Windsor, Ontario, Canada, December 6, 2023
Bp. Ioan Casian (center). Photo: Facebook
The Romanian Orthodox Cathedral of St. George and St. Andrei Șaguna festively commemorated its 105th anniversary late last month.
The celebration, held Friday, November 24 to Sunday, November 26, “was joy and celebration crowned by the light of education,” reports the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Canada.
“God’s care does not depend on us, but is a gift of God’s bounty to us. This is the quintessence of a weekend of spiritual joy celebrating a community that carries here in the diaspora the flag of Romanian Orthodoxy in symbiosis with the education that St. Andrei Șaguna gave,” the diocese writes.
St. Andrei Șaguna, the cathedral’s second patron, was a 19th-century Holy Hierarch in Transylvania who fought for improved education and rights for the Romanian community under the Habsburg Monarchy. In this vein, the Windsor cathedral held a conference dedicated to Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae, a Romanian Orthodox confessor and one of the most noted theologians of the 20th century, who is to be canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2025.
The festive weekend began with the Divine Liturgy on Friday, celebrated by His Grace Bishop Ioan Casian of Canada and local and visiting clergy.
And on Saturday, Bp. Ioan Casian kicked off the symposium, held under the auspices of the St. Maximos the Confessor cultural-theological and catechetical training center of the Canadian Diocese, saying:
I dedicated this symposium to Father Dumitru Stăniloae because in his writings we find answers to the problems of our time and a model of thinking or rationality for our lives that leads us, as he himself says, to “our improvement.” We find in him a lucidity and a naturalness of thought that combines spiritual intelligence with ascetic effort, Biblical thinking with contemporary philosophical reflection, the depth of inner contemplation and the breadth of ecclesial-community development. We also find an almost surgical thoroughness in analyzing the ancient writings and exhausting them as resources that can be used to our spiritual advantage. He combines a poetic and symbolic sensibility and a capacity for globalization and synthesis that is hardly comparable.
The conference brought together clergy and scholars, representing both the Romanian and Serbian Churches and various universities, who presented “perspectives related to the role of the Church and education, the Scriptures and the Eucharist, the need to provide pertinent answers to youth, as well as aspects of Father Stăniloae’s thought with relevance for today’s multicultural world.”
On Sunday, the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy was celebrated again, for the feast of St. Andrei Șaguna.
At the request of the cathedral community, the mayor of Windsor declared the week of November 24-December 1 as the Week of Romanian Pioneers in Windsor. Bp. Ioan Casian read the mayor’s proclamation following the Divine Liturgy, to the joy of the faithful.
The weekend concluded with a fraternal agape.
Follow OrthoChristian on Twitter, Vkontakte, Telegram, WhatsApp, MeWe, and Gab!
