The Provision of Palliative Care
On 16 May Abba Seraphim, accompanied by Archimandrite Deiniol, Administrator of the Wales Orthodox Mission, attended a lecture on “The Provision of Palliative Care: An Ethical and Legal Duty” at the House of Lords. The lecture was given by Professor John Keown of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University and was hosted by Baroness Ilora Findlay and sponsored by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.
The British Orthodox Church has long been a committed supporter of St. Christopher’s Hospice at Sydenham.
Oriental Orthodox Festival 2011
On Saturday, 14th May, clergy and laity from all of the Oriental Orthodox churches gathered together for the 4th annual Oriental Orthodox Festival. The festival provides an opportunity for the members of the various Orthodox communities to meet together and share in the celebration of the Liturgy, and then have an opportunity for fellowship over a varied buffet lunch provided by the different Orthodox traditions and ethnicities represented.
The latest festival took place at St Michael’s Eritrean Orthodox Church in Camberwell, London. Participating bishops included His Grace Bishop Angaelos and His Eminence Archbishop Athanasius in the presence of His Grace Bishop Markos. The attending priests represented the British Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Indian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox and Eritrean Orthodox Churches. There were many deacons from the various Churches and the sanctuary was filled with a wonderful fraternal spirit. As Father Youhannes began the prayers of the Liturgy a spiritual atmosphere descended upon the crowded Church.
Many British Orthodox clergy and faithful had travelled to Camberwell to participate in the Festival. They included Father Sergius, Father Simon and Father Peter, together with Deacon Theodore from the French Coptic Orthodox Church, and servants and laity from the South Coast congregations. Many other friends of the British Orthodox Church were present in the congregation, including Father Deacon Richard Downer and Dr Carol Downer.
The Liturgy was conducted with the participation of the various clergy, and the congregation was marked by enthusiastic singing of the hymns and chants of the Eritrean tradition. It always makes a great impression to see so many of the faithful dressed in their traditional white clothes. It is important that this concelebrated liturgy takes place each year so that we provide a visible manifestation of our unity as Orthodox Christians.
After the Liturgy the choir of the Eritrean Orthodox church sang many of their traditional songs with the accompaniment of drums. It was a great blessing to see such devotion and seriousness in the young Eritrean Christians who sang and performed their liturgical dance, but also to see the joy and spiritual delight in the faces of the many members of the congregation who joined in. His Grace Bishop Angaelos addressed the congregation, as did His Grace Bishop Markos, whose message of welcome was translated by Father Youhannes.
But the Festival is more than the concelebrated Liturgy, and we were invited to the basement of the Church where the various churches represented had laid out diverse foods from their own cultural traditions. After a great deal of warm conversation it seemed that most people had a plate of food in front of them. I certainly enjoyed the Eritrean food I was offered, and the opportunity to talk with some of the other clergy. Father Youhannes was tireless in his hospitality and hardly had time to sit down himself.
To conclude our Festival the choir of the Indian Orthodox church had arranged to share some of their musical repetoire with us. As they started their first song the church filled up with clergy and laity. The choir sang enthusiastically, and the choir director even managed to urge the Eritrean Orthodox choir to join in with their drums. The congregation were given an opportunity to try and sing one of the Indian Orthodox songs, but I am not sure that we all managed to pronounce the Malayalam words properly.
After a final prayer Father Youhannes dismissed the congregation. It had been a most successful event, and already I have received messages from those who had been able to attend and who had enjoyed the Festival.
[Report by Father Peter Farrington]
Reflections on Abba Seraphim’s visit in the “Sunday Times of Malta”:
The Sunday Times of Malta on 1 May 2011 published the following comments on Abba Seraphim’s visit to Malta in an interview with the Rev. Prof. Peter Serracino Inglott in his weekly page on the paper.
The organisers of the visit by Metropolitan Seraphim of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria mentioned that the original stimulus to organising the visit came from this column. How valuable do you think the visit proved to be?
The Ecumenical Service at Cospicua last Thursday certainly served to raise our awareness of the plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt, which has continued in spite of the end of the Mubarak regime, as well as of the present outright persecution of Christians in more than forty states. Christian martyrs have been more numerous in our lifetime than in the years of the worst persecutions by the Roman emperors.
An unforgettable moment in my own life was when I was invited to attend, for some unexplained reason, what had been described as a Muslim Summit Conference in Cairo. Casually, I met at the Maltese Embassy a young Coptic lady whose community had just suffered serious physical violence.
Somewhat naively, I asked her whether this pressure was weakening the Christian faithful. She rolled up her sleeve, showed me a cross tattooed on her arm and kissed it.
She reminded me that by 725, almost a hundred years after the Muslim conquest, 95 per cent of Egyptians were still Christian. Even at that moment in the mid- 1990s more than one out of 10 Egyptians still belonged to the Coptic Church. However, Copts by the thousands were emigrating or trying to.
The American Coptic Association asserted that at least a million Copts had fled their country, 400,000 of whom were said to live in the US.
The reason for it was somewhat paradoxical. Mubarak was troubled especially by the fact that many hundreds of the Egyptian volunteers who had gone to fight the Soviet occupants of Afghanistan returned to Egypt eager to establish an Islamist state, possibly using the Urban Guerrilla tactics they had learnt.
So, on one hand, Mubarak set about suppressing extreme Islamism in Pharaonic style but on the other he promoted his own quiescent brand of Islam in response to growing popular pressures for a more Islamic society. This pressure included castigation of foreigners, Jews and, of course, the Coptic Christians.
Perhaps the country where persecution of Christians is now at its worst is Eritrea.
Of course, we should not practise any kind of religious discrimination when it is a matter of humanitarian aid, but surely we should take some account of the fact that immigrants may be seeking refuge here because of the lack of religious freedom in their own country.
I personally am particularly sensitive to the current sufferings of Christians in northern Nigeria following the election, apparently democratic, of a Christian to the presidency, because of my personal knowledge over many years of some of the protagonists involved.
I am always perplexed why the religious dimension is sometimes exaggerated and at other times left out in reporting of current events, for instance that in the Ivory Coast the Catholic Bishops went on clearly supporting the Christian Laurent Gbagbo against the Muslim Alassane Ouattara and that the Christians are at present suffering harshly for it. I feel very deeply that a truly planetary consciousness and solidarity is still not as developed as it should be in a Church which calls itself Catholic in the age of the internet.
Does the message of the Metropolitan Seraphim relate to today’s Feast of the Divine Mercy established by Pope John Paul II whose beatification is also very aptly taking place today?
The most interesting aspect of this relationship is perhaps this. On one hand, devotion among Christians to the Divine Mercy as such (as distinct from say the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which has flourished since the 17th century) only became widespread through the impetus given to it by Pope John Paul II in his first Encyclical.
It was devoted to this theme and clearly inspired by his knowledge of Sister Faustina whom he canonised.
On the other hand, it had been highlighted in the Muslim tradition since its very beginning. Prophet Mohammed said: “To God belongs 99 names…” the first two being “Ar-rahman” and “Ar-rahim”, which mean “the most compassionate” and “Merciful”.
When I was in Cairo, Muslims greeted me with the words: Salamo Alik Wa Rahmat Allah wa Barakato which means peace, mercy and blessing of Allah be on you. Curiously enough, just a few months ago Christians in Malaysia faced problems because some potent Muslims wanted to forbid them from using the name Allah for the Christian God, because they refused to accept that He was the same as the prophet’s.
The increasing centrality of the reference to the Divine Mercy in the Catholic Church – the bestselling religious book in France at the moment is called May Thy Mercy Come – should contribute to show the Malaysians that they are misidentifying the Christian Allah.
Actually the Metropolitan Seraphim began the Ecumenical Service at Cospicua with the Coptic Prayer of Thanksgiving , the first words of which are: “Let us give thanks unto the Beneficent and Merciful God, the Father of our Lord God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.”
I can well understand why we Western Christians should be discovering the significance of mercy as the defining attribute of God in these years.
But for it, if we just contemplate it, the disastrous situation of the world and especially of our own responsibilities for it, we could easily despair.
What was the remark you had made which actually prompted the invitation to the Metropolitan Seraphim?
I wished that there would be a confluence between those of us who were concerned to see the development of the Euro-Mediterranean political and economic network centred around a holistic marine policy and those invited to respond to Pope John Paul’s call to the Maltese Church to concentrate on Judeo-Christian-Muslim dialogue.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.
Abba Seraphim visits Malta
At the invitation of the Faculty of Theology of University of Malta and the Mediterranean Institute Abba Seraphim was invited to Malta to preside at an ecumenical service to commemorate the new Coptic Martyrs of Alexandria and to deliver two public addresses.
British Orthodox Churches celebrate Holy Pascha
As once again, the date for Holy Pascha was common to both East and West, there was a great sense of oneness among Christians in celebrating the Lord’s Resurrection. British Orthodox congregations observed the Holy Week services whilst at Charlton, Father Sergius Scott joined in an Ecumenical Procession of Witness on Good Friday. In all our churches the Paschal Vigil and Liturgy was celebrated on Pascha Eve (23 April), which also coincided with the traditional observance of St. George’s Day in England. The exceptionally fine weather and the fact that so many trees, shrubs and flowers had burst into bloom, added to the sense of the glory of the new life revealed in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Because of its elderly congregation and the church being isolated in the countryside, St, Mary & St. Felix at Babingley in Norfolk began the Vigil service just before sunset. Abba Seraphim presided and was the first to proclaim, “Christ is Risen”. As there were a good number of Orthodox Christians from Moldova and Russia joining the regular congregation, they were also greeted in Russian. At the conclusion of the Liturgy when Abba Seraphim blessed and distributed dyed eggs, he also blessed their traditional festive foods of pascha and kullich, which they had brought to the church. Father Simon reports that the Bournemouth and Portsmouth congregations celebrated Holy Week and the feast at the Church of Christ the Saviour at Winton (Bournemnouth) and services were well supported. Following the Vigil and Liturgy on Pascha Eve, on the forenoon of Pascha, prayers for the departed were said at church and in a long-established local tradition their graves at Wimborne Road Cemetery were visited and the Resurrection hymn sung as eggs were placed on their graves. At Cusworth the local congregation were also joined by Orthodox Christians from Eastern Europe and the church was filled, whilst at Chatham a new catechumen was received during the evening and the joyous celebration concluded with an extensive buffet which continued into the early hours.
At the conclusion of the service at Babingley Abba Seraphim read the Paschal message from His Holiness Pope Shenouda III and all churches prayed with great fervour for Pope Shenouda and also Patriarch Mor Ignatius Zakka of Antioch, having a great burden of concern for their brothers and sisters in Egypt and Syria who are caught up in the civil disturbances in both countries.
Abba Seraphim returned to London at noon on Holy Pascha and went first to greet Father Michael Robson at Morden College, Blackheath, before visiting sick and housebound members of the church with Holy Communion.
