My people to whom I come on My second coming. I want to come to peaceful terms with you for this sin committed against My saints and yours, and against your forefathers. I want to forgive you. Amen. Be careful to what I tell you, for with your great feasts, those that are rulers over you from time to time, make an agreement act of forgiveness for many guilty people who have gone wrong against the law. This is what I also want to do on My feasts; I want to forgive you, My Romanian people. I give you a heavenly commandment: turn your face to your parents and bring back to their places the holy feasts of My saints, for I have set into your midst a new beginning and a stone of memorial and of reconciliation with the heaven, and you do not have any wisdom to understand My times and their accomplishments.

Let it be four times of fasting, for this is how it has been from the fathers. Amen. You should be a Romanian, Romanian people. You should be Romanian and you should be Christian, Romanian son. Amen. The scroll of the days fallen from your counting stand before Me as a testimony against you, for you have been deceived by a foreign people and you have not watched before Me. However, I come as word to you and I speak out: turn back and be a true people before Me! No other people has been so afflicted in its faith, in its holy law, and no one has been more afflicted than you. Oh, it is not good for you to sleep. Watch and keep watching from now on, so that the thieves of soul may not come and sell your soul in the time of your lack of watching.

The time has come to forgive you, country with Bridegroom and bride…»

Excerpt from the Word of God, November 15/28, 1997

Reporter: I know that you are the second person with theological studies, who, according to His Holiness Irineu of Bistriţa, openly confess the mystery of the New Jerusalem from Pucioasa. We ask you to make a summary of the history of our ancestral Romanian calendar, abandoned by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1924.

Daniela Cătană (theologian): Our old calendar was made by the philosopher Sosigene from Alexandria in 44 BC, by an order from the emperor of Rome, Julius Caesar, reason for which it is called the Julian calendar. It had stood at the foundation of our church calendar, the workmanship of the alexandrine astronomers.

The Julian calendar used to remain one day and one night behind the astronomical one every three hundred years, but the wise alexandrines did not stumble against this giving it up, but they rather used its errors wisely for a stable concordance with the lunar year, a year, which lies on the foundation of our old Paschalion (Paschalion is a listed table, which contains the date of Passover over a long period of years). The lunar year was proved to be connected within eternity to the Julian one, being impossible a delay of one to another, because the spring equinox is delayed equally in both chronologies. Anyone, by analyzing a Paschalion from the great grandmother Book of Hours, can find out how the paschal full moons fall precisely on all the dates indicated by the Julian calendar, but they do not coincide with those of the Catholic calendar at all. The Western Church had observed the same calendar together with the Eastern Church until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII reformed it, being confused with the delay of the solar year by ten days with respect to the Julian one, moving the days of the equinox with the same number of days.

The holy fathers from Nicaea bowed before the solution proposed by the alexandrine scholars, establishing the laws of establishing the date of Passover, and precisely: the first Sunday after the full moon, which follows the spring equinox.

Reporter: I understand that our old church calendar by 1924 was the same with the one from Nicaea, for which our holy fathers established a perpetual Paschalion for the whole Christianity.

D.C: Yes, it is the same church calendar indeed, having severe apostolic calendars on its basis; it is the same calendar on which a wonderful Romanian history of sacrifices and victories had been baked, governed by holy waivodes and bishops. It had never come over their minds to „correct“ the feasts of the Orthodox Christianity even by a second, let alone by thirteen days, as the antichrists of the 20th century did, according to scientific astronomical lies. And even when the difference was ten days, in the time when Pope Gregory 13th was revising his calendar, no eastern patriarch was tempted to do it, this all the more so as, at that time, they all were consumed with a strong apostolic zeal to collect within great treatises of Orthodox confession the truths of faith, which irrevocably distinguished themselves from the papist (Catholic) teaching. However, the Scriptures of the prophet Daniel had to be fulfilled in 1924: «the people made bold to change the times as well» (Daniel, 7/25).

Reporter:What made the Primate Metropolitan of that time, Miron Cristea, violate these canonical restrictions and impose another church calendar?

D.C.: In the beginning of the 20th century, and especially in the twenties, in Greece and at Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, there appeared strong secularist streams, among which, the intention to introduce arbitrarily the Gregorian calendar (Catholic). This answered well to the modern needs: business, capital exchanges and other laic activities, but liturgically, it was useless and even harmful, because it was impossible to bring into an agreement the Gregorian calendar with our Orthodox Paschalion. After one „pan-Orthodox“, congress held in 1923 in Constantinople, the patriarch of that time, Meletie, proposed the accepting of the „revised“ Julian calendar, which coincided with the Catholic one for a period of 2800 years, and which «was allowing all the feasts to be celebrated once with those celebrated by the other confessions».

The abandonment of the Julian Paschalion was placing this congress under the most severe canonical condemnation: «let all those who dare unbind the decision of the Holy and great Synod gathered at Nicaea for the holy and saving feast of the Passover, be not communed and rejected by the church, if they will persevere more powerfully against the things well dogmatized» (Pidalion).

The first who consciously started to apply this proposed exhortations, but not imposed on the eastern patriarchs, was Miron Costea. In his pastoral book sent to the churches in 1924, he underlined the need of „correction“ of the church calendar because of the thirteen days error with respect to the astronomical one: «And if we leave this mistake not corrected for many, many centuries, then the delay could reach to one hundred and thirty days».

Behold how all the worries, which had left in peace so many eastern patriarchs for two centuries, all of a sudden come to overwhelm the head of this bishop of sad memory, who assumed the decision to behead the church from customary holy feasts: «…Bishops and remarkable people of our Romanian church came to an agreement with the bishops of all the Orthodox churches, in such a way that … the Patriarchy of Constantinople and then the Church of Greece, did and introduced the correction in their churches even on the 10th of March, the Serbs did the correction in October (but fortunately, the Serbs have no longer modified their calendar, no), and the Bulgarians would also do it as we did (yes, but only in 1968! no)».

Thus the lies were rolling demonstratively down the heads of the poor who were shepherded. In fact, not even the Russian Patriarchy, or that of Jerusalem, or the Mount of the Orthodoxy of that time, the Athos, have not changed their calendar, keeping the feast in the old style.

So, the places consecrated as the holiest focuses of pilgrimages of all eastern Christianity have kept their thesaurus of heavenly feasts according to the old calendar, without the murmuring of the unfortunate patriarchs, being underlined the deepest schism within the right worshipping church.

It is terrifying to find out how this metropolitan, greedy of the patriarchal diploma, which he was about to receive meritoriously in the next year from the seat of Constantinople, hence his folly, has been recorded as anathema upon the holy efforts and cultural sacrifices for centuries of the Romanian rulers. Their generosity is known, who in spite of all their shortcomings and offerings, dedicated to the altars in Jerusalem and Athos, protecting the creed of Christian basileis: „All for Christ“.

And in order that the „laughing and crying“ may be complete, we quote the last „forte“ argument of the mentioned pastoral book: «From now on, with this correction, only after forty thousand years we have to leap one day to remain indebted to the natural year». In order words, what our fathers from Nicaea did not manage to foresee 1600 years ago, celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Passover, a synod of antichrists „saved“ in the end of the world, for forty thousand years of nothingness.

And laughing has been turned into crying.

Any other commentary is useless…

Written by Irina Tone

Article taken from the „The Dimboviţa Reality“, June 10, 1998

Reporter:: Let us resume the thread of our subject concerning the reform of the calendar left off in 1924 by the Romanian Orthodox Church. Do you think that this theme (new style/old style) can be a vital notion today?

D.C.: As the Romanian world looks today, badly damaged by the anti-Christian invasion, is hard to believe that the theme of church calendar could be of any interest to someone, beyond a pure informational or cultural level, the more so as the Romanian Orthodox Church does not even think «to turn its face to its fathers and to turn the face of the fathers to them» (Mal. 3/23-24).

Otherwise, one has to understand that for more than seventy years this nation has no longer had feasts (Christmas, Epiphany, Annunciation, …etc.), but only on the paper; that is, these feasts are delayed by thirteen days to the cosmic, or heavenly reality. How painfully and abnormally it would be to celebrate a loved person two weeks before, in his or her absence, and when she comes announcing her real birthday we may not take her into consideration, making excuses that we have something else to do or even to celebrate someone else.

After this devastating century, Romanians have to be alphabetized again within the Christian order, in the real sense of the term, starting with the sign of the cross, the time of the feast, the time of fasting, confession, communion, until the last letter, immortality or incorruptibility in body and spirit.

But behold the good Teacher has not been slow in coming before this people with all His teaching (not only with the alphabet), giving to it, lesson by lesson, the conscience of its former greatness, preparing it for a seven times greater brightness for those who want to pass by storm through the Romanian gate into the eternal kingdom of youth without old age and of life without death.

Coming back to the problem of the calendar, even if the Church Institution covers this trauma with a great number of anathemas and anti-canonical interdictions, still the Voice of God above the New Jerusalem digs out the whole truth and He gives it back to us comfortingly for the healing of this country, so loved and so beautifully glorified there, at Pucioasa: «For the church on earth, which bears My name, the Orthodoxy, which I called My bride two thousand years ago, denied God… That it has never been a greater schism over My church for two thousand years that the one, which took place seventy years ago, when it was fulfilled that Scripture that says: „they will make bold to change the times“».

Therefore, the divine Word judges this page of ill-fated history by its most severe attributes, the greatest schism or denial of fatherly Orthodoxy. In favor of this truth, I quote the opinions of a contemporary French theologian, the father Patric Ranson, member of the „St. Gregory of Palama“ Orthodox Fraternity from Paris: «It is not possible to separate today the problem of the calendar from that of ecumenism. It was changed only to pave the way and to come closer to the heterodox (those from other confessions), and by no means for astronomical reasons, or for reasons of comfort. Nothing forbids us to have a civil calendar for daily necessities of life. As the Constantinople was conquered in the 15th century by a small gate, left open in the wall of the city, in the same way we are able to speak today, that just the calendar was the small gate, which has allowed the occult power to lay hands on the patriarchy of Constantinople. Today it is known with certainty that Meletios Metaxakis, who decided the change, and the patriarch Athenagora, who imposed this, belonged to the occult powers». Therefore, the underground purpose was that the Orthodox Church to be set at the table of the other confessions, only to be one branch among many others, as the so-called protestant theory of the branches says: «The Christ’s Church does nowhere exist; Orthodoxy is nothing else but a branch of this, among many others».

Behold, how, by the adoption of the new style, so many eastern patriarchies sold their „firstborn“ right for an „ecumenical broth“, making useless the whole commitment of the Synodikon of the Orthodoxy: «As the Prophets saw, as the Apostles preached, as the Fathers dogmatized, as the Church received, so we believe and teach others».

When at the orthodox altar from Bethlehem the joy of the Christmas’ Eve hums with life, in the country everything becomes silent, and souls, full of food, of drink and of carol singing, know that it is Epiphany. Thus the days pass away weakly and the saints do no longer have room on this holy land!

However, for the rulers of this time, responsible for this rejection, the Word sent by God to Pucioasa pronounces a sentence for them for which they would be called into account for so many humans they have led to darkness.

Reporter: Still, the date of Passover is the same for the entire East. Is it really possible a compromise between this date and the rest of the feasts with a fixed date, according to the Gregorian calendar, as the new style calendar of Romanian Orthodox Church has?

D.C.: With the idea to save the unity of Orthodoxy, it was decided that at least the date of the Passover to be the same for all the eastern patriarchies during the period of the Pentecostarion. It was beyond their power to crush the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, the more so as it is known that it has been manifested supernaturally in Jerusalem on the Saturday of the Orthodox Passover, by the wonderful descent of the Holy Light, being marked from above, from heaven, the true feast, implicitly the true style (the old style), the true faith, the one rightly worshipped. (This miracle does not also take place at the date of the Catholic Passover!)

On the other hand, this compromise, which the reformed calendar makes, that is to bring into agreement the old Paschalion with the Catholic calendar, has lead to two unacceptable consequences in the life of the Church, such as: the breaking of the liturgical cycle from the feasts during the Passover feasts and feasts with a precise date, held according to the western fashion by the schismatic side of the Eastern Church. The second aberrant consequence, we will see, merely mutilates the order of the fasting of the saints apostles Peter and Paul, because when the Passover falls between April 20 and 25 (the old style), the feast of the saint apostles is abolished. This injustice is also exposed by the Word of God: «for behold, the fasting of the saint apostles in the new style lasts only three or four days, and the one in the Romanian style lasts two or three weeks». But if all these theological scruples sound „empty“ in a church ruined by a time of apostasy, a time of faith denial, what else can we expect from a scattered flock and torn by wolves?

In her famous book „Romanian traditions and beliefs“, Elena Voronca collected from the peasants of one hundred years ago their wisdom, and all knew that the end of the world will be in 2000, specifying additionally that one of the four pillars of the Church (the Orthodox fastings) will be torn down! … Behold the time!!!

Reporter: How did the believers of the time receive the new style?

D.C.: The replacing of the feasts of the church caused much faction and strife, first of all inside the Church. In Greece, for example, many Christians rejected the new calendar. The state persecuted them violently as well as the official Church, which took their worshipping places and requested the arresting of the old calendar priests. Then a great wonder took place at the feast of the Cross, which these Christians wanted to celebrate on the traditional date, and which was forbidden. In 1925, on the Eve of the Ascension of the most honored and life giving of our Savior’s Cross, the watching was ministered at the „St. John the Theologian“, church, in Athens. At 9.00 o’clock p.m., in the church and around it, there were over two thousand believers, because very few true churches remained opened by the authorities. At 23:30, in the sky, above the church, a bright cross began to take shape shining powerfully. «The light, which was released by the cross, not only that it was giving the light to the church, but in its rays the stars from the cloudless sky turned pale, and the courtyard of the church was filled with a palpable light. The cross was in the form of a byzantine cross, its lower bar was inclined. After a while the cross began to ascend slowly vertically, as when the priest lifted up the cross at the ceremony of the Cross Ascension within the church. After it was ascended straight up, the cross gradually disappeared. The soldiers who came to arrest the Christians stopped being amazed and some of them, seeing the miracle, became monks…» (Eyewitnesses’ account).

In our country, beginning with 1924 and until 1989, the civil authorities and the Church had frequently persecuted the believers. The police usually arrived during the services with the intention to arrest the priest and during this time many conflicts followed, resulting in dead and wounded people, because the Christians tried to protect their shepherds. Around 1940 the authorities had already destroyed all the churches in the old style. By the fifties there were restored all the demolished churches. The most important one was the monastery of Slãtioara, which presently serves as a spiritual and administrative center of the Church in the old style. In 1955, one bishop of the official Church, retired, the former secretary of the Synod, Galaction Cordun, and after a public confession, returned to the Father’s calendar. Wanting to set their situation right, they were annexed in 1979 to the Synod of the calendar people from Greece, led by the metropolitan Kallistos of that time.

The bishop Galaction took care of the ordination of a series of priests and of the sanctification as bishops of the following priests: Evloghie, Meftodie and Glicherie. The bishop Evloghie Oţa recognized the virgin Virginia from Pucioasa as being the bearer of a great mission, by whom the Lord had to announce and to prepare the glory of His coming on earth.

Reporter: Which is the official position today of the Romanian Orthodox Church to the Romanians who continue to keep the feasts based on the old calendar?

D.C.: They are decreed as stylists or anti-calendar or, even worse, incriminated as a schismatic and even a heretical movement. However, alternatively, these are more of tormentor manners, inherited from the red times, than the right inclination to the truth. Because, quoting the father Patric Ranson: «it is not possible to assign a relative value to the faith. Our faith is not to be discussed; it is to be confessed. It is not our property; it was revealed and it is absolute». And we would speak the same today: our Romanian law is not to be argued, but rather is to be lived and it is confessed by holiness.

But what shall we speak about our most sought confessors and theologians, who even now, in the time of the outside darkness, „filter out the mosquito and swallow the camel“, affirming foolishly that it is not the Church, which makes the calendar, and that this is made up by the specialized astronomers!? They have not understood anything from their doctorates about the eschatological sense of time, as though the Universe has all the time prefigured within it, from the Creation: «and there was one evening and there was one morning, the first day… and there was one evening and one morning, the second day…». Here is the measure of creation! And this is a holy time, liturgical, a time of salvation, of complete fullness, of which nothing can be changed, not even a split of a second!... However, it can be taken out though «their share from the tree of life and out of the holy citadel, which are written in this book» (Rev. 22/19) if they will not set the calendar back in order as they inherited it!!!

But behold, the Lord, after seventy years, brings clearly back into their order the feasts of old, in the charter of the New Jerusalem Monastery, through His bishop: «let it be respected the canonical church law in the Romanian and ancient Orthodox style».

Reporter: How did the peasants, the Christians of the time, receive this reform?

D.C.: In order for the readers to understand that it had not been worked out only arithmetically a series of numbers of which thirteen days were subtracted, but a cosmic order, I will relate some quotations from the wonderful wisdom of the Christian of that time, because the most vehement and dramatic reactions came from the world of the Romanian state. Because, what the scholars of the time refused to defend, befuddled by new western streams, the peasants did it instead, with their glasses empty of oil, as true confessors who feared God.

Behold, for example, what the ethnologist Ernest Bernea recorded in his essay „The Time of the Romanian Peasant“ (1941): «There where the peasant refused to enter the church anymore, there where the priest was beaten, there where the relative connections were broken, there where the spiritual life of the village was broken, one cannot speak about a fact in brief and not even about a political fact, no matter how powerful it may be. When after the reform of the calendar, the stylism appeared as a new sect, and when the people grew beards and began another life outside of the spiritual community of the Church of the nation, it is understood that it happened a thing of great depth, that the affliction were painful and spiritual».

We quote their answers, from the same essay: «From now on the people have become corrupted. Since with the new style, God has also turned His face away and He has no longer given any rain… Before this, the grain was all over only ear».*

«I do not give myself, only to be killed. Let them take the knife and cut me, but I do not give myself for the new. What I have received, that is what I stick to; I keep the Christian law».

Some made a difference between the civil and the traditional calendar: «Let the calendar follow its course, but let the days be as our Lord Christ established them».

Behold, that what the theologians take for a retrograde attitude, in fact it was wisdom of spirit and a deep understanding: «I believe in the Holy Cross, I believe in the Gospel, but I do not believe in the star. How shall we believe in the devilish law (the new style, no.) and not in Christ’s?».

The Christian peasant understood everything, like a saint! He understood that «the wisdom was in the beginning and then the light was made, and after the Lord made the heaven and the earth, in the fourth day, it was made the sun and the moon, the lights of the day and of the night» (Excerpt from the Word of God, May 27/June 9, 1994).

The keeping of the feasts in the new style was predicted by many as causing illnesses, draught and shortcomings, a fact proved by those seventy years since we had always been scorched, so that today we are spiritually so traumatized, as we have never been since we came into existence as a nation and «for more than seventy years, the Romanians eat one another, kill one another and even the poor are evil» (Excerpt from the Book, The Word of God, November 15/28, 1997).

Behold, some other speaking arguments of great depth: «you can change the calendar as much as you want, but the days still remain there…», or as the Saint Maximus the Confessor, would say: «God has the time within Him» (Not in the pockets of the astronomers).

«The old style is the good one; the fruit trees come into leaf and blossom in the old (style) and they do not want in the new one; the cuckoo sings in the old one, but it is not heard in the new one. And this cuckoo has not learned in school, and, see, it understands; it is seen that God gives it understanding… But we keep the new one as well; what can we do? Willing or not, harness and come!»

«When a feast comes, God gives signs to the man; only the one who does not have faith, does not see them, the sinful man». Or, «what should we do without a calendar? The calendar gives sense to our work and life.»

And the conclusion that the ethnologist draws is that the reform has destroyed the whole spiritual life of the village, making breaches and dramas without being possible to be repaired.

Beautiful and simple speeches as the truth is, but the theologians of that time and today have misinterpreted harnessing an entire nation to this apocalyptic chariot, which carries with it the faith denial and the abomination of desolation.

«Willing or not, harness and come! ...»

The earth is kneaded in blood and sweat of martyrs

Today it shudders and cries besieged by tyrants.

Today the Saints, lovers of Country pray mournfully to Christ

To save our faithful nations from shame.

Fathers with a great soul, spiritual shepherds,

Show yourselves once again at your chairs of bishop!

Saint John Jacob the Romanian

Note:

*In the old times the grain from bottom up united more ears, and now it has only one ear on its top. (A/N)

Recorded by Irina Tone

The article is taken from the newspaper „The Dimboviţa Reality“, July 6, 1998