Photo: anisima.ru
Today [last Tuesday, February 8] the Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of St. Xenia of Petersburg. We know her Life well. But in this post I would like to talk with you about something else. I would like to talk about whether a Christian has the right to evaluate the significance of saints according to their nationality.
In Holy Scripture it is written very plainly that in the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no separation into nations, races, or ethnicity. The Savior teaches us that for God, the only significant thing is the state of a person’s heart. Then let’s think: Can a any organization that “decanonizes” saints because of their nationality be called a “Church”? After all, we are not talking here about faith, but about simple human logic, about what we call common sense.
Should we get rid of the English language in connection with the anti-human colonial politics that Great Britain conducted over the course of many years? Should we ban the music of Bach, Beethoven, Straus, or Brahms, just because they belonged to the same nation as Hitler? Or perhaps for the same reason, we should burn the books of Kant, Hegel, Shelling, Fichte, and forget about the poetry of Goethe and Shiller? Then let’s ban the books of Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Mistral, because they were born in the same country as Pinochet.
We can go on and on with the analogies. Amognst any people or nation we can find worthy examples for emulation, just as we can find the opposite. That certain “activists” have begun to speculate on modern events, trying with this to blacken the memory of Orthodox saints who are venerated throughout the whole world, speaks not only of their total misunderstanding of Christian teaching, but also of their low intellectual level. But what is significantly worse is that they are trying to force their primitive way of thinking upon other people, conducting absurd propaganda.
