Does no one recall that they were schismatics not many years back, that the Church was created by the communist government in a successful attempt to create a new national identity, completely cut off from their genuine heritage? Should they be rewarded now with recognition?
Since they repented of their irredentism and the mistreatment of the Serbians, I would say yes. We need to reward people who repent, and the North Macedonians repented, sincerely, to the extent of changing their country (they could have stuck to their guns and been referred to as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). I would also note their language is different from that spoken by the Serbs and Croats (who speak basically the same language); Macedonian has some degree of mutual intelligibility with Serbian and Bulgarian and also has Turkish influences.
So you were right to object to what they had been doing, and in particular their illegal arrest and mistreatment of the imprisoned Serbian Orthodox Archbishop of Ohrid and the display of irredentist maps of a “Greater Macedonia” including Northern Greece, Thessaloniki, and Albania. But they have repented, and we need to reward this move away from nationalism to pan-Orthodox unity.
Nationalism can be really very toxic to Orthodoxy, particularly when it gets into an ethnic group closely related to another. It almost always leads to various forms of ethnophyletism. For example, to use an Antipodean analogy, if Queensland had a nationalist uprising that discriminated against people from New South Wales and Victoria, because NSW and Victoria have an upper house in their legislature and Queensland doesn’t, that would be of equivalent silliness to the schism between the Macedonians and everyone else. But it has ended, and for that we should be thankful.
Thus I’m going to suggest we do what
@ArmyMatt is doing and rejoice, since this shows God is watching out for His Church and is working to move schismatics to repentence.
Now if we could just get the Old Calendarists to repent…as bad as toxic nationalist phyletism is, the construction of a series of recursively schismatic sects that believe all other Orthodox are devoid of grace, whose entire theology arguably is constructed on the logical fallacy commonly referred to as “no True Scotsman”, well, that is something to pray for, since Old Calendarists are causing real damage, by publishing their ideas on sites like Orthodoxinfo.com which are disguised as ordinary Eastern Orthodox resources - they don’t make it clear they’re Old Calendarist and that the doctrines they espouse are explicitly rejected by the canonical Orthodox.
There are fortunately no Old Calendarists on ChristianForums, unlike on another forum which I looked at a few times and found revolting, which thankfully is history the last time I checked. My hope is that the fact this forum is not restricted in its overall membership to Orthodox Christians but rather accomodates us along with the non-Orthodox will be enough to make them scream “Ecumenism! Pan-heresy! World Orthodox!“ and go back to writing polemics about how the Matthewites lack the sacramental grace that their own sect has and speculating about which canonical Orthodox bishops are 32 degree Freemasons vs. which ones are 33rd degree Freemasons.*
*The interesting thing about that is that while it is true continental Freemasonry has plotted against our church, continental Freemasonry is different from the Masons of North America, although that said the Masons of North America have aspects that are incompatible with Orthodoxy; particularly within the Scottish Rite which is the group that has all of the numbered degrees above the 3rd degree, particularly within the Southern Scottish Rite which was influenced by a Confederate general named Albert Pike who was attempting to create a new religion with new rituals for baptism of infants, burial, and everything else, because of his anti-Catholicism. However as far as I can tell the Freemasons in North America never plotted against us and actively dislike the Continental Freemasons who have, because Continental Freemasons allow atheists to join, and allow the discussion of politics in the lodge, which British and American Freemasons regard as “irregular” which is Mason-speak for “heresy.”
Thus in my view we should recognize as an incompatible religious system Freemasonry of any kind and not allow the Orthodox to join their lodges, but we should draw a distinction between the ones who have conspired against us and the Catholics, and those who have included some of our people who did not know better and were unaware of the problems, and who have not attempted to harm us.
www.oca.org
