He Was In The World, And The World Was Made Through Him, But The World Did Not Know Him.

He was in the world, and the world was made through him, but the world did not know him.

John 1:10

Thalerhof was the first concentration camp in Europe, active from 1914 to 1917 and its primary victims were Eastern Christians. This camp preceded even Dachau which is considered to be the prototype of concentration camps built by Nazi Germany.

It is the place where Austrians interned 30,000 “Russo-philes” which meant that those who identified as Rusyns (or Ruthenian), including Orthodox and Greek Catholics, were interned in either Thalerhof or Terezin.

Rusyns are a little known population who originated in the northern Carpathian mountains, along the modern borders of Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. To this day, their identities as Rusyns are not acknowledged and they’re often underrepresented in censuses, especially in Ukraine, where they are merely listed as Ukrainian highlanders.

There are countless efforts to erase this part of Eastern European history and today, Thalerhof has been razed to the ground and an airport is built where it once stood. Carpatho-Rusyns, in their attempt to escape genocide, are responsible for bringing Orthodox Christianity to America.

Serbia, 16th century

A Different Worldview and a Different History; Catholicism and Orthodoxy

The Roman Catholic Scholastic thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote in his massive work, the Summa Theologiae, that theology is the "highest scientia" since a high degree of rationality is required to understand the most important and complex philosophical concepts about God. The universities that developed during the Scholastic period in the Christian West were intended to teach students how to deal in this "science" of theology through rigorous conceptual analysis. Theology was considered to be the preeminent Scholastic endeavor, a good thing in many ways. Yet, as a result of the high regard for logic and rationality in medieval Roman Catholicism, those who studied and taught (the "doctors") came to be more highly regarded than the monks and nuns (the "religious") whose main vocation was to pray.

Theology began to be expounded by scholars outside of the context of prayer, pastoral ministry, and liturgical worship. Pelikan traces this specific change in the West through the changing job description of the theologian. He notes that, between AD 100 and 600, most theologians were bishops; from 600 to 1500 in the West they were monks. But after 1500, Western theologians are university professors: "Gregory I, who died in 604, was a bishop who had been a monk; Martin Luther, who died in 1546, was a monk who became a university professor. Each of these lifestyles has left its mark on the job description of a theologian." After the sixteenth century in the West, the task of theology increasingly became separated from its earlier moorings to the worship of the community and the spiritual disciplines.

From an Eastern Orthodox point of view, knowledge of God comes only from an encounter with the God who has revealed Himself: "What may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them" (Rom. 1:19). Thus, theology can never be separated from prayer, worship, and contemplation of the Holy Trinity. Metropolitan Ware affirms that all true Orthodox theology is mystical: "Just as mysticism divorced from theology becomes subjective and heretical, so theology, when it is not mystical, degenerates into an arid scholasticism, 'academic' in the bad sense of the word." That is to say, Orthodox mystical theology guards against either unacceptable extreme: subjective and heretical, or arid and academic.

- A Basic Guide to Eastern Orthodox Theology, Eve Tibbs

Thinking about being in church makes me want to lay on the floor and cry it is home I’m home finally I’m home