Where did Saint Basil the Great say or Write that?

http://orthodoxmonk.blogspot.com/2008/12/jus-ad-bellum.html

http://orthodoxwiki.org/Just_war#Canon_13_of_St._Basil

"Our Fathers did not consider the killings committed in the course of wars to be classifiable as murders at all, on the score, it seems to me, of allowing a pardon to men fighting in defense of sobriety and piety. Perhaps, though, it might be advisable to refuse them communion for three years, on the ground that they are not clean-handed."

I have tried in vain to find anything outside that article of Orthodox Wiki in which the Canons of Saint Basil are enumerated with statement what they were and what they regulate canonically.

I have found a site called "Canons of St Basil" shut down, thus not consultable. I have also found a site arguing for Women Priests from three different "canons" (enumerated as such) of St Basil, enumerating also the letters of St Basil in which they are found.

Normally setting canons is for apostolic authority. Of course, he held apostolic authority over Neo-Caesarea, but not over the entire Church. Moreover, as a bishop he ruled after published canons, but there is no indication he published any canons in person. I did find canons of Neocaesarea, Ancyra, and of course, Nice or Nicea, the council that condemned Arius and issued a few canons on other matters two. None of the three councils has a nr 13 stating the above.

I already took a distance from what Orthodox I know now back in 2009, because there were plans to canonise as a saint a Paul Ballaster who had falsified either text or occasion when he found a text he took for the real one, but which is falsified, a text from St Robert Bellarmine.

http://o-x.fr/xet is where I dealt with this matter, after an other post referring to one in which I had heard about St Robert Bellarmine getting misquoted.

There the falsification served - by or to this Paul Ballaster - the purpose of demonising Papism by attributing to its great promoter and saint a word that is Papolatrous. And which in fact he did not write, he wrote something else with a very clear difference of grammatic mood in one verb. Where Paul Ballaster gave in his misquote from Bellarmine "... the Church is obliged ...", St Robert actually wrote "... the Church would be obliged ..." - Paul Ballaster accused the Catholic Church for changing its Christian and Apostolic doctrine on good and evil on Papal whims, and produced a misquote from St Robert Bellarmine as proof whereas the real text of St Robert Bellarmine means that since the Church does not change its doctrine, Popes do not have the power to err in such matters on all occasions, but only on such where they do not oblige the whole Church (or even try to). The same text also says that the Pope is no priest of Apollo or soothsayer. Erring about an individual case is well within the Popes capacities of human sinning.

Now, there is another attempt of referring to texts without a primary concern for truth in or at least about these texts. Here the quote above, which I googled, could not be gotten from any site dedicated to St Basil of Caesarea. I have not read through all of his letters, of which NewAdvent Site gives one numbered 366, where some people at least go to find his "canons" - notably, as said above, a site arguing from deaconnesses in the quotes to female priesthood in the thing, as if all ordinations to whatever were always parts of sacrament of orders, as if a deaconness could never have been something like porter or exorcist (neither of which is part of holy orders, both of which need a kind of dispensation before getting married, and of course the example of St Genevieve seems consistent with women sometimes serving as exorcists, at least on women who could not be touched by men according to Pagan standards of modesty). So I do not even know if the quote above is genuine or fake. But I do know that as it stands it does not constitute a canon stipulating 3 years public penance on people who killed in battle.

- First, the only context in which St Basil established any canons that I know of are those of the Basilian monks.

- Second, any councils where he may have participated and* which issued canons, Ancyra, Neo-Caesarea, Nicea, all have a totally other canon 13.

- Third, it is not worded as a canon, but as an advice:

Our Fathers did not consider the killings committed in the course of wars to be classifiable as murders at all, on the score, it seems to me, of allowing a pardon to men fighting in defense of sobriety and piety.

This is not in itself a canon, but a preambulum, whether it be to a canon or something else. It is to something else, to a personal speculation of advisability of introducing such a canon:

Perhaps, though, it might be advisable to refuse them communion for three years, on the ground that they are not clean-handed.

Obviously this advice was spoken or written with some hesitation ("perhaps") and it was never adopted as a canon obliging laymen in any way whatsoever, as far as I know. Pacifistic and feministic appeals to Patristics tend to some fraudulency. And since Orthodox - as they call themselves - refuse to take distance from that fraud, I as a Catholic Christian have to take distance from them.

By the way, I do hope Benedict XVI does not canonise John Paul II. On St Robert Bellarmine's principles it seems more of an occasion of seeing they were not Popes than for changing my take on what a Pope should do.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Bibliothèque Mouffetard,

en Paris V

8 - VI - AD 2001

* Chronology rules this out. He was born after these councils in 330.