Byzantine Catholic Church Patriarchal See

A Letter from the Apostolic Chancellor

 

 

My brothers and sisters in the Lord,

 

 

We have been through some interesting struggles in the past three weeks since the death of our second patriarch. Since he maintained his own office, it was closed by his family when he died. The files were sealed in numerous boxes, the telephone was turned off, and all of this had to be reinvented at a new location.

 

A new downtown Los Angeles telephone number was installed. Of course the office had to be set up from scratch, and files gone through and purged of years of stuff that no longer needed to be kept. Then begin the filing of the files that we kept which will be going on for some time. Our newly elected and enthroned patriarch ordered a full facelift update of our web presence that took weeks to complete. Whew! Are we done yet? Not!

 

None of these activities leave any time for reflection or morning of the passing of a man that led the church for forty-six years. We are just now beginning to slow down a bit and catch our breath, yet there is still much work to do.

 

Those of us that lead the church constantly pray for you and we hope that at this time of change in the church that you will pray for us as well.

On a lighter note, we have discovered that one side effect of the gallons of coffee we have all been consuming, and the little sleep we have been getting, is that we now all talk to each other in staccato. For you non musical folk, that means; "choppy." We really sound quite funny. Our new patriarch has dubbed it as "barking" at one another. The result of the barking means that we are constantly asking each other: "What did you just say?, or Would you repeat that please?" The flip side of that is; "Yes, got that, can we now just move on to the next thing on the list."

 

Now do you see why we are hoping that you are praying for us?

 

Sincerely at work, I remain yours in Christ,

 

+Metropolitan Joel