Some years ago a Russian Metropolitan and personal friend told me that Patriarch Kyrill had always considered that the interest of the 2007 reconciliation between the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) and the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) was political, rather than spiritual. In order to assert that the MP is the Mother Church, émigré churches had to be reconciled, proving that the MP was no longer a Soviet organisation, thus reconciling the divide between ‘Red and White’. This was the historic, political importance of the event for the MP, which even then was a hundred times larger than ROCOR.

For us, then in the old European ROCOR, the reconciliation was also vital, not for political, but for spiritual reasons. In order to ensure that the sectarian tendencies which had been developing in American ROCOR since the 1960s and had already resulted in the schism in 1986 would not take over, ROCOR would be brought back, even in the USA, and anchored in the Russian Orthodox mainstream. If the reconciliation had not occurred, we, like many others, would at once have left for the MP, deserting ROCOR as a sect behind us. Indeed, it was the pressure from us that helped the bishops to make the right decision in 2007 and become part of the MP.

I can still remember how after the historic concelebration and reconciliation between Patriarch Alexis and Metropolitan Laurus in the Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in May 2007, a very senior and well-known mitred Russian archpriest from ROCOR said to me: ‘We’ve done it!’ And that is how we all felt – relief and joy. The sectarians had lost. Moscow had given victory to the Orthodox majority in ROCOR and now we could look forward to building a united Diaspora together with Russian and other Orthodox, the sectarian elements leaving for various tiny old calendarist groups, each even stranger than the other. Sadly, this was not to be.

Within ten years of that triumph, the sectarians started coming to the fore into ROCOR again, effectively double-crossing Moscow. A turning-point came in 2017 when ROCOR bishops refused the Patriarch’s request to establish three regional Metropolias within ROCOR. This would have led to metropolitanisation or decentralisation, mirroring the same processes inside the Russian Federation, as implemented by Patriarch Kyrill. After this came the americanisation of European ROCOR, persecuting and spiritually destroying, a situation reflected also in Australian ROCOR. In other words, ROCOR had fallen into centralisation and uncanonical extremism.

This refusal meant the outright rejection of our helping towards the creation of new regional Local Churches, contributing ROCOR’s legacy to them. However, the situation grew even worse. At the very end of 2020 a young and untutored American ROCOR bishop created a schism with another part of the MP on account of the canonical reception of Non-Orthodox, rejecting the age-old Russian Orthodox and European ROCOR conciliar way. In so doing he lost half his diocese, but. amazingly, received the backing of his fellow-bishops amid silence from the MP. The slippery slope was there and soon ROCOR bishops began rebaptising Orthodox.

The MP was quiet, obsessed by the politics of the 2007 ROCOR reconciliation and not by the dogmatics of baptism and pastoral practice. Then all its attention was distracted by the conflict in the Ukraine, with the resulting chaos in all its dioceses outside the Russian Federation and Belarus, not least in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova and Western Europe. Essentially, this heresy of the new ROCOR is Neo-Donatist Anabaptism (the Donatists were the first rebaptisers), that is to say, repeating baptism, contrary to the Creed of the Church, ‘I believe in one baptism…’.  We can see how the new ROCOR is founded on American Protestant sectarianism.

As one American friend said to me: ‘The new ROCOR are really Orthodox Amish’. For the Amish like other sects are of course issued from Donatist Anabaptism. After 50 years inside the Russian Church and despite constantly being so often treated as third-class citizens, we are all very sad to see what ROCOR has become and how it has fallen away from the Orthodox Church. What saddens us the most is that though the old European ROCOR had nothing in common with the new ROCOR, it has now been taken over by it. The legacy of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe is being persecuted again, just as he was persecuted by US ROCOR in 1963.

The fragments of the old European ROCOR are being americanised, all who resist after lifetimes of service are expelled. And all this is encouraged in New York! Will Moscow wake up to what it has brought into the world? It thought it had gained canonical Russian Orthodox representatives in the Western world, but in fact it has been double-crossed and is represented by a sect of extremists and bullying pharisees and hypocrites, not by the Church. The new ROCOR ideology is playing no role in witness to the authentic Orthodox Faith, rather it is discouraging and delaying it.  Here is the tragedy that distracted Moscow will one day have to address.