Tag Archives: Pastoral Tragedy

How ROCOR Double-Crossed the Moscow Patriarchate

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.

 

 

 

The Attempted Reign of the Crazy Converts

 

I first heard the term ‘crazy convert’ in the USA, specifically from California, in the 1970s. Apparently it was a disease there even then. In 2006 in San Francisco a priest explained to me that there is an American saying that: ‘When God made America, he tipped it up on the east coast, so all the oddballs would run down to California’. That is an American saying about a minority, but it certainly prepared me for what happened later.

We live in the age of reaction to all that is woke. As a result, we in the Orthodox Church are often mistakenly contacted by young men who are anti-woke. Not just anti-woke, but usually from a Protestant fundamentalist background, extremely conservative (sometimes Fascistic and in love with guns), anti-vaxxer, often racist and followers of some guru, often through podcasts, if they are not themselves gurus. Some of them suffer from what has become known as ‘the Jerusalem Syndrome’, the convert syndrome which leads them into phariseeism and judgementalism. Only sectarianism and schisms attract them and they demand to be rebaptised, sometimes more than once.

This small minority are usually ‘incels’. This new word ‘incel’ means an ‘involuntary celibate’. This is not true, since, as they are usually anti-woman, it is not involuntary at all. They are also often homophobic, though they themselves can be repressed homosexuals or even pedophiles, which is why they are so misogynistic. Such young men may also suffer from the beard syndrome. It is all very well to have a long beard, but if you are not under monastic obedience, you are not a monk. Married men do not have long beards, it displeases their wives, if it is a happy marriage. And married men who love their wives should please their wives, just as their wives who love their husbands should please them.

In other words, the above are not theological converts, like the apostles, but are psychological, and even pathological, converts, who suffer from the temper tantrums of spoilt brats, demanding absolute obedience and showing intolerance and the censorious and punitive spirit of the narrow neophyte. On top of this, they lack any emotional intelligence and basic knowledge, especially of theology and history, but also of different languages and cultures (though all must obey them in everything). They are young and inexperienced, refuse to listen to advice (as they are always right, why should they?) and demonstrate all the arrogance of infallible and narcissistic popes who give no pastoral care.

In love with their vain selves, they love money and their own appearance. These are the crazy converts and they are being put into positions of ‘authority’, as never before, even though they have no authority at all and only discredit themselves and their string-pullers. The results are desperately sad – for them. The rest of the Church, the 99.9% sails serenely on, leaving them behind on their self-made desert islands.

The Tragedy of the Russian Emigration: The Land of Lost Opportunity

Since the reunion or reconciliation of the Russian emigration and the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) in recent years, many voices, both in Russia and also abroad, have asked: ‘Why continue a separate existence? Since the fall of the USSR, the 100-year old Russian emigration has no more reason to exist separately, it is an anachronism, it should fully integrate the MP’. The answers given by Russian emigration bishops said: ‘But we are distinctive. They wear black vestments during Lent, we wear violet; they wear red vestments for Easter, we wear white; after our bishops wash their hands before the Great Entrance, they shake the drops of water onto the people, MP bishops do not’. Other self-justifying and equally minor ritual variations were also quoted, most of the emigration variations wrong anyway! Some readers may think we are inventing these absurd justifications for separation. We are not. We can quote times, places and names.

We always took another line. That the Russian emigration could and should continue its distinctive traditions. Not the ritual ones, but the real ones:

  1. Instead of behaving like pre-Revolutionary (carriages with black horses) Soviet (luxury black Chayka and Zil cars) and post-Soviet (black Mercedes or SUVs) bishops and living in palaces in the lap of luxury, all emigration bishops could have continued to live humbly and modestly like the émigré bishops who had dominated the Russian emigration until about the Year 2000 when they died out, their model being St John of Shanghai. Instead: Often a purely voluntary imitation of the worst Soviet-style examples.
  2. Instead of having churches like railway stations, people going in and out just to light candles, giving the impression that few are praying, the Russian emigration could have continued as it used until about 2000, with real parishes, parishes as communities, where people knew one another and helped one another. Instead: Generally, an imitation in order to take more money for effeminate luxury and gain more power and impunity.
  3. Instead of doing whatever the post-Soviet State told it to do, the Russian emigration could have continued with politically independent views on issues such as the martyred Tsar and those close to him, the two 1917 Revolutions, the New Martyrs, the Soviet Union and, more recently, the Ukraine. Instead: Generally, political dependence, sounding brass and lack of Love.
  4. Instead of pursuing a policy of Russian nationalism, the Russian emigration could have continued with its old internationalism and multilingualism, actively helping to create and contribute to new Local Churches in all the Diasporas where it used to operate and so opening new parishes, boldly defying the MP wherever there were issues of principle. Instead: Fear and trembling.

As self-governing, virtually autocephalous parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian emigration was in an excellent position to be independent. It could have used that independence fearlessly to co-operate with other Local Churches, not least in Northern America with the Russian-founded OCA, and to help set up new Local Churches elsewhere. They chose not to and rather to be frightened of Soviet-style reflexes, punitive effeminacy, and protocols of bureaucracy of the worst parts of the MP and indeed to imitate them! Nobody forced them to do this. One of the reasons for it was that so many people of faith left the Diaspora Church because they feared compromises of the faith. Sadly, they joined schismatic, old calendarist groups.

Their departure created an imbalance, giving an opportunity to careerists, in love with power, money and above all with themselves, to take over. Thus, they chose the suicidal path of being inward-looking, polemical, aggressive, bullying, moralistic, right-wing, sectarian and turning into isolated ghettos, with a love of power and money. Little wonder that most Russians refuse to attend their churches. The result is that the Russian emigration is imploding. New Local Churches will be formed largely without the Russian emigration. The train has left the station. You missed it.