Hieromonk Job (Gumerov)
Rating: 9.4|Votes: 18
The Saturdays of commemorations of the dead are called ancestral Saturdays (the first universal commemoration on Meat Fare Saturday, the second, third, and fourth Saturdays of Great Lent, Trinity Saturday, and St. Demetrius Saturday). Why do these take place specifically on Saturdays? What are the historical roots of this tradition? They were not all instituted at the same time.
Rating: 7.3|Votes: 29
Since throughout the Great Fast such commemorations as are performed at every other time during the year do not occur during the celebration of the Presanctified Liturgy, it is the accepted practice in our Orthodox Church to commemorate the departed on these three Saturdays, that the dead be not deprived of the Church's saving intercession. (The remaining Saturdays of the Great Fast are consecrated to special celebrations: Saturday of the first week to St. Theodore the Recruit; Saturday of the fifth week to the praise of the Theotokos; the sixth Saturday commemorates the resurrection of the Righteous Lazarus.)
Priest Maxim Massalitin
Rating: 5.8|Votes: 155
Unfortunately, few of the faithful have recourse to the help of such a lamp of grace as the precious head of St. John the Baptist, “the first among martyrs in grace”.[2] Many Orthodox Christians come to France, but not all of them know how many holy relics there are still on French soil despite the outrages committed against them during the French Revolution and subsequent forgetfulness of France’s Christian past.
As Metropolitan Hilarion noted, the tragedy of the Russian pre-revolution intelligentsia lay in the fact that they were far from the people and the Church. ‘The people and the Church are an inseparable whole. The Church was the core of our people’s life.
Andrei Kozarzhevsky
Whenever the theme of the Church’s position during the first two Soviet decades is discussed, attention is usually concentrated on the tragic side of her life; thus parish life, the life of ordinary worshippers, pastoral activity (Fr. Alexei Mechev perhaps being the only clergyman given scholarly attention), and traditions which have already become a thing of the past, unfortunately escape researchers' attention. All this is preserved in reminiscences of old parishioners, whose number is naturally and inexorably depleting.