Pascha

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

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Farewell, after 20 years: Why we did what we did

If you know anything about world religions, then you know that Easter is a big deal in Christianity.

In Eastern Orthodox churches, the Big Idea is stated this way, over and over, in rites for Pascha (Easter): “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life” (see this flash mob celebration in Lebanon).

I don’t bring this up as a matter of evangelism or some other #triggerwarning behavior. I am noting that this is an essential fact about Christianity, the world’s largest religious faith. Easter isn’t a “bunny” thing.

This brings us to one of the more unusual “religion ghosts” we spotted several times during the 20-year history of GetReligion. Here’s a case study at Newsweek and another at Facebook news. However, the classic version of this ghost appeared in the holy (in journalism terms) pages of The New York Times in this 2014 feature: “Hoping War-Weary Tourists Will Return to Israel.” Here is the key passage:

On a recent afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, while fighting raged in Gaza, Bilal Abu Khalaf hosted a group of Israeli tourists at his textile store in the Christian Quarter — one of Jerusalem’s tourist gems. …

“That’s the first group I’ve had here in more than a month,” Mr. Abu Khalaf said. “There have been whole weeks when no one has been inside the shop. I’ve sold almost nothing the entire summer. Business hasn’t been this bad since the first intifada in 1989, when the Palestinian groups ordered us to shutter our stores.”

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus was buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

Now, what’s unusual about that? Well, it helps to know that the printed version said:

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

It’s all about the word “is,” isn’t it?

Inquiring minds wanted to know: Was there anyone in the editorial chain at the world’s newspaper of record who knew the essential fact that traditional Christians don’t believe Jesus is buried anywhere? It’s that whole “Easter” thing.


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Pascha in Ukraine, 2023: That's a subject journalists view through a totally Western lens

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Pascha in Ukraine, 2023: That's a subject journalists view through a totally Western lens

Ask faithful members of Eastern Orthodox churches to name the most important day of the Christian year and about 99.9% of them will say this — “Pascha.”

This is the ancient Orthodox term for the feast of the Resurrection of Jesus. As the OrthodoxWiki.org website notes, “Pascha” is “a transliteration of the Greek word, which is itself a transliteration of the Aramaic pascha, from the Hebrew pesach meaning Passover.”

Pascha rites around the world began just before midnight on Saturday and proceeded into the early hours of Sunday, followed by festivities to break the long, intense fast of Great Lent. Folks get home about 4 a.m.

Needless to say, this was not a normal Pascha in Ukraine. I was curious to see how mainstream newsrooms would cover the rites in the Ukraine, where two competing Orthodox bodies are united in their opposition to the Russian invasion of their land, but separated by decades of competing claims of which church represents the future of the faith in Ukraine (see this earlier post-podcast on that topic).

I was curious, as an Orthodox layman (this Pascha marked the 25th anniversary of my family’s conversion), how mainstream news organizations would cover Pascha 2023 in Ukraine — so I ran an online search for the terms Ukraine and “Pascha.” The result — zero 2023 news reports containing “Pascha.”

Ah, but what if journalists ignored Orthodox history, tradition and theology and only referred to this feast day as “Easter,” the Western Christian term?

What if your stories contained zero references to “Pascha” and only said “Easter”? That online search yielded some mainstream reports, which often mentioned “Orthodox Easter,” thus viewing the most important day in Eastern Orthodoxy through a totally Western lens. Try to imagine doing this with any other global faith group of 260 million members, Christianity’s second largest Communion. Imagine changing the name of “Passover,” “Ramadan” or even “Easter” (when covering Rome and Protestantism).

Of course, readers need to be told that “Pascha” is the ancient Christian term for the season that, in the dominant West, is known by the somewhat controversial (for some outsiders) term “Easter.” But shouldn’t coverage of Pascha at least include, you know, the word “Pascha”?

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting metaphor to describe most, if not all, of the warped mainstream press coverage of the role that Orthodox history and faith is playing in Ukraine. I have already written about this several times and I’m about to board an airplane to head to Los Angeles. So let me be as quick as possible.

If reporters had the slightest interest in the historic Ukrainian Orthodox Church — with 1,000 years of shared history with Slavic cultures — they would be paying attention to this church’s (a) ongoing attempts to sever, within the limits of Orthodox canon law, it’s remaining ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, (b) its leaders’ opposition, since Day 1, to the Russian invasion and (c) the criticisms of this church by leaders of the new, competing Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which is supported by the United States, the European Union, the current Ukrainian government and the tiny, but symbolic, Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarchate in Turkey. These criticisms have escalated into a full-tilt government attempt to crush the older Orthodox body.


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Angels and demons: Orthodox pain woven into this year's Pascha epistles in Ukraine

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Angels and demons: Orthodox pain woven into this year's Pascha epistles in Ukraine

With the barrage of horrors from Ukraine, it wasn't hard to distinguish between the messages released by the Eastern Orthodox leaders of Russia and Ukraine to mark Holy Pascha, the feast known as Easter in the West.

The epistle from Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill offered hope for this life and the next. But his text contained only one possible reference to the fighting in Ukraine, which the United Nations says has claimed the lives of 3,000 civilians, at the very least.

"In the light of Pascha everything is different," wrote the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. "We are not afraid of any mundane sorrows, afflictions and worldly troubles, and even difficult circumstances of these troubled times do not seem so important in the perspective of eternity granted unto us."

But the first lines of the message released by Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine placed this Pascha in a radically different context -- a clash between good and evil, right now. It was released on April 25th, the day after Orthodox Christians celebrated Pascha according to the ancient Julian calendar.

This letter was especially symbolic since Metropolitan Onuphry leads Ukraine's oldest Orthodox body, one with strong ties to the giant Russian Orthodox Church.

"The Lord has visited us with a special trial and sorrow this year. The forces of evil have gathered over us," he wrote. "But we neither murmur nor despair" because Pascha is "a celebration of the triumph of good over evil, truth over falsehood, light over darkness. The Resurrection of Christ is the eternal Pascha, in which Christ our Savior and Lord translated us from death to life, from hell to Paradise."

The contrast between these messages underlined a complex reality in Orthodox life after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a land cruelly oppressed by the Soviet Union, but with strong Russian roots through the "Baptism of Rus" in 988. That was when, following the conversion of Prince Vladimir, there was a mass baptism of the people of Kiev -- celebrated for a millennium as the birth of Slavic Christianity.

Metropolitan Onuphry and other Orthodox hierarchs with historic ties to Moscow have openly opposed the Russian invasion, while trying to avoid attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church. The bottom line: Leaders of ancient Orthodox churches will ultimately, at the global level, need to address these conflicts.


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Great and Holy Pascha in Ukraine: Details matter when war crashes into holiest day of the year

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Great and Holy Pascha in Ukraine: Details matter when war crashes into holiest day of the year

Once a copy-desk fanatic, always a copy-desk fanatic. If you ever get caught up in obscure debates about items in the Associated Press Stylebook, then you’re trapped. You see picky style issues all over the place.

This is certainly true on the religion beat. Readers may recall that the AP team recently updated and expanding some of the style bible’s references to religious terms, history, etc. See this recent post and podcast: “Can the AP Stylebook team slow down the creation of new Godbeat 'F-bombs'?”

This brings me to the most important holy day on the Eastern Orthodox Christian calendar — it’s called Pascha and you may have heard that the ancient churches of the East celebrate it according to the older Julian calendar. It’s complicated, but there are times when East is East and West is West.

Pascha is certainly one of those times. OrthodoxWiki notes:

Pascha is a transliteration of the Greek word, which is itself a transliteration of the Aramaic pascha, from the Hebrew pesach meaning Passover. A minority of English-speaking Orthodox prefer the English word "Pasch."

Here is the note that I’d like the AP style pros to think about. It is also accurate to say that this holy day is, in the West, called “Easter.” Thus, we frequently see the term “Orthodox Easter” in the mainstream press. In fact, that is pretty much the only language that we see in news reports about this holy day.

Here me say this: As a journalist who is an Orthodox Christian (and a former copy-desk guy). I get it. I know that “Orthodox Easter” is a quick way to save some ink that journalists would have to use to offer an explanation of, well, Pascha.

But the word “Pascha” is real and it’s ancient and it has great meaning to the second largest Christian communion on the Planet Earth. If you are writing about Orthodox believers at this time of the year, why not use both terms in the story? Why avoid THE WORD. (Oh, and the name of our eucharistic rite is the “Divine Liturgy,” not “Mass.”)

This is an important issue, at the moment, because you have a war going on (whatever Vladimir Putin wants to call it) in the season of Pascha between Russia and Ukraine — two lands with centuries of shared history rooted in Orthodox Christianity.


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Podcast: The New York Times misses some key voices as Ukraine prepares for Pascha

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Podcast: The New York Times misses some key voices as Ukraine prepares for Pascha

I have said it before and I will say it again: If I could pick a major event from my life and live it over again — knowing what I know now — it would probably be the trip that I took to Moscow in 1991, arriving the week after the events that ended the Soviet Union.

There were still flowers on the sidewalks (near our hotel) where protesters were killed by Soviet tanks. There were Orthodox icons, as well. I was an evangelical Anglican, at that time, and really didn’t grasp the importance of many of the Orthodox people and places I encountered during that stay. I was there as part of the Moscow Project, an effort to help the emerging Russian Bible Society print 4 million Bibles.

One moment, in particular, was relevant to our discussion during this week’s belated “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on a New York Times report about Ukraine and tensions in global Eastern Orthodoxy heading into this weekend and the holiest day on the Christian calendar — Pascha (Easter in the West).

I was visiting with a veteran Orthodox priest who was active in the Moscow Project. We were talking about the future of Russian Orthodox Church and the realities that would shape the next few decades. This is from an “On Religion” column on the topic. He said:

It’s impossible to understand the modern Russian church … without grasping that it has four different kinds of leaders. A few Soviet-era bishops are not even Christian believers. Some are flawed believers who were lured into compromise by the KGB, but have never publicly confessed this. Some are believers who cooperated with the KGB, but have repented to groups of priests or believers. Finally, some never had to compromise.

“We have all four kinds,” this priest said. “That is our reality. We must live with it until God heals our church.”

I bring this up, of course, because of the firestorm surrounding the words and actions of Patriarch Kirill, the current leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. In KGB documents, it appears that his codename was “Mikhailov” during the years before the 1991 coup.

How would Kirill be classified, using this priest’s typology?


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Annual AP report on 'holy fire' ritual offers same old mistakes, raises one big question

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Annual AP report on 'holy fire' ritual offers same old mistakes, raises one big question

It would appear that the Associated Press has a computer hard drive somewhere full of stories about annual religion events that the editors don’t care that much about. Maybe it’s just a folder up in an AP data cloud.

Anyway, when this unworthy event rolls around on the calendar someone goes into the files and copies language from old stories to save time. Apparently, it isn’t important whether some of the file language is tired, inaccurate or assumes the worst of religious believers involved in this ritual.

Do you believe in miracles? Hold that thought.

This brings us to one of the most interesting, inspiring (for millions) and controversial moments linked to the holiest day on the liturgical calendar of Eastern Orthodox Christianity — Pascha.

In most churches of the West, Pascha is known by another name — Easter. To further complicate things, Christians in the East and West use different calendars that, on most years, put Easter and Pascha on different dates. Click here for more on that old story.

With all that in mind, consider this paragraph in this year’s AP and Religion News Service story about a key Pascha rite in Jerusalem.

Many countries will be restricting normal Orthodox Easter celebrations. Neighboring Lebanon for example went into a round-the-clock curfew to curb the spread of coronavirus, from Saturday until Tuesday morning. Churches will be allowed to hold Easter mass and prayers only at 30% capacity, and require special permits.

What is “Orthodox Easter”? That is Pascha, of course. It would only take a few words to say that.

Then look at this reference — “Easter mass.” Actually, the Orthodox do not have “Mass.” Our ancient Eucharistic rite is called the Divine Liturgy. Also, the “M” in “Mass” is upper case. Thus, an AP copyeditor managed to allow three mistakes in a mere TWO WORDS. That’s a hard trick hard to pull off!


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AP covers Orthodox Easter around the world -- except in the churches of America

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All news is local? I guess not, when it comes to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

I looked forward to coverage of Pascha (Easter in the West) this year for several reasons — in part because bishops in America have cooperated with “shelter in place” orders, but have also been creative in some of their responses. It’s hard to capture Orthodox liturgy with one digital camera, but monasteries and parishes have been doing their best, often with beautiful results. (Click here to visit my old parish outside Johnson City, Tenn, in the Smokey Mountains.)

Thus, I was disappointed when I read the Associated Press feature about Pascha. It was an impressive effort to cover the global angle of this story — but completely ignored the fact that Orthodoxy is right here in North America, as well. The story ended with this reporting credit:

Daria Litvinova reported from Moscow. Theodora Tongas in Athens, Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus, Konstantin Testorides in Skopje, North Macedonia, Elias Meseret in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia, contributed.

All valid. But who covered Dallas, Wichita, Kan., Pittsburgh, Southern California, Appalachia, Florida and Washington, D.C., among other obvious locations? Did I miss a story somewhere?

You see, Orthodoxy in America has turned into an interesting quilt of ethnic traditions and thriving parishes packed with converts, from lots of other flocks or folks who had no faith at all.

Yes, the Greeks are the Greeks and the Slavs are the Slavs. But there are also Orthodox red necks, Midwestern farmers and lots of other American archetypes. Here’s a rather normal pack of folks singing in lockdown:


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Podcast: Will preachers fighting 'shelter in place' rules create a church-state disaster?

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For several weeks now, churchgoers — and journalists — have been waiting to see what would happen at Easter, Passover and Ramadan.wisely,

We don’t have all the answers, yet. But it’s clear that in the overwhelming majority of cases, Christians in North America and around the world will be observing Holy Week and Easter at home, watching small teams of clergy and musicians celebrate the holiest rites of the Christian year while striving to follow the fine details of “shelter in place” orders.

In my own church — Eastern Orthodoxy — we will celebrate Pascha a week after Western Easter. Clergy in the Diocese of the South (Orthodox Church in America) just learned that our Archbishop Alexander has (I believe) set strict standards (.pdf here) for his parishes all across the Sunbelt. People will stay home through it all — Holy Week and Pascha — watching five-person teams of clergy and chanters do as many of the long, ancient rites as they can. Click here for Rod Dreher’s poignant post on that, which includes:

Did you know that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the one built over the site where Jesus died, was buried, and was resurrected, has been closed for the first time since … the Black Plague, in the 14th century? The right way to see this is that we Orthodox Christians are being asked to make an absolutely extraordinary sacrifice for the life of the world — so that this plague which has killed, and will kill, so many, and will have reduced so many to poverty, can be defeated. As the old-school Catholics like to say about sacrifice, we should, “offer it up” as an extreme sharing of Christ’s passion. We will know in a way we never have the meaning of the crucified Jesus’s words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

All of that loomed in the background as “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I recorded this week’s podcast (click here to tune that in).

For the most part, we tried to look past that story and down the road at the long-term legal implications of other religion-beat headlines caused by the coronavirus crisis.

I am referring to the small number of evangelical Protestants who have been rebelling against government orders to “shelter in place.” Julia Duin and I wrote about the coverage of some of these cases here (“About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague“) and then here (“All megachurches are not alike: NYTimes noted Howard-Browne arrest, but didn't leave it at that“).

What happens if — as some are planning — clashes between a few churches and state officials end up in court?


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About Rodney Howard-Browne and what happens to Easter, Passover and the hajj during a plague

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When President Donald Trump first talked about churches being “packed” on Easter Sunday, many listeners must have wondered if he meant July 12 instead of April 12.

A lot has changed since Trump’s pronouncement and, for the most part, churches are not packed except for notable exceptions, such as the arrest of a Florida megachurch pastor on Monday for holding services this past Sunday.

Some of you may have heard that the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne ignored the social-distancing warnings and preached to a packed church this past Sunday. TMZ and other outlets reported on that story.

This is the clear and present danger ... people continuing to congregate -- squeezing into close quarters like sardines -- and that's exactly what happened Sunday at a Florida Church.

The River Church in Tampa was packed to the gills with worshipers who clearly were looking for hope. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who presides over the megachurch and has been reportedly defiant over social distancing, has claimed he'll cure coronavirus just the way he did with Zika.

He has vowed he will never close his church ... despite every doctor and scientist saying social distancing is the only thing that will prevent the disease from spreading even more.

On Monday, Florida police arrested Howard-Browne and charged him with two misdemeanors. CNN’s Daniel Burke had the best lede about it all:

(CNN) Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne said he wouldn't close his doors of his Tampa, Florida, megachurch until the End Times begin. The police weren't willing to wait that long.

News of this was all over Facebook and Twitter by Monday night. For those of you who are afraid of the Constitutional implications of all this, don’t worry. The CNN story points out that the police have been trying to work with this pastor for days, but getting nowhere. Now, the Christian Post says that Howard-Browne (which I am shortening to RHB) made family groups stand six feet apart from each other, but as I watched the video (atop this page), it was hard to tell. Take a look.

But then again, I’ve a history with RHB. I interviewed him back in 1994 for this article when he first hit the American religious scene (he’s from South Africa), introducing the “holy laughter” phenomenon and calling himself “the Holy Ghost bartender.” I was not impressed.


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