Fr. Jacobse

Charles Colson: 1931-2012. May His Memory Be Eternal

Charles Colson Memory Eternal by Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
Charles Colson died today. He was 80 years old. I first met Colson at a conference at Washington, DC and was struck by his magnanimous character and intelligence. Everyone knows his story. Colson was a ruthless political operative in the Nixon administration, got caught up in the Watergate imbroglio during the Nixon administration and went to jail.

I heard him explain his experience in prison during one of his talks. It was the lowest point in his life where he had lost everything and began to question purpose, decisions, and direction. He was visited by a friend (former Minnesota Governor Al Quie) who shared with him how Jesus Christ came into the world to redeem man. Colson listened, cried out to God for help and, as his life would later prove, God heard him. His repentance was deep and lasting.

Prison opened his eyes not only to God, but the desperate conditions of other prisoners. He founded Prison Fellowship, an organization they helped prisoners while incarcerated, after they got out, and their families. The Russian Orthodox Church called on Prison Fellowship after Communism fell to help them build viable prison ministries in Russia. [Read more…]

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Facebook “Listening” Group Drags Culture Wars into the Orthodox Church

Culture Wars Orthodox Church facebook by Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse –
Progressive fads sweep through the culture like clockwork. Remember the impending global ice age in the 1970s that morphed into global warming today? How about the fight about abortion where anyone who dared criticize it was branded as a hater of women? Remember the Equal Rights Amendment and how convinced its supporters were that it was absolutely necessary for a just society?

None of these movements should be taken lightly of course but that doesn’t disqualify them as fads. There is always a strong strain of self-justification among Progressive Culture Warriors; a posturing that creates a facade of virtue and labels the critic as ignorant. Fellow travelers bask in that warm glow of imputed righteousness that they generously confer on each other. The rest of us can return to our caves.

That kind of arrogance informs the new Facebook group “Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality with the Orthodox Church.” The tendentious title is the first clue something is seriously skewed. What silence needs to be “broken”? Who are the people breaking it? Is the Orthodox Church really silent on sexuality? [Read more…]

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Orthodox Bishops Must Speak Out Against the Homosexual Agenda

Fr. Johannes Jacobse by Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
When the light shines, the darkness is made manifest scripture tells us and nowhere is this clearer than in the debate about the morality of homosexuality in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). Most readers know that this debate is heating up, driven in large part by the Facebook group Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality within the Orthodox Church.

True to its tendentious name (there is no “silence” that needs “breaking”), the group follows the playbook of homosexual activism that crippled the Episcopalian Church: Accept the premise that the prohibitions against homosexuality need to be “revisted” (a favorite phrase) and thereby undermine the authority of the moral tradition. Refuse and you will castigated as unloving, uncharitable, closed-minded, ignorant, homophobic, responsible for teen suicides — all the usual pejoratives that are foisted on those who disagree. It’s all done with a smile of course. Call it intimidation through church-speak.

The OCA is hampered with the problem of homosexuality because past leaders were active homosexuals. These leaders did not champion the homosexual agenda, but because they were morally compromised the homosexual behavior in some ranks of Church leadership went unchallenged. [Read more…]

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Thieves Hijacking the Language of the Christian Moral Tradition

Fr. Johannes Jacobse
Fr. Johannes Jacobse

10/4/2010 – Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
What happens then when people leave Christianity and want to promote ideas about morality that violate the moral tradition? They have only one option: Hijack the language. They use the terms of traditional Christianity but mean very different things by them. Words don’t mean what they used to mean. Language gets inverted, turned upside down. Do this long and loud enough, and in less than a generation the new meanings take hold. When hijackers use the language of the moral tradition, they implicitly claim to stand inside that tradition. It’s only a pose of course, but their pose fools many people.

NAPLES, FL. (Catholic Online) – In a recent Catholic Online article (Social Justice: Take Back the Term from the Thieves and Build a New Catholic Action) Deacon Keith Fournier writes about a question he was asked at a recent conference:

…the host of the conference made a suggestion that we get rid of the term “Social Justice” because it is now used by ‘the left”. He asked for my thoughts. I strongly disagreed. I insisted that we take back the phrase from those who have stolen it, either on the “the right” or “the left”. He then suggested the Church does not use the phrase “Social Justice”. An attendee did a “google” search of the Vatican documents on his handheld device and reported it was used thousands of times in the magisterial teaching of the Church.

Fournier is right on two counts: The Christian moral vocabulary properly belongs to Christians, and we should not cede the vocabulary to the thieves. [Read more…]

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Fr. Peter Preble interviews Fr. Hans Jacobse on the Mosque at Ground Zero

Shepherd of Souls Fr. Peter-Michael Preble
8/18/2010 – Fr. Johannes Jacobse and Fr. Peter Preble –

Fr. Peter-Michael Preble interviewed Fr. Hans Jacobse about the building of the mosque at Ground Zero after my article was published on Catholic Online. In it Fr. Hans discusses some of the ideas that inform the argument he made in his earlier article on the same topic.

Mosque at Ground Zero? – 8/18/2010 http://audio.ancientfaith.com/shepherdofsouls/sos_2010-08-18.mp3|titles=Mosque

Fr. Peter blogs at Shepherd of Souls, and Fr. Peter-Michael Preble. He hosts the Shepherd of Souls podcast on Ancient Faith Radio Orthodox website. [Read more…]

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Why We Should Preach After The Gospel

Fr. Johannes Jacobse
Fr. Johannes Jacobse

8/11/2010 – Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
I used to preach at the end of the Liturgy.

It was a pragmatic decision. A good portion of my congregation didn’t arrive until after the Gospel reading. The sloppy behavior was ingrained in parish life for decades and wasn’t likely to change soon no matter how strongly I exhorted them to arrive on time. Better to hear the teaching later then never at all I reasoned.

Did some people benefit from the arrangement? Probably. Did it implicitly encourage the sloppy behavior? Most likely. But short of a full-blown renewal in the parish, the late-comers were like to keep on coming in late and what would they remember if I preached earlier? The announcements?

Since moving from a large parish to a mission parish I’ve changed my ways. The sermon is always after the Gospel reading. I used to think that the rubrics required it because the reading was fresh in the minds of my hearers. While this is true, I’m no longer convinced this is the primary reason. I see something new: The timing of the sermon vivifies – breaths life into – the Eucharistic half of the Liturgy. [Read more…]

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Ground Zero is American Holy Ground. No Mosque Near Ground Zero

Ground Zero Cross 7/27/2010 – Fr. Johannes Jacobse –

Sacred ground is more easily understood by European Christians than their American counterparts. Some events are so catastrophic, or prove to be so historically significant, that they transcend the categories we normally employ to explain them. These events must reference something higher to make sense to us.

NAPLES (Catholic Online) – Muslims have it over secularists, but not Christians – at least the clear thinking ones anyway. The Muslim proposal to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is not only an affront to all people who died there, but another chapter in a cultural jihad that seeks to replace the cultural traditions of Christendom with Sharia, the code of law derived from the Koran and from the teachings and example of Mohammed.

First the caveats. Yes, most Muslims are not jihadists; they may see the non-Muslim as an infidel but won’t resort to violence to defeat him . Yes, Muslim believers pose no threat to American cultural norms and legal structures as long as their numbers remain small. Yes, every Muslim citizen should be afforded the rights due to all Americans regardless of their religion. [Read more…]

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Alexi Giannoulias, Democratic Senate Nominee, Supports Homosexual Marriage

Alexi Giannoulias Supports Homosexual Marriage
Alexi Giannoulias

7/8/2010 – Fr. Johannes Jacobse –

Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois Democratic nominee for US Senator, [and member of the Greek Orthodox Church] supports homosexual marriage. Here’s the introduction from the Greek Star (a Chicago newspaper with Greek readership):

Alexi Giannoulias, Democratic nominee for US Senator, shares why he supports the freedom to marry for all, including people of the same sex. This is something that many of his supporters, and especially Greek-Americans may be opposed to. The Greek-American politician chose to be honest and he should be given credit for being brave to state his opinion on a difficult subject. He stated, “There may be many individuals that may not be happy with my particular stance”. The Greek Orthodox church does not allow, or support, same sex marriage. Giannoulias in the video continues “To me faith has always been less about how you treat God and more about how you treat people.”

[Read more…]

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Culture is at Risk of Becoming Anti-Culture without the Church

AOI | by Fr. Johannes Jacobse | 3/10/2010

Metropolitan Hilarion
Metropolitan Hilarion

Metropolitan Hilarion’s warning deals with what Nietzsche called the “transvaluation of values” — what his dark prophesy warned would happen in the West because “God is Dead,” by which he meant that Western culture was entering into a period where it functioned within the cultural structures shaped by Christianity but without concrete, existential communion with the Savior — the kind of communion that would lead to martyrdom if required. Those structures would weaken as the historical memory of Christianity grew increasingly dim from one generation to the next.

That is the period we are in today, call it secularism, but understand that secularism is just a layover from one city to the next. We have left the City of God (recalling Augustine) for what — Islamic domination? Perhaps. Man cannot live by bread alone, and that includes the secularist as well as the believer. [Read more…]

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Fr. Jacobse: Sunday of Orthodoxy Sermon, 2010


AOI | Fr. Johannes Jacobse | Feb. 21, 2010

On this day we celebrate the Triumph of Orthodoxy, the commemoration of the defeat of the heresy of iconoclasm. The word “heresy,” as we know, means “false teaching” and the false teaching that was finally vanquished was iconoclasm.

“Iconclast” comes from the Greek work that means “icon-breaker.” The iconoclasts were those who smashed the icons because they believed that the Orthodox faithful, in venerating icons, were breaking the first commandment that says, “Thou shalt not make unto yourself any graven image.”

Of course the objection ran deeper than that. Look at it closely and you see that the false teaching – the heresy – of iconclasm taught something else too. It taught that Jesus Christ never really existed. The second person of the Trinity, the Word (capital W) of the Father never really became flesh and dwelt among us. [Read more…]

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