Hristos se Rodi!

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2847

European Americans United and Western Voices offer our Eastern Orthodox Christian members, supporters, readers and friends a happy Orthodox Christmas.

The Eastern Orthodox churches, whose members hail from Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Armenia, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus, Cyprus, Moldova, Macedonia, Georgia, Romania, parts of the Baltic nations and Poland, and, of course, Russia, the most populous white nation in the world, form the second largest Christian communion. Orthodoxy is also present in all Western nations, brought with the likes of the hardy Russian pioneers who settled, for example, parts of Alaska and California.

The Orthodox faith gave white people an ideological and cultural focus that united our folk on the European frontline in the face of relentless nonwhite invasion, from the Mongols and Tatars to the Ottoman Turks. It also sustained them under long periods beneath the yoke of nonwhite occupation. Today Orthodoxy is a major weapon in the Serb resistance to the imposition of an Islamic regime in Kosovo, and forms the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2656 (1502–1585) instituted caldendar reforms when new calculations found that the Old Calendar was 11 minutes, 14 seconds too long. A Jesuit named Christopher Clavius came up with the new calendar (later improved by Johannes Kepler), and in 1582 the Gregorian Calendar moved the date of Christmas Day from January 7 back to December 25.

The change was slow in being adopted, with the “New Style” not being civilly instituted in England and its colonies in America until 1752. In Orthodox nations, the change was not made because of the Great Schism of 1000 AD, when the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches parted company. The Gregorian civil system was unevenly adopted across Europe, with the Soviet Union being the last to institute it officially, in 1919. This was mainly an http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2595 in the West today.

The Julian calendar persists in Orthodox churches for liturgical purposes, and so all main church holidays fall on different dates than Western ones.

The equivalent of the “Merry Christmas” greeting in Serbia is “Hristos se Rodi!” (“Christ is born!”), to which is said “Vaistinu se rodi!”: “He is born indeed!” This may be the last Christmas the Serbs of Kosovo Metohija celebrate as free people; the next one may find them at war or in the grip of an Islamic government.

2008-01-07