The Bland Taste of a Salt-less Meal

Archbishop Averky of Syracuse and Jordanville concerning the “Salt of the Earth”

As salt preserves food from decay and makes it healthful and pleasant to the taste, so too true Christians preserve the world from moral decay and facilitate its return to health. But if the salt “loses its savor,” as the Gospel says, i.e. “loses its strength” (in the East there actually is a kind of salt which can lose its taste), then it becomes good for nothing except to be “thrown out to be trodden under foot of men” (cf. the Gospel reading for the third day of the feast of Pentecost, Matt. 5:313).
How terrible this is! And we find ourselves living in such times when the tendency dominating the world is directed toward making all Christians such “salt which has lost its savor,” once it has abolished the true Church of Christ derived from the Holy Apostles and thus has deprived Christians of the grace of the Holy Spirit.
This is the so very fashionable, so-called “ecumenical movement,” which is based on the position that supposedly the true Church of Christ does not presently exist on earth and it is necessary to create it anew…through the unification of all Christians belonging to various “churches” and confessional associations and organizations; this will be done by various mutual concessions in matters of doctrine and the development of a new, common system of doctrine acceptable to all and, along with it, of course, a new world view.
And the opinion, extremely popular in our times, that “it’s all the same which church you go to; after all, God is one” is in agreement with this tendency.
Yes! God is one, but, you know, He also gave us one faith; He created one Church for us, not many different faiths and “churches.” This is confirmed by the holy Apostle Paul when he says, “One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all,” and so we Christians should form “one body and one spirit,” as we are called to “in one hope of our calling” (Eph. 4:4-6).
If there is only one true faith and only one true Church, then as a consequence all other faiths and “churches” are false, not true. How then can anyone say that all faiths and “churches” are of equal value and that “it is all the same which church you go to.”
Therefore one can and must speak not of the ecumenical unification of everyone for the creation of some new Church, but only of the restoration of union between all who have fallen away and the one true Church of Christ to which Christ the Savior Himself gave the great and sure promise that “the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).