The Saint Euphrosynos Cafe

Thank you, Jonathan, you are a very reasonable, well-balanced moderator - and a good writer. We all appreciate your contributions!

About the 12th Imam, Prav was rambling! Just assuring you not to bother as he occasionally can muse away about very disparate topics. There IS no connection whatsoever.

About Zionism though, yes that's one of the hugest red flags of today's world. Even Ecumenism is NOwhere near as dark or threatening, as I see it.
That's why I keep bringing up Israel's nefarious roles in events - they and their evangelical supporters are the most dangerous around for the stability of life on the planet!

I never for a minute believed that St John purported statement. It's so tempting, sounds credible.

My eye just caught the little smiley icon with the BUMP! to the right. Wasn't the Saint supposed to have stumbled when he pronounced this? Maybe he stumbled, said MERELY "WHAT IF the Antichrist were born?" However, humans, as they like to embellish, rushed to say St John made an official statement clad in steel.

Well, time to make a pilgrimage to his tomb and submit the question~!?

Let's remember that supposedly Archbishop John would bless any plane upon which he was flying and/or bless the pilot[s] in person. But according to now-bp Petre [Lukianov], that was made up. So maybe this apocalyptic statement was another of those colorful tales launched into circulation.

If only St John could bless all the planes today - for crashes have become a regular event. What about those in remoter areas which are hushed up hastily?

Thank you for your kind words. I will do my best to remain well-balanced and offer good contributions.

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment of Zionism and Ecumenism. Both are theologically dangerous, but Ecumenism is the one that has undermined nearly all the local Patriarchates, with the partial exception of Jerusalem (if you believe Irineos is still the legitimate Patriarch, that is). Most 'official' Orthodox prelates now preach the Ecumenist heresy openly, or are silent in the face of it, but very few, if any, preach Zionism, and some are openly anti-Zionist. In this respect, there is a huge difference between the World Orthodox and Evangelical Protestants in America, since the latter are generally anti-Ecumenist but pro-Zionist.

There is a kind of 'conservative' ecumenism that has become increasingly popular among certain traditionalist Catholics and Protestants, and also some conservative World Orthodox. This ecumenism is noteworthy because it eschews the social liberalism that is a hallmark of the mainstream ecumenist movement, i.e. the WCC, and is also much more sympathetic to Zionism. You will find a good representation of this in the journal First Things. It is possible that this is the germ of the Ecumenist-Zionist synthesis that may lead to the Antichrist, but I cannot offer more than this speculative suggestion.

This is probably appropriate for another thread, however. If people want to continue this discussion, we can split it off.

JGress,

        I have never seen anything in writing about the [i][u]1962[/u][/i] date for the prophecy of St. John Maximovitch concerning the Antichrist.  I heard the anecdote secondhand from a close disciple of Father Seraphim Rose.  Do you have a reference?

       My reference to the 12th Imam comes from a non-Orthodox source.  It is Joel Richardson's book, [i][u]Antichrist; Islam's Awaited Messiah[/u][/i].  I wrote a popular review for this book on Amazon.com some years ago, and corresponded for a time with the pseudonymous author.

        As for your comment on Obama's world popularity, I read a recent poll that found Barak Obama to be the most popular man on the planet-- having recently surpassed the Dali lama.  I don't recall the demographics of this poll--  it may have been a European sample.

Here is one reference:

http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/a ... ist-begun/

Also, Bishop Peter Lukianov, who does not believe that St John made this prophecy, also confirms the 1962 date:

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/29140.htm

Obviously non-Orthodox sources carry little, if any, authority when it comes to predicting the reign of Antichrist.

Here is the latest data on Obama's popularity:

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... cking_poll

As you can see, at the moment more Americans disapprove of his presidency than approve of it.

I would be highly suspicious of any data purporting to show Obama's worldwide popularity. There is simply no infrastructure for gathering representative evidence from underdeveloped countries, so the sample will be highly skewed towards his ratings in other developed countries only, i.e. Western Europe, Japan and a few other places.

JGress,

 Thanks for the two anecdotal references on the 1962 date for St. John's alleged prophecy about the Antichrist.  Both referenced accounts are quite sketchy and non-specific, but the fact that St. John apparently did not occupy the see at San Francisco until 1962 certainly implies that this legendary incident in San Francisco could not have occurred as early as August of 1961, when Obama was born.

  You (and our resident defender of the Mohammedan faithful, Catherine) should probably read Joel Richardson's analysis in [i][u]Antichrist; Islam's Awaited Messiah[/u][/i] before casting judgment on its historical and theological merits.  It offers a very well-documented review of the Hadith, and the source material for the prophecies are taken primarily from the canonized Orthodox Christian scriptures.  There is, however, an extensive discussion of the Islamic teaching about the "Mahdi" and the 12th Imam, which is, of course, extraneous to Orthodoxy.

  As for Obama's popularity ratings, your Rasmussen reports of his recent demise have been perhaps greatly exaggerated, and always need to be taken with a large grain of salt in this era of corporations like Rupert Murdoch's mass propaganda agency known as Fox "News."   For example, the most recent Gallup poll (from one week ago) has Obama's American approval ratings holding at a steady 50% this year-- with marked stratification by race and geographic region.  This is a rather reamarkable number considering that Obama took office last year in the midst of the Great Bush-Cheney Economic Crash of 2008-09, the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. 

  Meanwhile America's, and Obama's, approval ratings throughout the world have surged dramatically during the past 15 months from their all-time lows in 2008 under President George W. Bush.  There are multiple validated references for this international polling.

  I am also posting below the reference to a European Harris poll which recently found Barak Obama to be the single most popular man in the world, even surpassing the Dali Lama.  It appeared in our local paper recently.

Poll says Obama, Dalai Lama world's most popular
Fri Apr 23, 2:00 am ET

PARIS (AFP) – US President Barack Obama and the Dalai Lama are the world's two most popular leaders, according to a poll conducted in six countries and released on Friday.

Obama won 77 percent backing, one percentage point higher than in November, in the poll conducted by Harris Interactive for France24 and Radio France-Internationale.

The Tibetan spiritual leader was at second place at 75 percent, followed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at 62 percent.

Pope Benedict XVI was the seventh most popular leader with 36 percent support.

The survey was carried out on the Internet between March 31 and April 12 and covered 6,135 adults aged between 16 and 64 in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was at fourth position with 54 percent support. She was followed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy who tied for fifth place with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at 37 percent.

The most unpopular leaders according to the survey were Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi and Chinese President Hu Jintao.

   [/color][/b][/i]

Looking at how European leaders, dismal fakes all of them, no offense! - but they are linked heavily to Bildergers [Angela Merkel is their absolute tool] or Zionists [Sarkozcy] are supposedly so "popular', who could believe that poll ?
Americans and Westerners are trained by "the scientfic method" to quote statistics to back up ideas.

So an American-FUNDED poll among Afghans will say that some high percentage supports the American takeover. Yeah, SURE. About 5% is more like it: Western-educated intellectuals and the US puppet leadership waiting in the wings. That's IT !
Total lies.
You have to examine closely WHO did the poll, how it was conducted, and complex factors to which outsiders never are privy. The "results" are just trumpeted about with none of this careful examination of where bias could be built in to the gathering of the figures given.

Prav, I know you have some scientific training. Hence you might be too eager to jump at figures.
We as True Orthodox are above all, seekers of REAL truth. Tearing away all the layers of garbage with which the average person of today is fed and consumes, we are they who reject that in favor higher truth. What's right, not what's popular at the moment. We are they who do not go with current popular trends and do need to for example as Ian quoted the prophecy in the other active thread, eagerly watch the TV news to inform ourselves of what's going on.
We trust in higher wisdom and do not need to soil our eyes watching these very dark new broadcasters even for a minute! It pulls down the entire light in our souls. Better to read text to learn what's going on and choose websites that hit close to the mark of truth than allow our eyes to be polluted by such awful energies of the news anchors and the commentators which are selected by the same old machine of both the Zionist and the New World Order power brokers of this world.

I think Jonathan was right that the indications are rather the opposite. Thank God! if so.
Sure enough there was a lead article today which begins:

"WASHINGTON – Voters rejected one of President Barack Obama's hand-picked candidates and forced another into a runoff, the latest sign that his political capital is slipping beneath a wave of anti-establishment anger...."

I followed Jonathan's link and was surprised to see that the rather wild-sounding Antichrist assertion was specifically refuted in the article. I had forgotten that.
These recollections as far as I understand came from Mary Mansur's newspaper Orthodox America. [I want to give her work credit which is fair.]
I first saw it in the online version. A link for info on another Orthodox Hierarch brought me there years ago when I was first researching.

Pravoslavie probably copied the reprint in a recent Orthodox Word issue ["Saved From Fire" May-June 2008].
Someone mailed to me as I am not a subscriber; there's too much stuff don't like there these days. Fr Damascene is close to the MP, hence that's probably how Pravslavie bot a hold of this.

I have a copy of the FULL original of the rare pic of successive San Francisco Archbishops Tikhon and St John. I keep this prominently placed so I can view IT [not newscasters!] because it depicts THREE EXTRAORDINARY BISHOPS of ROCOR all together in one snapshot!

I waited a long time & had to go through a lot to finagle a copy. Maybe that's because it IS so special that the devil didn't want me to have this...or perhaps another factor regarding the picture was blocking it ? I'm mentioning because we all notice these obstacles raised - by what I consider to be dark forces - to keep good things from away from those souls bold enough to strive for purity. But up-to-date TV's and lousy DVDs are PUSHED on the consumers!

Well is anybody waiting to learn who is The Third Bishop - sounds like the title of a thriller movie ! Let's see if any readers are awake out there --

Yes, I agree that the evidence for St John Maximovich's prophecy about the Antichrist is sketchy, although I am curious that you now make this claim, given that you were the one who first brought it up to bolster your hypothesis that Obama is the Antichrist (because he happened to be born in the early 60s).

My understanding of who the Antichrist will be is based mostly on Vladimir Moss' collation of Russian catacomb sources. As far as I can tell, the Russian catacomb saints possess the greatest spiritual authority of recent times, because they are the ones who have suffered the longest and most systematic persecution to date, exceeding even the persecution of the Old Calendarists in Greece, Romania and Bulgaria. In those sources I see no indication that the Antichrist will be a Moslem. I am also not aware of earlier prophecies predicting this, although there were certainly saints who called Mohammed 'Antichrist'. But that is to be understood allegorically, in the same way that Julian the Apostate was called Antichrist in his day: Mohammed was a type of Antichrist, but not Antichrist himself. Similarly, Soviet power was called Antichrist, but again, the collective Soviet government was only a type of Antichrist, not Antichrist himself. The Moslem's own prophecies about their 'Mahdi' or whomever are neither here nor there, given that they are a false religion in any case. I suppose you can interpret them in the same way we interpret the Jewish expectation of the Messiah, i.e. we foresee that they will accept the Antichrist as their Messiah (this is included in the catacomb prophecies). But I am not aware of any catacomb prophecies that discuss how the Moslems will react to Antichrist; for that, I would need to re-read Moss' book.

If we are to believe these catacomb sources, Antichrist himself will be a Russian-born Jew and will reign from Jerusalem, in the rebuilt Temple. This is not at all hard for me to believe, given that there are so many Russian-born Jews living in Israel already. But before this happens, several other events will occur. First, Soviet power, which still reigns in Russia through KGB agent Putin and the Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, will be overthrown in a great war with China. Again, not at all an impossible scenario looking at the current situation. Then an Orthodox tsar will take power in Russia and oversee the spread of the True Church throughout the world. I admit, this seems hard to believe now, but the prophecy is clear and 'nothing is impossible with God'. After this, the Antichrist will appear.

Will all this really come to pass in our lifetime? That, of course, depends on whether the world repents before the end and puts off the day of reckoning. But I don't think we can afford to dismiss these testimonies, especially not on the basis of heretical interpretations of the New Testament prophecies.