There is only one thing which divides Christians: deviation from Holy Tradition, or that which has been believed at all times and in all places by the Faithful. Today, almost all of the Orthodox Churches have fallen to the pan-heresy of ecumenism, which denies the primacy of Orthodoxy. This deviation from the fundamental principle of our Faith, that it alone preserves the fullness of the Apostolic Church, accounts for the divisions among us. And just as it has divided us by compromising the Church’s traditions—beginning with the calendar innovation—, so a rejection of the pan-heresy of ecumenism and a return to the Church’s traditions will once again unite us.
If we have any instruction to offer, it must always rest on an understanding that no lesson, no bit of knowledge about the Church, can be significant unless it first counsels the believer consciously to embrace the Orthodox Church as the True Church and her Holy Tradition as inspired and divinely established, whether that Holy Tradition be expressed in the basic dogma of Orthodox ecclesiastical primacy or something so seemingly insignificant as how we Cross ourselves. If by stating the truth we seem to divide, this is only because those who have deviated from or revile the truth are already separated from the spirit of Orthodoxy.
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