Widowed nuns?

[ArmyMatt]

We have also had a very small number of bishops in this category, almost vanishingly small, but I have heard of a handful, but what we do not have obviously are non-celibate bishops.

yep

 

[RileyG]

Not as such. However different monasteries and convents can have individual typikons which are highly divergent, so some monasteries have their monks more active in the world, for example, there is a OCA Romanian Orthodox monastery in Southern California that doesn’t accommodate pilgrims but rather is basically where several Romanian Orthodox hieromonks who serve the OCA parishes in the region as needed live, one of whom I have met and really liked.

But we don’t really have any kind of formal religious orders like Franciscans, Cistercians, Carthusians, Dominicans, et cetera, with widely divergent rules. But on Mount Athos, for example, you will find, in addition to the major cenobitic monasteries, smaller places called sketes, where the monks are idiorythmic, that is, leading a less organized life, but still coming together for prayer, and there are a few hermits.

I would say there’s actually more diversity within Orthodox monasticism than in Roman Catholicism because of the freedom of monasteries to adopt the Typikon to the needs of their community - it is frowned upon to criticize the Typikon of someone else’s monastery, especially if you are visiting it.

Thanks! Very interesting!

 

[RileyG]

She lived with a group of nuns which ran a home for impoverished elderly people. She was discovered and returned to the UK when she started selling her royal jewels to pawn shops to keep the home in business, and one of the pawn dealers became suspicious and called the police.

I really like her; I think she was a lovely lady and might well be a saint.

Indeed I think she is largely responsible for having set in motion a process by which the interest of Prince Philip and King Charles III in Orthodoxy led to an injection of increased interest in Orthodoxy into Anglicanism, and which is responsible, for example, for the presence of Byzantine icons in the altar area of Westminster Abbey (I don’t think it’s technically an apse, but it might be, but there is that additional area behind it which might be a separate chapel; I can’t recall, but either way, these icons are on the large structural pillars on either side of the altar).

I am in favor of saturating Protestant churches with Orthodox ideas in the hope that it might cause them to convert wholesale. My only concern, and this is a legitimate concern, involves liberal Anglican churches abusing our liturgy for gay marriage, but I am personally aware of only one case where a homosexual “wedding’ was done in a manner that abused our liturgical texts, and it was done by some wacky freelancers rather than say, the Episcopal Church.

That said, the Episcopal Church is abusing our iconography at St. Gregory of Nyssa Orthodox Church in San Francisco, but St. Gregory has the last laugh - they doubtless selected him to be their patron because he is incorrectly believed to be a universalist, which is not quite the case, but he is also, along with his brother St. Basil the Great, one of only a handful of Orthodox bishops who found it necessary to write a canon expressly penalizing homosexual activity (canon 4 of St. Gregory IIRC, and canon 68 of St. Basil, if I remember the numbers correctly).

Also there is a Unitarian Universalist church in New Mexico that displays an Orthodox cross behind their pulpit next to other religious symbols.

If I had the time and the energy to waste I would send send formal letters of complaint to both churches and to the Episcopal bishop over certain aspects of St. Gregory of Nyssa, accusing them of cultural appropriation, which might actually work, although I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Lukaris]

Righteous Martyr Maria (Skobtsova)

Elizaveta Pilenko, the future Mother Maria, was born in 1891 in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, and grew up in the south of Russia on the shore of the Black Sea. Her father was mayor of the town of Anapa, while on her mother's side, she was descended from the last governor of the…

www.oca.org

I thought St. Maria was a widow but she was divorced although her ex ( 2nd) husband supported her monastic decision.

 

[RileyG]

Righteous Martyr Maria (Skobtsova)

Elizaveta Pilenko, the future Mother Maria, was born in 1891 in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, and grew up in the south of Russia on the shore of the Black Sea. Her father was mayor of the town of Anapa, while on her mother's side, she was descended from the last governor of the…

www.oca.org

I thought St. Maria was a widow but she was divorced although her ex ( 2nd) husband supported her monastic decision.

Thanks!