SAINT JUAN CHRYSOSTOM PICO DE ORO

On January 28, the Latin Church celebrates Saint John Chrysostom (zalatos rot and zatousta for the Russians), mouth of gold who was the father of sacred oratory, an art that unfortunately has fallen into disuse in the West.

The sermons and homilies of our pardoned priests are somewhat coarse and persuasive. So they could provoke the invectives of Padre Isla. Today it is preached in the style of sidewalk orators like Fray Gerundio de Campazas.

Homilies that neither fu nor fa preach to me priest preach to me friar it goes in one ear and out the other. The pulpits were banished. Nobody puts cloths on the pulpit and launches bell sermons, those that moved the audience. Be.

The negative to all this could be the "property" or sermon that I heard from Patriarch Cyril of Moscow in the Cathedral of the Redeemer at the end of the pontifical mass on Saint Tatiana's day- Good prosody, clarity of ideas, perfect exposition without any fussing on Russian so clear that I understood it myself.

  I thought that Saint John Chrysostom, the Patriarch of Constantinople, must have spoken in the same way with the same elegance and solemnity and that with Saint Basil, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Athanasius he constitutes the tetrarchy of the fathers of the Eastern Church.

In the voice of Patriarch Cyril I glimpsed mythical resonances of that great tribune of sacred oratory who pontificated in Constantinople in the fourth century. Boca de Oro was a Syrian monk who was taken out of the convent to be enthroned for the patriarchate of Byzantium.

An exemplary life, eloquence and fame as a thaumaturge were aroused in his person. I don't know if he did miracles. What does seem miraculous to me is the liturgical canon of the sung masses that are preserved in the Orthodox rite, his letters and his sermons. This saint has special relevance today for several reasons.

He opposed the corruption of customs of the Judaizers of Empress Eudoxia who rejected the Christian liturgy and continued to celebrate the customs and rituals of the Old Testament.

For all this he was banished to the Caucasus by the Emperor Arcadius. He preferred to lose his seat than accommodate himself to the secular whims of the emperor. This is a paradigm for today's ecclesiastics, those bishops who get out of peteneras and do not dare to come out in defense of the faith saying a platitude such as that one cannot kill in the name of God. Lack of courage There is no priest who says here I am.

  We already knew it. Through the scenic environment. When a humble sacristan is struck down by the knife of a Mohammedan fanatic. This cowardly goodness would not enter into the theological approaches of Chrysostom.

The Vatican didn't say this mouth is mine either. Propter metum judeorum?

We all know that jihadism and alcaida is financed by Soros and the dark forces as the spearhead to end Christian Europe.

Maybe I want to think that the good Muslim may not have anything to do with those fanatics. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

  But they do not integrate, their women continue with their capisayos touched with the medieval wimp on their heads.

Do they profess love for Spain only with a small mouth? Is emigration a subterfuge to plan a full-blown invasion?

  When formulating such doubts, fear overwhelms many Spaniards, just as we are surprised by the eagerness of the episcopal hierarchy to throw balls out. And the nefarious here nothing has happened. Moors and Christians are brothers. I think we are more cousins than brothers.

Saint John Chrysostom also had to struggle with the schism of the church of Alexandria with that of Antioch. He has currently been replayed with the Ukrainian war.

Selenski persecutes the priests who continue in communion through Patriarch Onofre with Moscow. Constantinople has also severed relations with Zagorsk.

At the cost of exile and death in Pontus, this great father of the church rose up in defense of the faith and is an example to be taken into account by our timorous, fearful, extremely prudent, scared hierarchs.

  Pope Francis's sermons are a disaster. Nor does he ever sing and they say 'for my people, what a rooster that doesn't sing has something in its throat or because it has one ear in front of the other or because it doesn't really feel like it, quite the opposite of Crisóstomo who composed the troparia, sequences and hymns that they mark the distance between the orthodox liturgy and the one that arose from the Caudine gallows of Vatican II.

I remember that more than fifty years ago in the Comillas minor seminary the feast of this saint was celebrated with a speech in Greek, a philippic by Demosthenes in the auditorium and one from Santander from the rostrum declaimed the speech in Greek for thirty-three minutes. , that rhetorician was a hero. He had bishop material. Would he make it to the priesthood? What happened to him?

Monday, January 30, 2023