“America is your cradle and your earthly motherland. It is a wonderful God’s country, and you are expected to be wonderful God’s people in this country. Remember that our greatest contribution to America is of a spiritual and moral nature. And that is precisely what America needs today. That is what every Christian country today needs most of all—in boundless measure. For all nations, especially the Christians nowadays traveling as if in a wilderness of confusion created by senseless materialism and its blind daughter atheism. I offer this to what leading American men and women are saying: ‘The only hope for us and for the world is to return to religion.’ Again I say: ‘Our hope is in the Church.’ You ought to listen to these words, too, and to ponder them. We live in very tragic times, which are made more tragic by easy-going and self-indulgent people who have never read the story of Sodom, of Laish, or of Capernaum. “If I am correct in my observations, the greatest struggle of America these days is the struggle for the priority and superiority of spiritual and moral values over techniques and technological lordship: in other words, for predominance of the spiritual over the material, of goodness over cleverness. The Serbs often say of a clever man: ‘He is clever as the devil.’ They never say: ‘He is good as the devil.’ “America is constantly sounding the sympathetic watchwords: ‘dignity of man’ and ‘liberty of men and nations.’ But the deepest meaning of these watchwords can be found in the sacred teaching of Him without Whom we can do nothing. That meaning is found most explicitly in the threefold program of our Orthodox Church: spiritual vision, moral discipline, and competition in doing good. “For the dignity of man—in other words, the superior value of man—has real and eternal meaning only if you know and acknowledge the Kingdom of Heaven as the true fatherland of all men, from which we originated and to which we are returning as children of one common Father, Who is in heaven. And freedom is most useful, joyful, and sacred if you exercise moral discipline over yourself and practice competition in doing good. “These are the fundamentals upon which you can build your individual and communal happiness. And you have received these fundamentals as a glorious heritage, never to part with. By practicing this spiritual heritage in your daily life, you will become an adornment to America. And through you all Americans will come to know and appreciate our ancient Church of the East and her spiritual heroes, whom we are praising today.” - St. Nikolai Velimirovich

ROCOR PRAYER REQUEST On Tuesday, June 16, 2026, His Eminence KYRILL, Archbishop of San Francisco and Western America, underwent a heart ablation. His Eminence was feeling well after the procedure until late last night, when at 1:00 AM this morning, he was admitted to the emergency ward with complications. Archbishop Kyrill is requesting the prayers of the faithful of the Western American Diocese and beyond for his health and recovery. wadiocese.org/news_260618_1?…