Anastasios of Tirana and Frank of Zanzibar on social struggle.

My house-sitter, Allen Killian-Moore, sent me this. Remarkable, because it comes from an Orthodox prelate:

"We must promote daring initiatives and just social struggles and not be
spectators of divine interventions and actions, but offer ourselves as
co-workers with the Lord...economic globalization is solely concerned with
broadening the market...Woe to us if, in the twenty-first century, we
again relinquish the initiative for social justice to others, as we have
done in past centuries, while we confine ourselves to our opulent rituals,
to our usual alliance with the powerful. We must promote a society of love
rather than a globalization that transforms nations and people into an
indistinguishable, homogenized mass, convenient for the economic
objectives of an anonymous oligarchy."

--Archbishop Anastasios of Tirana

And it reminded me of this:

... Christ is found in and amid matter—Spirit through matter—God in flesh, God in the Sacrament. But I say to you, and I say it to you with all the earnestness that I have, that if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum.

Now mark that—this is the Gospel truth. If you are prepared to say that the Anglo-Catholic is at perfect liberty to rake in all the money he can get no matter what the wages are that are paid, no matter what the conditions are under which people work; if you say that the Anglo-Catholic has a right to hold his peace while his fellow citizens are living in hovels below the levels of the streets, this I say to you, that you do not yet know the Lord Jesus in his Sacrament. ...If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly—it is madness—to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done.

There then, as I conceive it, is your present duty; and I beg you, brethren, as you love the Lord Jesus, consider that it is at least possible that this is the new light that the Congress was to bring to us. You have got your Mass, you have got your Altar, you have begun to get your Tabernacle. Now go out into the highways and hedges where not even the Bishops will try to hinder you. Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet.

---Frank Weston, Bishop of Zanzibar: conclusion of his address to the Anglo-Catholic Congress of 1923, Our Present Duty,