“I think that Culturally, Orthodoxy is very very foreign to the American South.... There is a history of Catholicism in the South. Particularly around New Orleans and around different coastal regions, Maryland... people moved from Maryland to the bluegrass region of Kentucky. I fail to understand why, particularly young Southern men, are becoming attracted to Eastern Orthodoxy. It's a different culture. It's not our people. It's Christian, but it's not a part of the universal papacy.
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“When you have a culture that is dedicated to the principles Western civilization -- which is what the South is -- Orthodoxy doesn't fit very well into that. Orthodoxy is more or less an ethnic religion. You have Russian Orthodoxy. You have Ukrainian Orthodoxy... so forth and so on. It's ethnic.
“All these early printed books that we discovered on Mount Athos constitute a unique literary, spiritual, and cultural heritage that has survived in a foreign land, far from Ukrainian soil. In the 16th–18th centuries, the Kyiv Church and Kyivan Christianity exerted a powerful spiritual and cultural influence on other peoples and other Local Churches, including at such an ancient global center of Eastern Christian monasticism as the Holy Mountain of Athos.
“the patience, confession of faith, and faithfulness to Christ of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will serve as an important example for strengthening future generations of Orthodox believers
“Let us teach our children our Orthodox Christian faith
“Ukraine is the ancient territory of the Patriarchate of Constantinople; there is no place here for adherents of Rome!
““Even if, somewhere far away, some do not regard us as a Local Church—just as some did not regard Paul as an apostle—for Ukraine we are the Local Church,” he said. “We recognise the unique and particular responsibility for Ukraine that follows from this. Therefore, like the Apostle Paul, we shall strive to do what is most beneficial for the Orthodox community of Ukraine. We shall continue firmly to expose the false teaching of the ‘Russian World,’ and we believe that, through our common efforts and with God’s help, we shall succeed.”
“this first Orthodox university in the country will serve as a platform for enlightening the world with the light of Eastern theology and as a reliable bridge for dialogue between Churches and cultures
