He that is not with me is against Me; and
he
that gathereth not with Me scattereth.
Matthew 12.30.
The adoption of the new calendar by the State Church of Greece came at a very vulnerable time for the Orthodox Church as a whole. The outward position of the Church had changed radically in the previous ten years. The Russian empire was gone, and the Ecumenical and (especially) the Moscow patriarchates, to which the vast majority of Orthodox Christians belonged, were fighting both external foes (the Bolsheviks and the Turks) and internal schism (“the Living Church” and “the Turkish Orthodox Church”). Neither the remaining Eastern patriarchates, on the one hand, nor the Serbian patriarchate and the Russian Church Abroad, on the other, could take the place occupied by the Russian empire and the Ecumenical patriarchate in the preceding centuries. If, as was (temporarily) the case, none of the hierarchs of the Greek Church would refuse to accept the calendar change and break communion with the Archbishop of Athens, there was only one force remaining that could take up the banner of truth – the people.
The position of the laity in the Orthodox Church has often been misunderstood. In Orthodoxy, the laity are neither the inert, impotent, blindly obedient mass of the Roman Catholics, nor the all-powerful, revolutionary horde of the Protestants. There are two vital functions which can only be performed by canonically consecrated clergy: the administration of the sacraments, including the ordination of bishops and priests, and the definition of the faith, including the position of the Church in relation to heretics and schismatics. But while the laity cannot take the leading role in these two functions, they do have an important confirmatory role in them. Thus strictly speaking a bishop or priest cannot celebrate the Divine Liturgy without the presence of at least one layman. Likewise a bishop cannot ordain a priest without the consent of the people (expressed by shouting “axios!” or “he is worthy!”). And a definition of the faith that is rejected by the people will remain a dead letter.
Thus
we read: “I shall judge the bishop and the layperson. The sheep are rational
and not irrational, so that no layman may ever say: ‘I am a sheep, and not a
shepherd, and I give no account of myself, but the shepherd shall see to it,
and he alone shall pay the penalty for me.’ For even as the sheep that follows
not the good shepherd shall fall to the wolves unto its own destruction, so too
it is evident that the sheep that follows the evil shepherd shall acquire
death; for he shall utterly devour it. Therefore it is required that we flee
from destructive shepherds.”[1]
In
the long, over 1000-year struggle with the western heresies, the Orthodox
people had never found themselves so bereft of clerical leadership as in 1924.
The signing of the uniate council of Lyons in 1274 and the deposition of the
true patriarch Arsenius the next year had been largely the work of the emperor
and his stooge, John Beccus; and there were many clergy who resisted the Unia,
which in any case lasted only eight years (to 1282). The position after the
council of Florence was more serious: St. Mark of Ephesus was the only Greek
hierarch who refused to sign the Unia. And it lasted for a longer period of
time (1438-80).
There
followed a long period in which, although there were some latinizing (and
protestantizing) patriarchs, the Church as a whole remained united against the
western peril. Thus when the new calendar was introduced by the Pope in 1582 in
order to create divisions among the Orthodox, it was synodically condemned no
less than eight times: in 1583, 1587, 1593, 1722, 1827, 1848, 1895 and 1904.
Towards the end of this period ecumenist tendencies began to increase in the
Orthodox Churches, but opposition to the new calendar remained strong.
However,
already in their encyclical of 1848, the Eastern Patriarchs had hinted at the
role the people would have to play independently of the clergy: “With us
neither Patriarchs nor Councils could ever introduce anything new, because the
defender of religion is the very body of the Church, or the people itself, who
wanted their religion to remain forever unchanged and in accord with the religion
of their Fathers.”
The
question that arose in 1924 was: did the people (and a handful of clergy) have
the right to separate themselves from all the bishops and, in the absence of
any hierarchs to support them in their struggle against innovation, declare
themselves to be the truly Orthodox Church? The answer supplied by the Holy
Tradition of the Church was a clear: yes. While certain functions that can only
be performed by bishops, such as the ordination of priests, are temporarily
suspended in such a situation, the Church does not cease to exist, and remains
there, and only there, where the True Faith is confessed.
For
“where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst
of them”, said the Bishop of bishops, the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew
18.20). And the 15th canon of the First-and-Second Council of
Constantinople praises those who break with a heretical bishop even before the
passing of a synodical decision against him. Indeed, there are several cases in
the Church’s history of holy men either breaking immediately in this way with
heretical bishops – St. Hypatius in the fourth century, for example; or dying
out of communion with all the bishops of the Church and yet being praised and
glorified by succeeding generations – St. Maximus the Confessor in the seventh
century, for example, and St. Arsenius of Paros in the nineteenth.
The
calendar change in the State Church of Greece took place on March 10, 1924
(March 23, according to the new calendar, which we shall cite from now on). On
that day, which was a Sunday, the future hierarch-confessor of the True
Orthodox Church, Archimandrite Germanus (Varykopoulos) was serving the Divine
Liturgy in his church of St. Alexander in Palaion Faliron. Having come to the
end of the Liturgy, he commemorated “the holy 13 days whose memory we
celebrate!”[2]
On
March 25, 1924, two important events took place simultaneously in Athens. The
great feast of the Annunciation was celebrated according to the new calendar by
Archbishop Chrysostom (Papadopoulos). And the Greek monarchy was abrogated
(without a vote) by the revolutionary government.
As
the journalist Nicholas Kraniotakis wrote: “Under strict orders, and to the
sound of trumpets, the soldiers detached the Crown from the Cross and threw it
to the ground! And Greek democracy was born!..”[3]
This
is another indication of the close spiritual link between events in Greece and
in Russia in those years. In both, anti-monarchism in politics was joined to
renovationism in religion.
In
Greece since 1917 the anti-monarchists and renovationists had been led by
Venizelos in the State and Metaxakis in the Church – Freemasons both.[4]
Their leading opponents on both accounts were Metropolitans Germanos of
Demetriades and Chrysostomos of Florina – the first metropolitans of the True
Orthodox Church of Greece from 1935.
On
April 6, the eve of the true feast of the Annunciation, a vast crowd gathered in
the courtyard outside the Annunciation cathedral. The next day the newspaper Vradini
reported: “The priests have been forbidden, under pain of defrocking, to
liturgise or chant the troparia of the Annunciation today. Also forbidden is
the ringing of the bells of the Russian cathedral (of the Philhellenes), and
today’s celebration of the Liturgy at the metochion of the Holy Sepulchre,
although the Patriarchate of Jerusalem has not accepted the new calendar.
“In
spite of all the measures that had been taken, multitudes of the faithful
inundated the metropolitan cathedral from the afternoon to late at night, and
at their persistent entreaty one priest was found who chanted a paraklesis,
being ‘obedient,’ as he said, ‘to the threats of the people’. The wardens
wanted to close the church, but in view of the fanaticism of the worshippers
the cathedral remained open into the night. Three miracles took place at the
metropolitan cathedral.. Seven-year-old Stasinopoulos, a deaf-mute and
paralytic since birth, was brought by his mother to the icon of the Mother of
God, convulsed by spasms. A little while later he arose amidst general
compunction, pronounced the words “mama-granny-papa” and began to walk.
“A
little later a seventeen-year-old paralytic was healed, and.. a hard-working
deaf-mute. The latter spoke yesterday for the first time in thirty years,
declaring that he would not go to work today. Although the cathedral wardens
know the names of these two, they refuse to publish them, affirming that no
miracle has taken place, although the contrary is confessed by the whole
congregation.”[5]
Another
newspaper, Skrip, reported on the same day: “Movement inside the
cathedral was impossible. The faithful listened to the vespers, and after the
dismissal anxiously discussed the change in the worshipping calendar and the
transfer of the feast of the Annunciation.
“Two
thousand pious Christians, together with women and children, unanimously
proclaimed their adherence to the holy dogmas of religion, which the democrats have
come to change, and one voice was heard: ‘We will not become Franks! We are
Orthodox Christians, and we will remain Orthodox Christians!’”[6]
Similar
scenes, and similar miracles, took place in other regional centres, such as
Nauplion, Tripolis, Thessalonica and Corinth. The secular authorities
everywhere supported the new ecclesiastical regime.
The
resistance of the people in this first phase of the struggle was greatly helped
by the very pious and traditionalist refugees from Anatolia, such as the great
wonderworking priest Arsenius of Cappadocia.[7]
The
faithful Christians, obeying the teachings of the holy Fathers and imitating
the Christians of old who in similar situations broke communion with the
innovators, themselves broke off all ecclesiastical communion with the
innovating Church of Greece. They prayed at home or in country chapels, served
by a very small number of priests who were continually persecuted by the police
at the instigation of Chrysostom Papadopoulos.
From
the beginning the Lord showed by many signs and wonders that He was with the
adherents of the Orthodox Calendar. Thus a miracle took place on January 6,
1925 – that is, the eve of the feast of the Nativity of Christ according to the
Orthodox Calendar and the feast of the Theophany according to the new. The
parishioners of the new calendar church of the Holy Apostles in Acropolis were
following the Divine Liturgy. Suddenly they saw that tears were flowing from
the eyes of the icon of the Mother of God, and blood from the heads of the
Apostles.
The
amazed parishioners were not slow to see in this a sign of God’s anger at “the
change in religion”, that they were baptizing Christ when He had not yet been
born. The church authorities sent an archimandrite to convince the people that
it was no sign from God but “an effluence from the wood, which is fir and is
acted upon by excessive heat or also by… cold”! The archimandrite was laughed
off the ambon. Finally, the authorities closed the church, preventing
worshippers from entering. Today the church is denuded of icons and visited
only by… tourists![8]
A
critical turning-point in the history of the Greek Old Calendarist Church was
the appearance of the sign of the Cross in the sky over an old calendarist
monastery near Athens, which greatly encouraged the people in their faith that
God was with them in the struggle against the innovators.
Bishop
Lazarus (Puhalo) writes: “In 1925, on the eve of the Exaltation of the
All-Honourable and Life-giving Cross of our Saviour, September 14 according to
the Orthodox Church calendar [27 according to the new], the all-night vigil was
served in the church of St. John the Theologian in suburban Athens. By 9
o’clock that evening, more than 2000 true Orthodox faithful had gathered in and
around the church for the service, since very few true Orthodox churches had
been accidentally left open by the civil authorities. Such a large gathering of
people could not, however, go unnoticed by the authorities. Around eleven p.m.
the authorities despatched a battalion of police to the church ‘to prevent any
disorders which might arise from such a large gathering.’ The gathering was too
large for the police to take any direct action or to arrest the priest at that
time and so they mingled with the crowd of worshippers in the already
over-flowing courtyard of the church.
“Then,
regardless of the true motives for their presence, against their own will, but
according to the Will which exceeds all human power, they became participants
in the miraculous experience of the crowd of believers.
“At
11.30 there began to appear in the heavens above the church, in the direction
of the North-East, a bright, radiant Cross of light. The light not only
illuminated the church and the faithful but, in its rays, the stars of the
clear, cloudless sky became dim and the church-yard was filled with an almost
tangible light. The form of the Cross itself was an especially dense light and
it could be clearly seen as a Byzantine cross with an angular cross bar towards
the bottom. This heavenly miracle lasted for half an hour, until midnight, and
then the Cross began slowly to raise up vertically, as the cross in the hands
of the priests does in the ceremony of the Exaltation of the Cross in church.
Having come straight up, the Cross began gradually to fade away.
“Human
language is not adequate to convey what took place during the apparition. The
entire crowd fell prostrate upon the ground with tears and began to sing hymns,
praising the Lord with one heart and one mouth. The police were among those who
wept, suddenly discovering, in the depths of their hearts, a childlike faith.
The crowd of believers and battalion of police were transformed into one,
unified flock of faithful. All were seized with a holy ecstasy.
“The
vigil continued until four a.m., when all this human torrent streamed back into
the city, carrying the news of the miracle because of which they were still
trembling and weeping.
“Many
of the unbelievers, sophists and renovationists, realizing their sin and guilt,
but unwilling to repent, tried by every means to explain away or deny this
miracle. The fact that the form of the cross had been so sharply and clearly
that of the Byzantine Cross (sometimes called the Russian Cross), with three
cross-bars, the bottom one at an angle, completely negated any arguments of
accidental physical phenomena.
“The fact that such an apparition of the cross also occurred during the height of the first great heresy [Arianism – the reference is to the appearance of the sign of the Cross over Jerusalem in 351] must strike the Orthodox with an especial sense of the magnitude of the calendar question and of all that is connected with it. No sensible person can discuss this question lightly, with secular reasoning or with worldly arguments. Renovationists, like the Arians in 351, are left without extenuation or mitigation.”[9]
On
hearing of the miracle of the sign of the cross, the new calendarist bishops
issued the following statement: “What
appeared before the old calendarists, if it really
appeared, was God’s testimony that they are in great prelest. The sign
was telling them: ‘Oh, the unreasonable ones, do not you know that the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross passed? So many hundreds of
thousands of people agree on the fact that today is September 26,
and you are still thinking it is Septembar 13 and the eve of
Exaltation of the Holy Cross! Why, the unfaithful ones, do you
celebrate Exaltation of the Holy
Cross on the 27th, when it is to be done on September 14?’ So, that
is what this could mean, if there was any appearance at all.”[10]
In
other countries, too, the introduction of the new calendar was encountering
resistance – more often from the people than from the bishops. The Russian
people had already rejected the sly attempts of the Bolsheviks to introduce the
new calendar the previous year. And Russian monks continued for several decades
to struggle against the new calendar in the monastery of Valaam, which until
the Second World War was in Finland and therefore in the jurisdiction of the
Ecumenical Patriarchate.
“On
September 25, 1925,” writes Schema-Monk Nicholas of Valaam, “there was a
division of people in Valaam as to the ‘old’ and ‘new’ style. Many of the
brothers remained true to the old style. Legal proceedings began. The church
administration arrived; there was a court with Abbot Paulinus in charge. They
began to summon the brothers one by one, and many were expelled from the
monastery. Then my turn also came. I went into the room, and there sat Abbot
Paulinus with others from the church administration. Father Abbot said, ‘Here
is a slave of God; ask him.’ One of them said that he would speak and that
everything should be recorded. They asked, ‘Do you accept Fr. Paulinus as
Abbot?’ ‘Will you go to church services according to the new calendar?’ I could
not answer this question; it was as if my tongue had become paralysed. They
hesitated and said, ‘Well, why aren’t you answering?’ I couldn’t say anything.
Then they said: ‘Well, go on, slave of God, and think this over.’
“I
began to pray to the Mother of God, my ‘Surety’, in my heart. ‘Tell me and
indicate my life’s path: Which side should I go to, the new or old style? Should
I go to the cathedral or somewhere else?’ And I, the sinful one, prayed to the
Mother of God during my obedience in the kitchen. When I finished my evening
obedience, I went to my cell and thought in the simplicity of my heart, ‘Why
don’t you answer me, Mother of God?’ But the grace of God did not abandon me, a
sinner. He wants salvation for all. Suddenly the cathedral appeared before me,
the same as it is: the same height, length and width. I was amazed at this
miraculous apparition – how could it enter my small cell? But my inner voice
said to me: ‘Everything is possible with God. There is nothing impossible for
Him.’ ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘one must go to church in the cathedral according to
the new style.’ Then, as I was thinking thus, a blue curtain came down from
above, in the middle of which was a golden cross. The cathedral became
invisible to me, and the inner voice said to me: ‘Go to the old style and hold
to it.’ And I heard a woman’s voice coming from above the corner: ‘If you want
to be saved, hold fast to the traditions of the Holy Apostles and the Holy
Fathers.’ And then the same thing was repeated a second time, and the third
time the voice said: ‘If you want to be saved, keep fast to the tradition of
the Holy Apostles and Holy Fathers, but not these “wise” men.’ After this
miracle, everything disappeared and I remained alone in my cell. My heart began
to rejoice that the Lord had indicated the path of salvation to me, according
to the prayers of the Mother of God.”[11]
Especially
heroic was the struggle of the Old Calendarists in Romania, where the new
calendar was introduced in the same year as in Greece, October 1, 1924 becoming
October 14. In reward for this, on February 4, 1925, the Romanian Church was
proclaimed a patriarchate by Constantinople. And on November 1, Metropolitan
Miron (Cristea), a former uniate, was enthroned as new calendar patriarch of
Romania.
Resistance
to the reform was particularly strong in Bessarabia, where, as we have seen,
there had already been strong resistance to the union of Bessarabia with
Romania and the removal of Church Slavonic from the churches. “The
patriotically minded Bessarabian population,” writes Glazkov, “who took a very
cautious attitude to any attempt by the Bessarabian authorities to liquidate
the national particularities of the Moldavian people, met the reform with
protests. ‘The Union of Orthodox Christians’ immediately condemned Metropolitan
Gurias, who carried out the decision of the Synod, and began an active campaign
against the new calendar style by publishing apologetic literature and
conducting popular meetings and processions. Some of the Bessarabian priests
who considered the reform of the calendar to be uncanonical supported the
protests of the laity and rejected the Gregorian calendar. Around the churches
where the Church Slavonic language and the Julian calendar were preserved (for
example, the church of the Alexander Nevsky brotherhood), there gathered
priests and laity. Thus in April, 1926 thousands of believers gathered at the
church of St. Panteleimon in Kishinev for a pannikhida for Tsar-Martyr Nicholas
II. Some priests openly celebrated all the feasts according to the old style in
front of a large number of believers, which was defined by the authorities as
rebellion, for many lay Old Calendarists were subjected to direct humiliations
by the new style clergy. There was an attempt to build, in Kishinev, a church
in direct submission to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who had remained faithful
to the old style. According to the police, the majority of the population
resisted the ecclesiastical reform, only individual parishes passed over to the
Gregorian calendar. It is noteworthy that if, at the beginning, the civil
authorities were quite conciliatory towards the Old Calendarists, allowing them
to celebrate Pascha and other Church feasts according to the old and new
styles, the official Romanian Church authorities took upon themselves
police-fiscal functions in exposing and repressing them…”[12]
In
Bessarabia, or former Russian Moldavia, the leadership of the movement against
the new style had been taken up by the white clergy and the city
intelligentsia. In inner Moldavia, however, the leadership was taken up by the
monks. The only bishop to oppose the reform was Bishop Gerasimus. He was told
that if could not accept the new style, he should leave the country. So he left
and went to live in Paris.
Out
of the 14,000 parish priests, almost none stood up against the calendar reform.
The only exception to this, as Metropolitan Blaise, the present chief-hierarch
of the True Orthodox Church of Romania, writes, was “Archimandrite Galacteon
(Kordun), who at that time was serving as parish priest in the metropolitan
cathedral in Bucharest and who used to preach there when there was no bishop.
“…
Fr. Galacteon, who later became our first metropolitan, fought against the
reform, but was unable to do anything, since he was only an archimandrite. He
was very capable, and had studied in Petersburg with the future Patriarchs
Alexis of Moscow and Cyril of Bulgaria, graduating with the degree of doctor of
theology. Later, in 1935, he was consecrated to the episcopate – they thought
he had changed his views. Three bishops who had been consecrated before the
change of calendar participated in the consecration, so [apostolic] succession
was not broken…
“This
is what happened, for example, in Neamt monastery, where St. Paisius
Velichkovsky was once the abbot. When the reform took place there were about
2000 monks in the monastery, 800 of whom were clergy. This was the biggest
monastery in Romania. It was here that the strongest movement against the new
style arose. Two months before the reform the abbot warned the brotherhood: be
careful, reforms are coming, do not accept them. This was as it were a prophecy.
But out of the 800 hieromonks only 30 (not counting the monks) were against the
reform; and of these 30 only 6 stood out openly in opposition – the rest did
not separate for material reasons. By a decree of the metropolitan of Moldavia
all the clergy who did not accept the new style were threatened with
deposition, exile from the monastery and confiscation of their property – the
man would be outlawed. Then a small group of monks with the most devoted and
zealous priests left the monastery, and it is from this group that our Church
begins its history. Neamt monastery as a whole accepted the new style, later
they also renounced St. Paisius’ rule, for the keeping of which the monastery
was renowned. Our monastery of Slatioara, which is not far from Niamt, inherited
this rule and tradition.
“Here are the names of the
(clerical) inhabitants of the monastery who resisted all their lives: Hieromonk
Fr. Glycerius (later metropolitan), Hierodeacon David (the first abbot of the
monastery at Slatioara), Hieromonk Pambo, Fr. Baruch, Fr. Gimnasius, Fr.
Zosima, Fr. Gamaliel, Fr. Damascene, who died in the woods near the monastery.
We also know the names of other monks of Neamt who resisted the new style.
There were also nuns: Mother Macaria, who was the helper of the abbess of the
biggest women’s monastery in the country, St. Agapia’s, which became new
calendarist (it now has 450 nuns), and who with her nuns founded the first
women’s monastery in our Church.
“The
small groups of clergy and monastics of these men’s and women’s monasteries –
the purest, who had God in their hearts and not their property, rejected the
reforms and were driven out of the monasteries – had to live in the world. The
pious laity who supported them became like bees constructing hives, the churches,
while these clerics were like queen-bees. That was how our Church came into
being.”[13]
“Two
months before the calendar change,” writes Metropolitan Blaise in another
place, “something very momentous happened in the great Church of the Neamt
Monastery. It was on the Eve of the Dormition of the Mother of God. The
Ecclesiarch went to the Church to prepare all that was needed and to light the
candles and kandelia for the Midnight Service. The weather was calm,
with clear skies and numerous stars; no cloud was in sight. Suddenly, a great
bolt of lightning cme down from the heavens and, passing through a window in
the dome of the Church, struck in front of the Miracle-working Icon of the
Mother of God. It hit the stone floor, and a section of stone collapsed; from
the impact, the candlestand that was affixed to this slab in front of the Icon
was knocked over.[14]
When the Fathers and Brothers came to Church, the Priest who was serving told
them what had happened; seeing the damage done by the lightning strike, they
all concluded that it was a Divine sign.
“Here
is another incident. When Father Glycherie reached the Coroi Ravine, a
spiritual uneasiness overcame him. One night, after lengthy prayer, he was
beset by heavy thoughts. ‘How is it possible,’ he said, ‘that in our country
many Priests with advanced theological training, together with a large number
of intellectuals, are leaving the Old Calendar, as it was bequeathed to the
people by the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, who have honored it from
times of old? Should I not abandon the Old Calendar and be one of these? Am I
making a mistake before God by not changing?’ Late in the night, he had a
beautiful vision: from the West, a dark cloud appeared; it tried to cover the
whole world and was moving furiously towards the East, howling like a monster.
In front of the cloud, a powerful storm formed, adorned with a chain as black
as tar, on which black Crosses appeared. Everyone was frightened. But looking
towards the East, he saw a snow-white cloud, glittering like gold; before it
was a chain of gold, from which there were hanging Crosses of gold.
“A
choir of Hierarchs also appeared – all with golden vestments, – walking towards
the black cloud. In a designated place, the two clouds collided and the dark
cloud fell; and in its place, a sea of water appeared, engulfing the earth…”[15]
Metropolitan Cyprian writes: “The
Romanian Patriarchate, both in 1926 and 1929, celebrated Pascha with the
Latins, constituting an infringement of the Orthodox tradition of centuries.
Indeed, on the second occasion that this was done, Patriarch Miron, having the
undivided support of the Uniate (Greek-Catholic) prime minister, Julius Maniu,
and several others among the clergy, compelled all of the Romanian Metropolises
to proceed with the common celebration of Pascha with the Papists, a fact which
evoked great commotion in the ranks of the Romanian Church. Metropolitan Gurias
of Bessarabia openly criticized Miron and, ignoring the Patriarchal decree,
ordered his churches to celebrate with the other autocephalous Orthodox
Churches (i.e. with the entire Orthodox world, with the exception of the
innovative Church of Finland). Patriarch Miron’s action also scandalized these
other Orthodox Churches, many of which reacted in protest. As well, the White
Russian clergy of Bucharest took a particularly strong position during those
trying days, ignoring the Patriarchal order and celebrating Pascha in
accordance with the traditional canonical decrees.
“The
uncanonical and un-Orthodox celebration of Pascha with the Latins deeply
grieved the reverent Romanians, many of whom returned to the Old Calendar.
Among them were three Hieromonks, as well as two Romanian Priest-monks who had
returned to Romania from Mt. Athos. Hieromonk Glycerius, who had taken a
leading position in the Old Calendar movement from the beginning, began to
build churches in the vicinity of Neamt Monastery. The first was established in
the village of Vanatori. By 1936 he had built about forty large churches, the
majority of them in Moldavia.”[16]
The
Romanian monks on Mount Athos fully supported their Old Calendarist
fellow-countrymen in the homeland. Thus in 1930, “there arrived in the
Moldavian skete [of the Forerunner] from Romania one of the skete’s hieromonks,
Simeon, a fifty-year-old who had been sent by Patriarch Miron to propagandise
the new style on Athos. He brought with him a lot of money… from Romania. He
also brought with him from Romania a lawyer, who was armed with an agreement
obtained in Athens to conduct negotiations over the return of the metochion on
the island of Tasso. The skete-dwellers received him with honour. They promised
to gather the brotherhood and speak to them in the church about accepting the
new style. But they prepared a trap for him. They summoned him to the hall, cut
off his beard and pigtail, took the money sent for propaganda, put a jacket and
hat on him and drove him out.. He appealed to the police in Karyes [the capital
of Athos] for help, but they replied that this did not come within the compass
of their responsibilities. This was the end of the propaganda for the new style
on Athos. This was already the Romanians’ second piece of trickery. The first
time they had received a letter from the patriarch suggesting that they change
to the new style. The skete-dwellers, on receiving this letter, served a
triumphant all-night vigil, and, on the next day, a liturgy with a moleben,
after which they pronounced an anathema on the patriarch, composing an official
document which they sent on to him.”[17]
In
1925 Metropolitan Anastasy of Kishinev wrote to Protopriest Vladimir Polyakov
saying that he still considered himself head of the Bessarabian Church and was
waiting for the opportunity to return there. In 1930 he concelebrated with Fr.
Glycerius in Jerusalem…[18]
The
centre of the struggle against the new calendar was Mount Athos. In 1924, all
the monasteries with the exception of Vatopedi had stopped commemorating the
Ecumenical Patriarch. On Great Thursday, 1926, 450 hieromonks and monks on
Mount Athos led by the Romanian Fr. Arsenius Kotteas signed “The Sacred League
of the Zealot Monks” for the defence of Orthodoxy against the new calendar. In
the same year the League published its Constitutional Charter under the heading
“The Anchor of Orthodoxy” until it was banned by a new Charter for Mount Athos
ratified by the Greek government in 1927. This did not stop the zealot monks,
however, who initiated a vigorous campaign against the new calendar throughout
Greece. This led to the expulsion of nineteen zealots from the sketes of
Vatopedi and Koutloumousiou in 1927. Some were allowed to circulate freely
through Greece, while others were confined to a monastery in Mytilene on the
island of Lesbos.
In 1926 the “Association of the Orthodox” in Athens was replaced by the “Greek Religious Community of the True Orthodox Christians”. This Community now joined with the Athonite Sacred League to work for the return of the Orthodox Calendar. In 1926, Hieromonk Matthew (Karpadakis), the confessor of three of the Athonite monasteries, went to Athens to help the True Orthodox there, and in 1929 the Sacred League sent two more hieromonks.[19]
In 1927 a patriarchal committee succeeded in negotiating a compromise that was accepted under pressure by all the monasteries but not by all the monks. The committee assured the Athonites that the calendar reform was not final in that it had not been accepted by all the Orthodox Churches. Moreover, the issue was to be reconsidered at an impending Pan-Orthodox Council that would resolve the matter. In this way, the committee persuaded the Athonites to continue following the Old Calendar while commemorating the Ecumenical Patriarch, pending the resolution of the question by a Pan-Orthodox Council.
The
compromise was accepted by all the Athonite monasteries, but only partially by
Esphigmenou, which did not resume the commemoration of the Patriarch but did
continue to receive his representatives and to commune with other monasteries
that commemorated him. Moreover, they continued to concelebrate at the
cathedral of the Protatou in Karyes, where the Patriarch was commemorated.[20]
However,
many of the monks refused to accept the compromise – which turned out to be a
deception in that the new calendar was not abolished by any Pan-Orthodox
Council. The spirit of these zealot monks is well caught in the following
excerpt from the life of the zealot monk Habbakuk “the barefoot”: “After the
adoption of the new calendar, a large number of Athonite Fathers decided to
stop commemorating their bishop, who was subject to the Patriarch, and to break
communion with the latter and with every church that accepted the innovation of
the new calendar or even continued to be in communion with the innovators. But
the majority of the monks did not dare to subscribe to this decision; whence
the schism which continues to this day and whose effects are felt more and more
acutely. At the beginning, twenty-four monks from the monastery of the Great
Lavra rebelled, among whom was the peaceable Habbakuk.
“The
quarrel was so intense that shouting could be heard even in the courtyard of
the monastery. For a place in which a tranquil calm had reigned only shortly
before, it was a harsh trial that suddenly flared up. Father Habbakuk shut
himself in his cell. Prayer-rope in his hand, he prayed without ceasing that
God bring back peace to sorely tried Athos. The monks who were faithful to
Tradition continued, as before, to work in the monastery, but since they could
no longer accept the commemoration of the patriarch they were not in communion
of prayer with the other Fathers and celebrated separately, in a large chapel
which had been granted them. Soon Fr. Habbakuk was exiled for a certain period
to Vigla, to the cave of St. Athanasius. But very quickly the Fathers, seeing
how noble his cause was and how much they loved him, could not stand it any
longer and asked for his recall to the monastery. This time he was given the
service of nurse; he was attached to the great hospital which the Lavra had for
the numerous old or sick members of the community…
“However,
the evil one again lay in wait. Soon his position as an old calendarist brought
the elder a second exile to the cave of St. Athanasius. It was not long,
however, before the sick complained: the nurse who had replaced Fr. Habbakuk
did not have the strength to follow the routine of his predecessor in the very
testing service of helping the sick. For Fr. Habbakuk was known to have a very
strong constitution, he was the most dedicated worker of them all and never
felt tired. So the sick very quickly got him back through their supplications!
And one should have seen the enthusiasm with which the monks and the sick, who
all loved him, reserved for his return.
“At
the beginning of 1927 the community wanted to put an end, once and for all, to
the pitiless quarrel which would end by destroying the monastery. And to assure
them of a better success, they sent a written invitation to the governor,
asking him to come and preside over the synaxis of the elders which would
debate the question of the zealots faithful to the calendar of the Fathers for
the last time. At the suggestion of a brother doctor, Fr. Athanasius Kambanaou,
who was himself a zealot, they had elected Fr. Habbakuk to represent these
Fathers. All the elders were present with the governor in the chair.
“He
immediately asked Habbakuk: ‘Father, how do you explain your deserting a
community in the heart of which you had previously sown anarchy? And tell me:
why are you not in communion with the other Fathers?’ Fr. Habbakuk replied with
meekness and humility: ‘Has your Excellency the Governor read the holy canons
of the Rudder?’ ‘And what does the Rudder say, Father?’ asked the
other. Fr. Habbakuk replied promptly: ‘If you don’t know it, Sir, go and read
it first. Then you can come and judge us.’
“Judging
that this reply constituted a grave insult to authority, the synaxis
immediately exiled its author to the holy monastery of Xeropotamou. Poor
Habbakuk was driven out of his place of repentance for the third time.
“About
two months later, he was recalled from his exile. That day, which was March 9,
they even asked him to be present at an all-night vigil with the governor. And
in the morning, immediately after the service which had lasted all night, the
governor mounted his mule and hurried back in haste to Karyes. Then Fr.
Habbakuk, seeing an opportunity to make him hear the voice of reason, took the
animal by the halter and set off on the path with him. And as they were going
along he spoke to him as he knew how. He explained to him in a gentle way which
had its effect on the author why the Fathers of the Holy Mountain were opposed
to the change in the calendar, and he made him see how the ecclesiastical texts
formed a good basis and justification for such an opposition. Very soon the
governor was moved by the simplicity and childlike enthusiasm which Habbakuk
put in his words, as well as by his admirable mastery of Holy Scripture. And it
did not take him long to come to the conclusion that he was dealing with a
virtuous man who was in love with an ideal. So immediately he arrived at Karyes
he asked for the zealot to be returned without delay to his home monastery.
Some days later, the Great Lavra received Habbakuk into its bosom again.
“However,
his return did not take place without disappointment. Of the zealot fathers who
had been his companions in the struggle, almost all had fled, some of their own
free will and others constrained by force. And the few who remained had
hastened to rejoin the Catholicon. From then on, Fr. Habbakuk had no peace
until the day when, with one of the brothers who also loved the virtues, he
left the monastery…
“Thus
it was his love for the apostolic Tradition of the Church, a pure and
disinterested love which was proof against tribulations and penalties, that
always made him struggle to discern the will of God in everything. It was this
love that had merited him exile to Vigla. But he had his reward: for it was
also there, in the solitude of Vigla, that he was granted a multitude of
spiritual goods, goods which were clearly not earned without sweat and grief,
but which were great gifts for all that.
“… One day a monk whom he loved very much, Fr. Ephraim who was from the Great Lavra like himself, asked why he had become a zealot. He was given a reply full of a frank realism: ‘Because God will call me to account; he will say: “Habbakuk, you knew the law of the Church, how did you come to trample it underfoot?’ And he added that the new calendar was a ‘sacrifice of Cain’.”[21]
Led by the Athonite confessors, the
Old Calendarists continued to defy the innovators on the mainland and islands
of Greece.
On October 25, 1925, four nuns from the monastery of St. Pelagia on the island of Tinos were sent for trial before an ecclesiastical court for breaking communion with the new calendarists. The court decreed that they should be exiled, but they ignored this order and continued to carry out missionary work among the pilgrims who came to venerate the wonder-working icon of the Mother of God on Tinos. On April 14, 1926, three of them were sent for trial in Athens. During the trial, Bishop Sinesius of Thebes said to one of the nuns, Abbess Eupraxia, who was also his cousin: “If you do not repent and accept the decision of the Holy Synod concerning the calendar, I personally will take off your cassock.” “I grieve,” replied the abbess, “that kindred blood flows in our veins, and that you have broken your hierarchical oath. I will say just one thing to you: ‘I prefer to go to Paradise in coloured clothes but Orthodox, than to be in hell in my cassock but together with schismatics!’ Seven hierarchs under the presidency of Chrysostom Papadopoulos sentenced the nuns to be deprived of their monastic schema and excommunicated. Then the ten leading zealots in the monastery were expelled. But the rest continued the struggle.[22]
In
1926, in the village of Nicetas in Khalkidiki, the True Orthodox priest,
Archimandrite Hilarion Ouzounopoulos, was arrested and given three months in
prison in spite of the resistance of his parishioners. Fr. Hilarion was called
a “counter-revolutionary”. From this it is evident that the True Orthodox in
Greece shared not only their name and their faith but even the form of their
accusation with the True Orthodox of Russia.[23]
At
Christmas in the year 1926, Chrysostom Papadopoulos ordered the closing of the
True Orthodox church of St. Parasceva, Aiantios on the island of Salamis. So
the priest, Fr. Christopher Psillides, decided to celebrate the Divine Liturgy
outside, opposite the doors of the church, in spite of the December cold. The
ecclesiastical authorities on the island sent some sailors to the church to
seize the priest, but after arriving and surrounding the worshippers they
decided to disobey orders and go back.[24]
In
Thessalonica on the Sunday of the Samaritan woman, 1927, Fr. Stergius Liouras,
the married priest of the True Orthodox Church of the Three Hierarchs, was
arrested after the Liturgy on the orders of the new calendarist metropolitan.
In 1935 he was again seized on the order of the same metropolitan and beaten by
the police. He died a few days later.[25]
On
November 21, 1927, the local authorities moved to arrest the priest of the True
Church in Mandra, Attica. However, the parishioners formed a wall to defend
their pastor, and in the ensuing scuffle a young married woman, Catherine
Routti, was fatally wounded. She died on November 28, the first martyr of the
Old Calendarist movement in Greece.[26]
On
the Sunday of Orthodoxy, 1928, on the orders of Chrysostom Papadopoulos, police
came to seize the priest of the True Orthodox church of St. Marina, Liopesi,
Attica. The priest escaped, but several parishioners were taken to Koropi
prison.[27]
On
April 22, 1928, Hieromonk Arsenius Sakellarios was taken to Lamia police
station. Then the local new calendarist metropolitan put him on public trial,
at which he was officially defrocked and the hair of his beard and head cut
off. Then he was released.[28]
On
April 7, 1929, the Annunciation Liturgy at the True Orthodox church of the
Annunciation, Kertezi, Kalavryta, was forbidden by the police because the
priest did not have the permission of the local new calendarist metropolitan.
The church was besieged, and the chief of police on horseback threatened to
shoot the whole congregation. But the people refused to hand over their priest,
saying, “We’ll all die with him”. The policeman took out his revolver, but the
people stood firm. Eventually he had to give in.[29]
In
1929, on the feast of St. George according to the new calendar, Fr. Nicholas,
the new calendarist priest of the church of the Forerunner, Mesoropi, Pangaion
was struck by the incongruity of celebrating the feast of St. George during the
period of the Great Fast (something that never happens according to the
Orthodox Calendar). He went to his local bishop and asked him for permission to
celebrate the feast of St. George according to the Orthodox Calendar. The
bishop gave permission. However, when Fr. Nicholas continued to celebrate
according to the old calendar, a persecution was stirred up against him. And as
he felt the approach of death, he told his parishioners: “When I die and they
stop you from burying me in the cemetery, bury me in my garden. But if they
come and take my body away by force, I adjure you not to follow my funeral
procession!”
The
new calendarists set the date of Fr. Nicholas’ trial for November, but he died
on October 19. The new calendarists came to bury him, but his widow refused to
hand over his body. Then the new calendarist bishop came to the town, and sent
a priest to the widow. He, too, was rebuffed.
Then
the True Orthodox laypeople began to bury their pastor in his garden, as he had
ordered. But then the bishop came with police and forbade the burial, ordering
the police to seize the body. The parishioners at first resisted, but then, not
wanting bloodshed, they kissed the body, threw some earth on it and then allowed
it to be taken away.[30]
While
the Greek confessors were suffering in this way, the Eastern Patriarchs were
one by one entering into communion with Metropolitan Sergius in Russia.
Sergius’ church organisation was legalised by the authorities in August, 1927,
after which first Patriarch Damian of Jerusalem, then Patriarch Gregory of
Antioch and then, in December, Patriarch Basil III of Constantinople wrote to
Sergius recognising him – although Basil did not immediately break relations
with the renovationists.[31]
Thus did the traitors of Orthodoxy in the Greek- and Russian-speaking Churches
join hands over the tortured minds and bodies of the True Orthodox Christians.
Although
the people with their few priests were essentially alone in openly opposing the
calendar change, there were still some who had not “bowed the knee to Baal” in
“the king’s palace” – the hierarchy headed by Chrysostom Papadopoulos.
Thus
Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias protested against the introduction of the
new calendar and held it in abeyance in his diocese until February 15, 1928.[32]
Again, “on July 2, 1929, in the presence of forty-four metropolitans,
Chrysostom suddenly demanded the immediate signature of the hierarchs present
to a report he had prepared approving the calendar change and condemning those
who stayed with the old. This satanic plan of Chrysostom’s was opposed by the
metropolitans of Kassandreia, Maronia, Ioannina, Druinopolis, Florina,
Demetrias, Samos and Khalkis. When the archbishop insisted, thirteen hierarchs
left, while of the fifty-one who remained twenty-seven against four signed
Chrysostom’s report.”[33]
Indeed, it was the hope that the State Church would eventually return to the Julian
Calendar, that persuaded those bishops who later joined the True Orthodox to
stay where they were for the time being.
Bishop
Ephraim writes that at a “Pre-Council” held at the monastery of Vatopedi on
Mount Athos in 1930, “the representatives of the Serbian and Polish Churches
(the Churches of Russia, Georgia, and Bulgaria were not represented at the
council; Russia and Georgia were not present because, at the time, they were
weathering the third wave of persecutions under Stalin, Bulgaria was not present
because the ‘Bulgarian schism’ was still in effect) asked for a separate
chapel. When the Greeks insisted that they all celebrate together the Slavs
refused, excusing themselves by saying that the language was different, as well
as the typicon, and that there would be confusion. The Greeks kept insisting
and the Slavs kept refusing, and in fact, to the end of the council, the two
did not concelebrate, and it became clear that the Slavs considered the
calendar issue important enough at the time to separate themselves from the
Greeks. When they said that their typicon was different, the calendar obviously
weighed heavily as a part of that difference…
“In
fact the Serbian Church even supported the Old Calendarist movement in Greece
by sending them Chrism across the border secretly.”[34]
During
this council Bishop Nicholas (Velimirovich) of Ochrid vehemently defended the
Orthodox Calendar, declaring that the 1923 Congress which approved the new
calendar had created a schism. “Does the present assembly,” he said, “have any
relation to the Pan-Orthodox Congress of Constantinople, from which the
anomalies known to us all proceeded? The Church of Serbia was stunned when she
saw the decisions of that Congress put into practice.”[35]
Again,
in 1929 the Russian Metropolitan Innocent of Peking wrote an open letter on the
calendar question in which he said: “In the Church of Christ there is nothing
of little value, nothing unimportant, for in every custom there is incarnate
the Spirit of God, by Whom the Church lives and breathes. Does not everyone who
dares to rise up against the customs and laws of the Church, which are based on
sacred Tradition and Scripture, rise up against the Spirit of God and thereby
show to all who have eyes to see of what spirit he is? Worthily and rightly
does the Holy Church consign such people to anathema.”[36]
But
these were foreign bishops; in Greece there was no bishop serving according to
the Julian calendar. However, the number of True Orthodox parishes in Greece
had multiplied (800 were founded in the years 1926-30 alone), and, helped by a
parliamentary decree of 1931 granting freedom of worship to the Old
Calendarists, the numbers of the faithful had swelled to over 200,000 by
October, 1934. Moreover, by that time it was becoming clear even to many new
calendarist hierarchs and theologians that the introduction of the new calendar
had been an unmitigated disaster.
The
disastrous consequences of the innovation have been summarized by Nicetas
Anagnostopoulos as follows: “The Greek Church infringed on the dogma of the
spiritual unity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, for which the
Divine Founder had prayed, because it separated itself in the simultaneous
celebration of the feasts and observance of the fasts from the other Orthodox
Churches and the Orthodox world, 8/10ths of which follows the Old Calendar (the
Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Holy Mountain, Russia, Serbia and others).
“In
Divine worship it has divided the pious Greek people into two worshipping
camps, and has divided families and introduced the simultaneous feasts of
Orthodox and heretics (Catholics, Protestants and others) as well as confusion
and disorder into the divine Orthodox Worship handed down by the Fathers.
“It
has transferred the immovable religious feasts and the great fasts, handed down
from ages past, of Christmas, the Mother of God and the Holy Apostles, reducing
the fast of the Apostles until it disappears when it coincides with the feast
of All Saints; and has removed the readings from the Gospel and Apostle from
the Sunday cycle.
“From
this it becomes evident that the Calendar is not an astronomical question, as
the innovators of the Church of Greece claim in their defence, but quite
clearly a religious question, given that it is indissolubly bound up with the
worshipping, and in general with the religious life of the Orthodox Christian.
“Through
the calendar innovation the new calendarist Church has transgressed, not only
the perennial Ecclesiastical Tradition of the Patristic and Orthodox Calendar,
and not only the above-mentioned Apostolic command [II Thessalonians
2.15; Galatians 1.8-9] and the decision of the Seventh Ecumenical
Council concerning the anathematisation of those who violate the Sacred
Tradition [“If anyone violates any ecclesiastical tradition, written or
unwritten, let him be anathema”], but also the decisions of the Pan-Orthodox
Patriarchal Councils of the years 1583, 1587 and 1593 under the Ecumenical
Patriarch Jeremiah II and of 1848 under the Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimus,
which condemned and anathematized the Gregorian calendar.
“It
has also transgressed the Sacred Canons which order the keeping and observance
of the Sacred Traditions, which are: a) the Third of the Council of Carthage,
b) the Twenty-First of the Council of Gangra, and c) the Ninety-First and
Ninety-Second of St. Basil the Great, as well as the Forty-Seventh canon of the
Council of Laodicea, which forbids the concelebration with heretics, which is
what the Latins and the Protestants are, and the First of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council concerning the steadfast observance of the complete array of
the divine Canons.”[37]
Nor
did the new calendarists lack direct warnings from the Heavenly Church that the
path they had embarked on was false.
One
such warning was given to the new calendarist Bishop Arsenius of Larissa on
December 12/25, 1934, the feast of St. Spirydon according to the Old Calendar,
but Christmas according to the new calendar.
“In
the morning the bishop went by car to celebrate the Liturgy in his holy church.
When he arrived there, he saw a humble, aged, gracious Bishop with a panagia
on his breast. Arsenius said to him: ‘Brother, come, let’s proclaim the joyful
letters of Christmas and then I will give you hospitality.’
“The
humble Bishop replied: ‘You must not proclaim those letters but mine, St.
Spirydon’s!’ Then Arsenius got angry and said: ‘I’m inviting you and you’re
despising me. Go away then.’
“Arsenius
went into the church, venerated the icons and sat in his throne. When the time
for the katavasias came, he sang the first katavasia, and then told the choir
to sing the second. Arsenius began to say the third, but suddenly felt anxious
and unwell. He motioned to the choir to continue and went into the altar, where
they asked him: ‘What’s the matter, master?’ He replied: ‘I don’t feel well.’
“When
Arsenius’ indisposition increased, they carried him to his house, where his
condition worsened, and the next day he died. He had been punished by God for
his impious disobedience to St. Spirydon. This miracle is known by the older
Orthodox faithful of Larissa.”[38]
During
this early period of the struggle against the new calendar, many people
sympathized with the True Orthodox but did not join them because they did not
yet have bishops. Others continued to worship according to the Orthodox
Calendar without openly breaking communion with the new calendarists. Among the
latter were two holy priests, Fr. Nicholas Planas of Athens and Fr. Jerome of
Aegina.
Fr. Nicholas was the priest who was
called to conduct a service of Holy Water to bless the “Society of the
Orthodox”, which effectively marked the beginning of the Old Calendarist
struggle. At that service he said: “Whatever has been done uncanonically cannot
stand – it will fall.” And he celebrated according to the Orthodox Calendar
until his death in 1932.
Once
“he wanted to serve according to the traditional Calendar on the feast of the
Prophet Elisseus [Elisha]. But since he feared that obstacles might arise, he
agreed with his assistant priest the night before to go and serve at Saint
Spyridon’s in Mantouka. In the morning his chantress went to Saint Spyridon’s
and waited for him. Time passed and it looked as though the priest was not
going to come to serve. She despaired. She supposed that something serious had
happened to him, and that was why he hadn’t come. She left and went to Prophet
Elisseus’ (because the ‘information center’ was there), to ask what had
happened to the priest, and there, she saw him in the church preparing to
celebrate the Liturgy! She chided him for breaking the agreement which they had
made, and asked furthermore why he was not afraid, but came there in the
center, right in the midst of the seething persecution. He said to her, ‘Don’t scold
me, because this morning I saw the Prophet and he told me to come here to serve
and not to fear anything, because he will watch over me.’ His helper was left
with her argument unfinished! ‘But, how did you see him?’ she asked him. He
told her, ‘I got up this morning and got ready for Saint Spyridon’s. I was
sitting in an armchair while they brought me a carriage. At that moment I saw
Prophet Elisseus before me, and he told me to go to his church to celebrate the
Liturgy!’…
“Another
example similar to that of Papa-Nicholas is that of the priestmonk Jerome of
Aegina, who followed the same path. Shortly after his ordination to the
priesthood, a year or so before the calendar change, Fr. Jerome ceased from
serving because of a vision that was granted him during the Liturgy. According
to some accounts this occurred within forty days of his ordination. He
continued to preach, however, at a hospital chapel where he lived, and which he
himself had built there on the island of Aegina. Although this chapel officially
was under the new calendar diocese of Aegina, Fr. Jerome always celebrated the
feast days according to the traditional ecclesiastical calendar… Although he
himself did not serve as a priest, nevertheless, because of his saintliness and
his popularity among the people and because of the obvious gifts of the Holy
Spirit which he possessed, he had great influence among the faithful who looked
to him for direction and guidance. This came to the ears of Procopius, the
Bishop of Hydra and Aegina. As a result, the bishop sent word to Fr. Jerome
that he was going to come and impose on him to concelebrate with him. Up to
this time, Fr. Jerome had sought to remain faithful to the Church’s tradition
and to his conscience without making an issue of it publicly or in street
demonstrations. He saw, however, that the bishop was determined to create an
issue now and force him into communion with him. As a result, Fr. Jerome sent
the bishop a short note and resigned from the diocese, saying among other
things: ‘I ask you to accept my resignation from the Hospital, because from
1924 and thence, my longing, as well as my zeal, has been for the Orthodox
Church and Faith. From my childhood I revered Her, and dedicated all my life to
Her, in obedience to the traditions of the Godbearing Fathers. I confess and
proclaim the calendar of the Fathers to be the correct one, even as You
Yourself acknowledge…’”[39]
An
especially active role in the struggle was played by Hieromonk Matthew
(Karpadakes), who in 1927, in response to a Divine vision, founded the women’s
Monastery of the Mother of God at Keratea, Attica, which soon became the
largest monastery in Greece.[40]
In
1934 he wrote: “For every Christian there is nothing more honourable in this
fleeting life than devout faith in the Master of all things, our Lord Jesus
Christ. For what else can save the soul from death, that is, from the
condemnation of eternal punishment, than this faultless Orthodox Christian
Faith of ours, about which the Lord speaks clearly, saying: ‘He who believes
and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned’ (Mark
16.16). This Faith was compared by the Lord to a valuable treasure which a man
found hidden in a field and to buy which he sold all his possessions (Matthew
13.13).
“Therefore
the blessed Apostle Jude exhorts everyone ‘to contend for the Faith which was
once for all delivered to the saints’ (Catholic epistle, v. 3). And the divine
Apostle made such an exhortation because there were appearing at that time men
of deceit, the vessels of Satan, guileful workers, who sow tares in the field
of the Lord, and who attempt to overturn the holy Faith in Christ. Concerning
the men of impiety and perdition, the holy Apostle went on to write: ‘For
admission has been secretly gained by some who long ago were designated for
this condemnation, ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into
licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.’ Because of
these innovators and despisers of the Faith in the Holy Church of God which has
been handed down to us, the Apostle of the Gentiles and Walker in heavenly
places Paul hurled a terrible anathema, saying: ‘If any one preaches to you a
gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed’ (Galatians
1.9).
“Therefore
our Lord in the Holy Gospel cries to all His faithful servants: ‘Beware of
false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are
ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits… Take heed that no one
leads you astray… And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.’ (Matthew
7.15,16, 24.4,11)
“Against
these innovating false-bishops and their followers the synodical decrees of the Church through the
Most Holy Patriarchs declare that ‘whoever has wished to add or take away one
iota – let him be seven times anathema’…
“Thus
with what great attention should every Orthodox Christian care for the valuable
treasures of the Faith, so as to keep it undefiled, as the divine Apostles and
Godbearing Fathers handed it down to us, and that he should struggle to
preserve the state which is fitting for Christians of penitence, the fear of
God, good works; for we live in an age in which, as the Evangelist John says,
so many antichrists have appeared. He writes: ‘Children, it is the last hour;
and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have
come; therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but
they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with
us.’ (I John 2.18-19)
“…
Those who govern the Church of Greece today have, together with the clergy who
follow them, persisted in error, kakodoxy, schism, the blasphemy against the
Holy Spirit, the heresy of the Papist calendar! And they have led the people into
error and become ‘heresiarch’ hierarchs according to the divine Fathers!
“…
What great wealth of the grace of God is brought into the soul of the Christian
by a little patience in afflictions! Although the holy martyrs, confessors and
righteous ones passed their lives in persecutions and afflictions, nevertheless
they endured and triumphed over this world which ‘lies in evil’ and found the
unfading glory of the Kingdom of the Heavens, because they hoped in the Lord.
Our Fathers hoped and were not ashamed, for the unlying mouth of our Lord and
God and Saviour Jesus Christ confirmed: ‘Behold, I am with you all the days of
your life until the end of the age.’ (Matthew 28.20) That is why the
Church of Christ, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, although furiously
persecuted by the Jews, the idolators, the pseudo-wise, the atheist heretics
and in general by the organs of the devil, emerged always victorious and
resplendent. ‘In truth nothing is stronger than the Church’; for Her Founder
and Head is the God Who became man for our sakes, He Who together with the
Father and the Holy Spirit is worshipped and glorified in heaven and on earth,
He Who is blessed to the ages. As every Christian can see, Orthodoxy is passing
through a terrible winter. Piety is persecuted, virtue is derided, Church
tradition is scorned. It is frightful that Shepherds of the Church should turn
into Her persecutors.
“St.
Basil the Great once wrote: ‘The one crime that is severely avenged is the
strict keeping of the patristic traditions… No white hair is venerable to the
judges of injustice, no pious asceticism, no state according to the Gospel from
youth to old age… To our grief we see our feasts upturned, our houses of prayer
closed, our altars of spiritual worship unused.’ All this has now come upon us.
Many and clearly to be seen by all are the great evils that the anticanonical
renovationists introduced into the menology and calendar of the Orthodox
Church. Schisms, divisions, the overthrow of good order and complete confusion,
violation of the most ancient laws of the Church, a great scandal for the
conscience of the faithful were the consequences, though anathemas on those who
violate ‘any ecclesiastical tradition, whether written or unwritten’ had been
sounded by the Holy Ecumenical Councils. On the basis of the apostolic maxim,
‘Obey those who have the rule over you and submit to them’ (Hebrews.
13.7), the Shepherds of the Church who support this anticanonical innovation
expect absolute obedience from the fullness of the Church. But how can the true
children of the Church obey those who at the same moment disobey the holy
Fathers, of whom the prophet says: ‘The Lord chose them to love them’, and do
not venerate the Church’s established order that has been handed down and
sanctified by the Holy Spirit, while the Lord says concerning them: ‘He who
hears you hears Me, and he who despises you despises Me. And he who despises Me
despises Him Who sent Me’? How can pious Christians shut their ears to the
voices and work of such great Saints of God, and so be deprived of the praise
and blessing of the Holy Trinity, which we hear in the mouth of the Apostle
Paul himself: ‘I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain
the traditions even as I have delivered them to you’ (I Corinthians
11.2); thereby receiving diverse and strange teachings ‘according to the
elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ’ (Colossians
2.8), inventions of men in which there lurks a special danger for the soul? The
faithful children of the Church, with fear of God in regard to the commandment
of the Holy Spirit: ‘Stand firm and hold to the traditions’ (II
Thessalonians 2.15), and in conformity with the other commandment:
‘Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom
you learned it’ (II Timothy. 3.14), have a reverent and Godpleasing
answer to give to the unproved claims of today’s innovating shepherds with
regard to obedience: ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5.29).[41]
Now
the True Orthodox Christians both in Greece and in Romania conducted the first
phase of their struggle against the innovating State Churches without bishops.
This was a severe handicap, for while it is better, as St. Basil says, to have
no bishop than a bad one, the absence of bishops endangers the long-term
survival of a Church for the simple reason that without a bishop it is
impossible to ordain priests. Moreover, those in the camp of the innovators who
secretly sympathize with the confessors are less likely to cross over to the
latter if they have no bishops.
However,
as we have seen, pressure for a return to the Julian Calendar had been building
up within the State Church; and in May, 1935 eleven bishops decided to return
to the Julian calendar. However, pressure was exerted on them, and eight
withdrew at the last moment. This left three: Metropolitan Germanus of
Demetrias, the retired Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina (who had already
distinguished himself in the early 1920s by refusing to recognize the election
of Meletius Metaxakis) and Metropolitan Chrysostom of Zakynthos (who was
accepted by the first two by the laying-on of hands, since he had been
consecrated after the calendar change).[42].
On
May 25, 1935, the Community of the True Orthodox Christians invited the three
metropolitans to break communion with the State Church and take up the
leadership of the True Orthodox Christians. They responded positively, and on
Sunday, May 26, in the Community’s little church of the Dormition at Colonus,
Athens, and in the presence of 25,000 faithful, they formally announced their
adherence to the True Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Germanus was elected
president of the new Synod. This joyful event was the people’s reward for their
steadfast confession of the Faith and the necessary condition for the further
success of the sacred struggle of the True Orthodox Christians of Greece.
The three metropolitans then issued
a Confession of Faith in which they declared, among other things: “Those who
now administer the Church of Greece have divided the unity of Orthodoxy through
the calendar innovation, and have split the Greek Orthodox People into two
opposing calendar parts. They have not only violated an Ecclesiastical
Tradition which was consecrated by the Seven Ecumenical Councils and sanctioned
by the age-old practice of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but have also touched
the Dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Therefore those who
now administer the Greek Church have, by their unilateral, anticanonical and
unthinking introduction of the Gregorian calendar, cut themselves off
completely from the trunk of Orthodoxy, and have declared themselves to be in
essence Schismatics in relation to the Orthodox Churches which stand on the
foundation of the Seven Ecumenical Councils and the Orthodox laws and
Traditions, the Churches of Jerusalem, Antioch, Serbia, Poland, the Holy
Mountain and the God-trodden Mountain of Sinai, etc.
“That
this is so was confirmed by the Commission made up of the best jurists and
theologian-professors of the National University which was appointed to study
the calendar question, and one of whose members happened to be his Blessedness
the Archbishop of Athens in his then capacity as professor of Church History in
the National University.
“Let
us see what was the opinion given by this Commission on the new calendar:
‘Although all the Orthodox Churches are autocephalous in their internal
administration, nevertheless, in that they are united to each other through the
Dogmas and the Synodical decrees and Canons, none of them can separate itself
off as an individual Orthodox Church and accept the new Church calendar without
being considered Schismatic in relation to the others.’
“Since
his Beatitude the Archbishop of Athens has by his own signature declared
himself to be a Schismatic, what need do we have of witnesses to demonstrate
that he and the hierarchs who think like him have become Schismatics, in that
they have split the unity of Orthodoxy through the calendar innovation and
divided the Ecclesiastical and ethnic soul of the Greek Orthodox People?”[43]
This
very important document was confirmed as expressing the Faith of the True
Orthodox Church in several subsequent Confessions (notably those of 1950, 1974
and 1991). It declares that the new calendarists are not only schismatics but
also, by clear implication, heretics in that (through ecumenism, the real goal
of the calendar innovation) they have attacked the dogma of the One, Holy,
Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Concerning
the meaning of the word “schismatic”, the three metropolitans made themselves
crystal clear in an encyclical issued on June 8/21, 1935: “We recommend to all
those who follow the Orthodox Calendar that they have no spiritual communion
with the schismatic church of the schismatic ministers, from whom the grace of
the All-Holy Spirit has fled, because they have violated the decisions of the
Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council and the Pan-Orthodox Councils which
condemned the Gregorian calendar. That the schismatic Church does not have
Grace and the Holy Spirit is affirmed by St. Basil the Great, who says the
following: ‘Even if the Schismatics have erred about things which are not
Dogmas, since the head of the Church is Christ, according to the divine
Apostle, from Whom all the members live and receive spiritual increase, they
have torn themselves away from the harmony of the members of the Body and no
longer are members [of that Body] or have the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore he who does not have it cannot transfer it to others.’”[44]
By
a “coincidence” rich in symbolical meaning, it was precisely at this time –
June, 1935 – that the Turkish law banning Orthodox clergy from wearing their religious
garb came into effect. Although this regulation was strongly resented by the
Ecumenical Patriarch Photius, the lower clergy greeted it with delight,
shouting: “Long live Ataturk!” And indeed, deprived now of the inner vestment
of grace, and governed by “human tradition, according to the elemental spirits
of the universe, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2.8), it was
only fitting that the Patriarchate should lose even the outer sign of its
former glory.[45]
On
May 23, 24, 25 and 26, 1935, the three metropolitans consecrated four new
bishops: Germanus (Varykopoulos) of the Cyclades, Christopher (Hatzi) of
Megara, Polycarp (Liosi) of Diauleia, and Matthew (Karpadakis) of Bresthena.
For this they were tried in an ecclesiastical court by the State Church, and
exiled by the police to three different monasteries.
At
a later trial the four newly consecrated bishops were also condemned and
defrocked. Two of them – Polycarp of Diauleia and Christopher of Megara – then
petitioned the State Church for clemency, but the remaining two – Germanus of
the Cyclades and Matthew of Bresthena – refused to recognize the decision of
the court. Germanus was then exiled, while Matthew was hidden by his spiritual
children in the Monastery of Keratea.
The exiled Chrysostom of Zakynthos soon repented and was restored to his metropolia by the State Church. However, in October the two other metropolitans were freed before time by the government (a minister, G. Kondyles, sympathized with the True Orthodox).
In
December, Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina set off for Jerusalem and Damascus
in order to discuss the possibility of convening a Council to resolve the
calendar question. The two Patriarchs received him kindly and promised to help
towards this goal. However, as he prepared to return to Greece, the Greek
consul in Jerusalem, acting under orders from Athens, refused to stamp a visa
into his passport.
For
several months Metropolitan Chrysostom languished in Jerusalem as a virtual
prisoner of the Greek consul. But Divine Providence, through the intercessions
of “the liberator of captives”, St. George, found a way out for him. This
miracle was recounted by Chrysostom himself as follows:
“I
was depressed by my captivity since I had no information about how the Sacred
Struggle was going and did not know what would be the outcome of my arbitrary
detention in Jerusalem.
“With
this serious problem weighing on me, I went, the next day, which was April 23,
to the Divine Liturgy. With pain and faith I called on St. George to help me:
“‘Holy
Great-Martyr of Christ George, you who are the liberator of captives and
defender of the poor, perform your miracle and deliver me from this captivity.’
“That
evening, when I was in my house and before going to bed, I heard a knock on the
door of my house:
“‘Come in.’
“Immediately
the door opened and there entered a good-looking young man, who said:
“‘You
are free to leave. No-one will give you the news.’
“‘Go and
look at my passport.’
“The
young men promptly left and, returning soon after, said:
“‘Everything
is ready.’”
The
bishop was about to give the young man a tip when, to his amazement, he
vanished. He pondered what this could mean. However, his heart was full of
peace and joy.
The
next day he again went to the church. On glancing at the icon of St. George, he
remembered the previous day’s incident and noticed that the face of the saint
on the icon looked exactly like the young man he had seen.
With
great enthusiasm he chanted the troparion to the saint: “Liberator of captives
and defender of the poor”, and then turned to him as if to a close friend:
“St.
George, I, too, am a prisoner. But since you promised that no-one would give me
the news, I’m going. Protect me.”
Immediately
after church he went to the house where he was staying and said to the
landlady:
“I’m going
to Piraeus.”
“But,
your Grace, where will you go? Your passport doesn’t have a visa.”
“St. George
will help me.”
When
he got to Haifa, from where the boats left for Piraeus, he began to worry
again, because he did not know the language and had no-one he knew to talk to.
As
he was setting foot in a boat, he saw a monk whom he did not know, who
approached him, bowed and said to him in Greek:
“Your
Grace, how can I be of service to you?”
“How
can you be of service to me? I want to leave, but my passport has not had a
visa stamped in it by the Greek consul.”
The
monk took the passport, went to a travel agency, and although the passport did
not have the seal of the Greek consul, obtained a ticket.[46]
The
two metropolitans continued to be harrassed by the State Church. Thus in 1937 a
magistrate’s court tried Chrysostom on the charge of having served in the
church of the Three Hierarchs in Thessalonica. He was declared innocent; but
further trials followed in 1938 and 1940.[47]
But
the Lord also continued to give signs from heaven to His faithful.
Thus
the True Orthodox Christians of Crete were going to celebrate the feast of the
Exaltation of the Cross with an all-night vigil in the church of the same name
on the peak of Mount Kophinas. “On the
eve of the feast, which was a Sunday (13/9/1937), when it began to grow dark,
the faithful were arriving in groups from the various villages in the area,
some on foot, some riding on animals.. The old men together with the priests
Fr. Demetrius from Krousona and Fr. Charalampus from Kapetaniana were waiting
for them at the little church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, which was
on the foothills of Kophinas. That evening, above the peak of the Cross, there
was a lot of mist and thick fog, and climbing was very difficult. The faithful
numbered more than 500, and according to others – more than 1000.
“At
ten o’clock a detachment of police arrived led by a sublieutenant. They
justified their presence by saying that ‘they came to maintain.. order!’ Of
course, their motive was quite different. However, when they saw the numbers of
the faithful they were forced to change their minds.
“At
midnight the priests began to chant the Rejoices to the Honoured Cross. In
spite of the fog and the cold, strong wind, the faithful prayed on their knees,
and they all together repeated the ‘Rejoice, blessed wood’ or the ‘Alleluia’.
“At
the end of the Rejoices the wind suddenly stopped blowing and the mist began to
disperse. The peak of Kophinas and the little church of the Honoured Cross came
clearly into view.
“Before
they realized what was happening, the whole area began to be illumined by a light
and a sweet peace spread everywhere. Then, with fear but also with ineffable
joy, they saw a cross of light shining on the peak of Kophinas and casting its
rays over the whole area. The night suddenly became day! Nothing could be heard
except the ‘Kyrie eleisons’ and the mute weeping of the Faithful. None of the
eyewitnesses could say how long the miracle lasted.
“Finally,
after quite a long time, as it had appeared, so it gradually disappeared again…
And again, as at the beginning, the wind began to blow and a thick fog covered
the area.
“The
faithful continued with renewed zeal and compunction to pray the whole night.
The priests celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the little church of the All Holy.
“At
dawn the Divine Liturgy came to an end, whereupon the whole crowd of the
faithful began to move, returning to their villages and houses, discussing
amongst themselves and the police the wonderful miracle of the divine
appearance of the Honoured Cross…”[48]
During
this period, the True Orthodox Christians of Romania were also undergoing
persecution. Metropolitan Blaise writes: “The Romanian King Charles II left his
wife Maria, who came from Constantinople and was married again to a Jewess.
Charles II did not want to abandon his throne, but was forced to abdicate since
he had married a non-Christian. His son Michael was only 8 years old, so a
regent was needed. Patriarch Miron became the regent. The political
circumstances of that time were complicated by the fact that the government had
been dissolved, and in order to maintain the constitution the regent had to
become Prime Minister. Thus in 1936 the patriarch became both regent and Prime
Minister – the complete master of the country. He had the power to annihilate
our Church, and he used it in full measure: he destroyed all our churches and
arrested all the clergy, the monastics and the leaders of the Old Calendarist
groups.
“This
was the first major blow against our Church, and many did not survive it.[49]
Take, for example, Fr. Euthymius – he was in a concentration camp for 3 years
with Fr. Pambo, and he told us how they tortured him: they threw him into a
stream and forced other prisoners to walk over him as over a bridge: he was at that
time about 27 years old.”[50]
In Bessarabia, writes Glazkov, “the
priests Fathers Boris Binetsky, Demetrius Stitskevich and Vladimir Polyakov
were put on trial for serving according to the old style. The establishment of
the dictatorship of King Charles II in Romania in February, 1938 was
accompanied by an increase of persecution for national and calendarist reasons.
The point was that the Romanian kings were of Austrian origin and were only
formally Orthodox Christians, they were not much concerned for the fate of
Romania, the people and the Church. On the whole they were only a façade behind
which various civil and ecclesiastical functionaries committed their deeds of
darkness.
“One of the accusation laid at the
door of the Old Calendarists, including Fr. Glycerius, was their links with the
‘Iron Guard’ (or legionaires) organisation, which had been forbidden by the
king. In the autumn of 1938 many arrests, trails and shootings of prominent
legionaries took place round the country. This movement was quite often false
accused of Nazism. But what did this right-wing organisation really represent
in Romania? Once could hardly call a movement whose main task was the education
of his supporters in the Orthodox faith and in faithfulness to the Church of
Christ – a Nazi organisation. Being not only a political, but also a spiritual
opposition to the totalitarian-military authorities, and at the same time
waging an inexorable struggle against any physical or spiritual manifestation
of communism in Romania, the legionaires often went against the political
ambitions of the unspiritual politicians. At the end of the 1930s massive blood
persecutions of the legionaires began, as a result of which the leaders of the
movement (for example, Kornel Kodryanu) were shot, while ordinary members,
including adolescents, were imprisoned in prisons and camps, in which many died
from unbearable labours and humiliations, while many spent decades in them. …
“In
1939 Fr. Glycerius found himself, as the result of the denunciation of a new
calendarist priest, in a special camp for legionaires in Myarkuya Kyuch. In
November of the same year there came an order to divide all the prisoners into
two parts and shoot one part and then the other. When the first group had been
shot, Fr. Glycerius and several legionaires who were in the second group prayed
a thanksgiving moleben to the Lord God and the Mother of God for
counting them worthy of death in the Orthodox faith. The Lord worked a miracle
– suddenly there arrived a governmental order decreeing clemency.
“A
few months late Bessarabia was occupied by the Red army, and a year after that
Romania entered into war with the USSR. The Old Calendarists, in order to
preserve Orthodoxy unharmed, were forced literally to enter the deep catacombs,
founding secret sketes in the woods and the mountains…”[51]
Metropolitan
Cyprian has provided us with some more details of the persecution of the 1930s:
“[Patriarch Miron] ordered all of the churches of the True Orthodox Christians
razed, and imprisoned any cleric or monastic who refused to submit to his
authority. The monks and nuns were incarcerated in two monasteries, where they
were treated with unheard of barbarity. Some of them, such as Hieromonk Pambo,
founder of the Monastery of Dobru (which was demolished and rebuilt three
times), met with a martyr’s end. During the destruction of the Monastery of
Cucova, five lay people were thrown into the monastery well and drowned. By
such tactics the Patriarch wished to rid himself of the Old Calendarist problem!
“Hieromonk
Glycerius was arrested in September of 1936 during a large demonstration at
Piatra Neamt, where many were killed. He was taken under guard to Bucharest and
there condemned to death. He was, however, miraculously saved, in that the
Theotokos appeared to the wife of the Minister of Justice and gave her an order
to intercede with her husband on Father Glycerius’ behalf. Her husband did not
react in the manner of Pilate, but rather commuted Father Glycerius’ death
sentence and ordered him imprisoned in a distant monastery…
“The
zealous Father Glycerius made two trips to Greece. During his first visit, he
became a monk of the Great Schema at the Skete of St. John the Baptist on Mt
Athos. On his second visit, in 1936, he met several bishops of the True
Orthodox Church of Greece, viz., Germanus… and Matthew (Bishop Chrysostom.. was
away in the East), who decided to consecrate him a bishop. Before Bishop
Chrysostom’s consent to proceed with this was obtained, however, Father
Glycerius was expelled from Greece…
“With
the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Father Glycerius was set free and, along
with his beloved co-struggler, Deacon David Bidascu, fled into the forest.
There the two lived in indescribable deprivation and hardship, especially
during the winter. In the midst of heavy snows, when their few secret
supporters could not get frugal provisions to them, the Fathers were obliged to
eat worms! However, Divine Providence protected them from their persecutors
and, directed by that same Providence, the birds of the sky would erase traces
of the Fathers’ footprints in the snow by flying about and flapping their wings
in the snow. And despite the harsh cold, not once did they light a fire, lest
the smoke might betray their refuge. (We might note that the cold often
approaches thirty degrees below zero during the winter in Romania.) Other
ascetics were also hidden in the deserts, among them Father Damascene, Father
Paisius, et al.”[52]
Returning
to Greece, we come to the tragic division that took place in 1937 between
Metropolitans Germanus of Demetrias and Chrysostom of Florina, on the one hand,
and Bishops Germanus of the Cyclades and Matthew of Bresthena, on the other.
This division between the so-called “Florinites” and “Matthewites” greatly
weakened the struggle of the True Orthodox and has continued (with further
splinterings) to the present day.
The
cause was a letter which the two metropolitans wrote in June, 1937 to the Monk
Mark (Khaniotes), in which they said: “When a Church falls into what St. Basil
the Great calls a curable error, as is the error of the Calendar, the hierarchs
as individuals can wall themselves off and break their spiritual communion with
the Church, so as not to become partakers of their error. However, they do not
have the right to declare the Church schismatic. That is the right of a
Pan-Orthodox or Great Local Council alone. In this case those who break
communion with the erring Church before Synodical clarification appeal against
it to a Pan-Orthodox or Great Local Council, so as to lead it back onto the
Orthodox way, or, if it remains in its error, to have it proclaimed as
heretical or schismatic by the Pan-Orthodox Council after the first and second
admonition – heretical, if its error affects Dogma, and schismatic if it
affects the Typicon and the administrative side of the Church. This is what we
have done in a rigorous manner, breaking spiritual communion with the Hierarchy
of the Great Church because of the error of the calendar innovation, and
appealing against it to a Pan-Orthodox or Great Local Council, which is the
only competent authority having the right to judge it for its error and either
persuade it to forsake its error, or if it remains in it, to declare it
schismatic. Thus insofar as it is one error of one Church which does not
directly affect a dogma of the faith but is related to ecclesiastical
anticanonicities and irregularities that are curable, in St. Basil the Great’s
words, it makes the erring Church potentially
[en dunamei] schismatic, but not actually [en
energeia] so, until it is
condemned and declared actually schismatic by a Pan-Orthodox Council…
“But
let your holiness know that the Holy Chrism which is celebrated and sanctified
by the Church of the Ecumenical Patriarchate retains all its grace and
sanctifying energy, even if this was done by the Patriarchate after the
introduction of the calendar.”[53]
This
statement clearly contradicted the three bishops’ Confession of 1935, which
both declared that the State Church was fully schismatic and deprived of the
grace of sacraments, and indicated that the dogma of the One Church had been
affected by the introduction of the new calendar. Therefore on September 18,
Bishop Matthew wrote an encyclical to Metropolitan Germanus reminding him of a
request he had made to him in writing on June 30 for a clear statement that the
new calendarists were deprived of the grace of sacraments. Since he had
received not reply, wrote Matthew, he was now breaking communion with him.
A
disturbing feature of this encyclical was the way in which it was addressed to
“the former Metropolitan of Demetrias
Germanus, until now president of the
Sacred Synod”, as if the latter were already defrocked. But by whom had such a defrocking
been carried out, and on the occasion of what trial? Matthew refers to no such
trial, and he himself could not possibly have tried Germanus in absentia…[54]
However,
a little later, on September 9, the two metropolitans, alarmed by the confusion
which their statement had created, seemed to backtrack, writing: “As regards
the validity or invalidity of the sacraments performed by the new calendarists,
we abide by what we proclaimed in June, 1935, that the sanctifying grace of the
sacraments is found in and works through [energei]
those ecclesiastical ministers who keep to the sacred traditions and canons
without making any innovation, but not through those who have distanced
themselves from the sacred canons and remain under the curses of the Fathers.”[55]
This
clarification appeared to avert the danger of a schism among the Old
Calendarists – which would, of course, halt the growth of the True Orthodox
Church its tracks. However, on November 9 Metropolitan Chrysostom again, in a
letter to Bishop Germanos, wrote that the State Church of Greece was
potentially, and not actually schismatic and deprived of the grace of
sacraments, and declared that it could be said to be actually schismatic and
graceless only on the basis of a decision of an Ecumenical or Pan-Orthodox
Council.[56] In fact, it
seems that Metropolitan Chrysostomos was hopeful that such a Pan-Orthodox
Council was about to be convened.
Bishops Germanus and Matthew
considered this letter a betrayal and separated from the two metropolitans. And
so in little more than twenty years the Orthodox Church had been reduced from a
position of external power and unity to a state of almost complete chaos…
What
was the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA) to the Greek Old
Calendarists? As we have seen, the Russian Church in all its jurisdictions
retained the Old Calendar, and in outlying parts of the former Russian empire
which came under the power of new calendarists, such as Valaam and Bessarabia,
Russians offered strong resistance to the innovation. The ROCA condemned it,
and Metropolitan Anastasy, as we have seen, concelebrated with the leading
Romanian Old Calendarist, Hieromonk Glycerius.
However,
the first-hierarch of the ROCA, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), adopted a
more ambiguous position. In 1926, writing to the Russian Athonite
Hieroschemamonk Theodosius of Karoulia[57],
he refused to break communion with the new calendarists of the
Constantinopolitan and Greek Churches: “You know the 13th, 14th
and 15th canons of the First-and-Second Council, which speaks about
separating oneself from a Bishop or Patriarch after his conciliar condemnation.
And then there is the canon (the 15th), which says that that
clergyman is worthy, not of condemnation, but of praise, who breaks with links
with him [the heretic] for the sake of a heresy condemned by the holy councils
or fathers…, and besides ‘when he (that is, the first-hierarch) preaches heresy
publicly and teaches it openly in the Church’. But this, glory to God, neither
P[atriarch] Basil [III of Constantinople] nor [Archbishop] Chrysostom [of
Athens] have done yet. On the contrary, they insist on keeping the former
Paschalion, for only it, and not the Julian calendar itself was covered by the
curse of the councils. True, P[atriarch]
Jeremiah in the 15th [correct: 16th] century and
his successor in the 18th anathematised the calendar itself, but
this curse: 1) touches only his contemporaries and 2) does not extend to those
who are frightened to break communion with him, to which are subjected only
those who transgress the canonical Paschalion. Moreover (this needs to be noted
in any case), the main idea behind the day of Pascha is that it should be
celebrated by all the Christians (that is, the Orthodox) on one and the same
day throughout the inhabited world. True, I myself and my brothers do not at
all sympathise with the new calendar and modernism, but we beseech the Athonite
fathers not to be hasty in composing letters (Romans 14). – Do not grieve
about our readiness to go to the C[onstantinople] Council. Of course, there
will be no council, but if there is, and if we go, as St. Flavian went to the
robber cou[ncil], then, of course, we will keep the faith and deliver the
apostates to anathema. But as long as the last word has not been spoken, as
long as the whole Church has not repeated the curses of Patriarch Jeremiah at
an ecumenical council, we must retain communion, so that we ourselves should
not be deprived of salvation, and, in aiming at a gnat, swallow a camel…”[58]
In
another letter he admitted that akriveia was on Fr. Theodosius’ side,
but argued in favour of oikonomia: “It is in vain that you torment your
conscience with doubts about continuing to be in communion with the Constantinopolitan
Patriarchate. Present this matter to the judgement of the hierarchs, and until
it has taken place remain in communion…”[59]
However, the wording of
the 16th century Councils that anathematised the new calendar do not
support the metropolitan’s interpretation: “Whoever does not follow the customs
of the Church,… but wishes to follow the Gregorian Paschalion and Menaion
[calendar],… let him be anathema.” Moreover, there is no word about the
anathema applying only to the generation of the anathematisers. In general,
anathemas, as expressing the unchanging decision of God with regard to
something that is eternally false, are necessarily applicable, if valid
and canonical, in all places and at all times.
A different opinion to
that of Metropolitan Anthony was expressed by the second member of the ROCA
Synod, Archbishop Theophanes of Poltava and Pereyaslavl.[60]
In the same year of 1926 he wrote:-
“Question. Have
the pastors of the Orthodox Church not made special judgements concerning the
calendar?
“Answer. They
have, many times – with regard to the introduction of the new Roman calendar –
both in private assemblies and in councils.
“A proof of this is the
following. First of all, the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II, who lived at the
same time as the Roman calendar reform, immediately, in 1582, together with his
Synod condemned the new Roman system of chronology as being not in agreement
with the Tradition of the Church. In the next year (1583), with the
participation of Patriarchs Sylvester of Alexandria and Sophronius VI of
Jerusalem, he convened a Church Council. This Council recognised the Gregorian
calendar to be not in agreement with the canons of the Universal Church and
with the decree of the First Ecumenical Council on the method of calculating
the day of Holy Pascha.
Through the labours of
this Council there appeared: a Conciliar tome, which denounced the wrongness
and unacceptability for the Orthodox Church of the Roman calendar, and a
canonical conciliar Decree – the Sigillion of November 20, 1583. In this
Sigillion all three of the above-mentioned Patriarchs with their Synods called
on the Orthodox firmly and unbendingly, even to the shedding of their blood, to
hold the Orthodox Menaion and Julian Paschalion, threatening the transgressors
of this with anathema, cutting them off from the Church of Christ and the
gathering of the faithful…
In the course of the
following three centuries: the 17th, 18th and 19th,
a whole series of Ecumenical Patriarchs decisively expressed themselves against
the Gregorian calendar and, evaluating it in the spirit of the conciliar decree
of Patriarch Jeremiah II, counselled the Orthodox to avoid it…”
“Question. Is the
introduction of the new calendar important or of little importance?
“Answer. Very
important, especially in connection with the Paschalion, and it is an extreme
disorder and ecclesiastical schism, which draws people away from communion and
unity with the whole Church of Christ, deprives them of the grace of the Holy
Spirit, shakes the dogma of the unity of the Church, and, like Arius, tears the
seamless robe of Christ, that is, everywhere divides the Orthodox, depriving
them of oneness of mind; breaks the bond with Ecclesiastical Holy Tradition and
makes them fall under conciliar condemnation for despising Tradition…
“Question. How
must the Orthodox relate to the new calendarist schismatics, according to the
canons?
“Answer. They
must have no communion in prayer with them, even before their conciliar
condemnation…
“Question. What
punishment is fitting, according to the Church canons, for those who pray with
the new calendarist schismatics?
“Answer. The same
condemnation with them…”[61]
If My People had heard Me, if Israel had walked in My ways,
quickly would I have humbled their enemies,
and upon their oppressors would I have laid My hand.
Psalm 80. 12-13
From the middle thirties a certain slackening in the fury of the atheist onslaught on Russia became discernible – until the Great Purge of 1937-38 produced its unprecedented roll-call of martyrs. The 1936 Constitution restored to the clergy and their families equal “rights” with the rest of the population, so that, for example, after five years of “productive and socially useful work” a former priest could receive the right to vote – though this was dependent, of course, on his demonstrating loyalty to the régime. In 1937, however, the Politburo ordered the raising of “all taxes on priests as persons receiving unearned income”, and the churches and monasteries were in addition taxed in kind – grain, potatoes – as though they were private farms.[62]
These concessions may have been caused by the perceived failure of the anti-religious campaign to wipe out faith in God – in 1937 a poll established that one-third of city-dwellers and two-thirds of country-dwellers were still prepared to confess that they believed. Or they may have been linked to the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism, persuading Stalin, who greatly admired Hitler, to permit a little more nationalism in his “socialism in one country”. In any case, the first real alleviation given, if not to religion in general, at any rate to the Moscow Patriarchate, was certainly linked to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and the events that followed it.
Thus Alexeyev and Stavrou write: “To the Soviet Union [in accordance with the pact] went significant portions of the Western Ukraine and Belorussia, and soon after them the three Baltic republics – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. From what used to be Poland alone there passed to the U.S.S.R. territories inhabited by a population of 4 million, with 1200 Orthodox churches, a theological seminary in Kremenets and 4 bishops. This immediately doubled the number of ruling bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, increased the number of open churches by about 40% and again raised the question of the relationship of the authorities to religious education.
“Usually Soviet border zones were very thoroughly communised. The churches there were closed. When a part of Poland became Soviet territory and a border zone, Soviet power was forced to review its usual policy. It was too risky to start large-scale religious persecutions and arouse the displeasure of the populace in the presence of the German army on the other side of the border. It was necessary to take into account the fact – which was beneficial in the given circumstances for Soviet power – of the Polish authorities’ discrimination against the Orthodox Church. Before the beginning of the Second World War the Poles had closed hundreds of Orthodox churches on their territory on the grounds that the Tsarist government had in 1875 returned theses churches from the unia to Orthodoxy. The Polish government considered the return of the uniates to Orthodoxy an act of violence, and they in their own way restored justice by means of violence, which, needless to say, elicited protests even from the Catholic and Uniate churches.
“The results of these measures of the Polish government were such that, for example, in the region of Kholm out of 393 Orthodox churches existing in 1914, by 1938 there remained 227, by 1939 – 176, and by the beginning of the war – 53 in all.[63] Particularly disturbing was the fact that, of the cult buildings taken away from the Orthodox, 130 churches, 10 houses of prayer and 2 monasteries were simply destroyed. Naturally, such measures elicited the displeasure of the Orthodox population of Poland and created good soil for Communist propaganda and the growth of sympathy towards the U.S.S.R. In these conditions it was particularly difficult for the Soviet government in 1939 to begin large-scale persecutions and close the churches which had not yet been closed by the Poles. It preferred a more cautious policy: the submission of the Orthodox hierarchy and the Orthodox parishes of what used to be Poland to the Moscow Patriarchate, which was well controlled by the government. In other words, this was the first occasion on which the Soviet government used the Moscow Patriarchate for the spread of its influence over newly acquired territory. Thus it did not suit Stalin to snuff out the Moscow Patriarchate at this time.![64]
However, it was difficult for the wolf to look like a sheep for long; so while it suited Stalin temporarily to play the part of defender of Orthodoxy against Catholicism, it was not long before the familiar pattern re-emerged. Thus all church property in the newly-occupied territories was nationalized in October, 1939; heavy taxes were laid on the clergy, the seminary in Kremenets was closed, and Archbishop Alexis (Gromadsky) of Kremenets was arrested. By June, 1941, 53 priests had been arrested, of whom 37 disappeared and 6 were shot; and the monks at the famous Pochaev Lavra had been reduced from 300 to 80. Two Soviet monks were imported into the monastery to see that the remainder stayed loyal to Soviet power. Archbishop Pantaleimon (Rozhnevsky), formerly of Pinsk, who had refused to accept the granting of autocephaly to the Polish Church by Constantinople in 1924, was designated exarch of Western Ukraine and Belorussia in October, 1939. But in July, 1940, he was “retired” to the Zhirovitsky monastery and Archbishop Nicholas (Yarushevich) of Novgorod was sent from Moscow to take his place, until he was forced to retreat before the advancing German forces to Moscow.
In 1939 the Moscow Patriarchate sent Archbishop Sergius (Voskresensky) of Dmitrov to Riga as the patriarchal exarch in the occupied Baltic States. In 1940 he received the Churches of Latvia and Estonia, which had been granted autocephaly by Constantinople, into the patriarchate. Then, in March, 1941, he took control of the see of Vilnius and Lithuania.
“Rule over the new diocesan provinces,” writes Volkogonov, “was established, naturally, by means of the secret services. As an illustration of the process, the following report was received by Stalin in March, 1941 from B. Merkulov, People’s Commissar for State Security of the USSR:
“‘There are at present in the territories of the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian republics autocephalous [autonomous] Orthodox churches, headed by local metropolitans who are placemen of the bourgeois governments.
“‘In the Latvian SSR there are 175,000 Orthodox parishioners. Anti-Soviet elements, former members of the Fascist organization ‘Perkanirust’, are grouped around the head of the Synod, Augustin.
“‘In the Estonian SSR there are 40,000 Orthodox. The head of the eparchy has died. Archbishop Fedosi Fedoseev, who heads an anti-Soviet group of churchmen, is trying to grab the job.
“‘The NKVD has prepared the following measures:
“‘1) Through an NKVD agency we will get the Moscow patriarchate to issue a resolution on the subordination of the Orthodox churches of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania to itself, using a declaration from local rank and file clergy and believers for the purpose.
“‘2) By a decision of the Moscow patriarchate we shall appoint as eparch Archbishop Dmitri Nikolayevich Voskresensky (an agent of the NKGB of the USSR), using for the purpose appropriate requests from the local clergy, which are to be found in the Moscow patriarchate.”[65]
It is striking how openly Merkulov talks about using the Moscow patriarchate for purely political purposes here. “Archbishop Dmitri Voskresensky” is probably a mistake for “Archbishop Sergius Voskresensky of Dmitrov”. The fact that he was an agent of the NKGB probably means that his three fellow metropolitans who were still in freedom – Sergius (Stragorodsky), Nicholas and Alexis – were also agents.[66]
It also demonstrates, as Volkogonov writes, “the reasons behind Lenin’s confident assertion that ‘our victory over the clergy is fully assured’. So complete, indeed, was that victory that even Stalin and his accomplices were at times at a loss to know if someone was a priest or an NKGB agent in a cassock. While boasting loudly of freedom of conscience and quoting copiously from Lenin’s hypocritical statements on how humanely socialism treated religion, the Bolshevik regime, through the widespread use of violence, had turned the dwelling-place of the spirit and faith into a den of thought-police.”[67]
However, the Soviets’ successful invasion of East Poland and the Baltic States, and less successful invasion of Finland, was soon to be avenged. On June 22, 1941, the feast of All Saints of Russia, the Nazis invaded Russia.
The Nazis were in general greeted with ecstatic joy. Thus Solzhenitsyn writes: “Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia gave the Germans a jubilant welcome. Belorussia, the Western Ukraine, and the first occupied Russian territories followed suit. But the mood of the people was demonstrated most graphically of all by the Red Army: before the eyes of the whole world it retreated along a 2,000-kilometre front, on foot, but every bit as fast as motorized units. Nothing could possibly be more convincing than the way these men, soldiers in their prime, voted with their feet. Numerical superiority was entirely with the Red Army, they had excellent artillery and a strong tank force, yet back they rolled, a rout without compare, unprecedented in the annals of Russian and world history. In the first few months some three million officers and men had fallen into enemy hands!
“That is what the popular mood was like – the mood of peoples some of whom had lived through twenty-four years of communism and others but a single year. For them the whole point of this latest war was to cast off the scourge of communism. Naturally enough, each people was primarily bent not on resolving any European problem but on its own national task – liberation from communism…”[68]
With the permission of the Germans, churches were opened everywhere. Even in fully Sovietized regions such as Pskov and the Eastern Ukraine, 95% of the population, according to German reports, flooded into the newly-opened churches. This meant that Orthodoxy became an important political factor which neither the Germans nor the Soviets could ignore.
The invasion of the Germans at this time had been prophesied by Elder Aristocles of Moscow in August, 1918. As he said to Mother Barbara (Tsvetkova): “You will hear about it in that country where you will be at that time, you will hear that the Germans are rattling their sabres on the borders of Russia… Only don’t rejoice yet. Many Russians will think that the Germans will save Russia from the Bolshevik power, but it will not be so. True, the Germans will enter Russia and will do much, but they will depart, for the time of salvation will not be yet. That will be later, later… Germany will suffer her punishment in her own land. She will be divided…”[69]
The religious revival made possible by the German invasion was only partly directed by the Moscow Patriarchate. Even in the Baltic States, where its control was strongest, the patriarchal exarch, Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky), who had refused to be evacuated eastwards with the Red Army, had to admit the power of underground Orthodoxy – although he misleadingly represented this as an underground layer of the Patriarchate rather than a completely separate church organization. Thus in 1941 he submitted a memorandum to the German authorities, saying: “It should be noted that the forcible disbanding of the socially recognized leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate would call into existence a secret leadership of the Patriarchate, which would significantly increase the difficulties of police supervision. In general there has existed in Russia a very lively secret religious life (secret priests and monks; secret places for prayer; secret Divine services; christenings; confessions; communions; marriages; secret theological studies; secret possession of the Sacred Scriptures, liturgical vessels, icons, sacred books; secret relations between communities, bishoprics and the leadership of the Patriarchate, etc.). If they were to conceive the desire of annihilating also a secret leadership by the Patriarchate, then they would have to punish all the bishops, – and among them the secret ones, who in case of such necessity would be consecrated one after the other. And if we consider the improbable possibility that they would at some time succeed in annihilating the church hierarchy completely, then religion would still remain, while atheist propaganda would not make a single step forward. The Soviet government understood this, and therefore preferred that the leadership of the Patriarchate should continue in existence.”[70]
The patriarchal exarch blessed the formation of an “Orthodox mission in the liberated regions of Russia”, otherwise known as the “Pskov Orthodox Mission”, whose official aim was the restoration of church life “destroyed by Soviet power”. This mission included within its jurisdiction parts of the Leningrad and Kalinin regions, as well as the Pskov and Novgorod regions, with a population of about two million people. Its head was Cyril Zaits, whose activity, according to Vasilyeva, “suited both the exarch and the occupation authorities. The mission supplied its own material needs, supplementing its resources from the profits of its economic section (which included a candle factory, a shop for church utensils and an icon studio) and from 10% of the deductions coming from the parishes. Its monthly profits of 3-5000 marks covered the expenses of the administration, while the remaining money of the mission went on providing for theological courses in Vilnius.
“Priests were needed to restore church life in a number of parishes. And as he accompanied the missionaries [who were graduates of a theological seminary in Western Europe],… the exarch said: ‘Don’t forget that you have come to a country where in the course of more than twenty years religion has been poisoned and persecuted in the most pitiless manner, where the people are frightened, humiliated, harried and depersonalised. You will have not only to restore church life, but also to arouse the people to new life from its hibernation of many years, explaining and pointing out to them the advantages and merits of the new life which is opening up for them.’”[71]
At the beginning the mission had only two open churches, one in Pskov and one in Gdov. By 1944 there were 200 parishes and 175 priests.[72] Lectures were read on Pskov radio, help was given to Soviet prisoners of war, and a children’s home was created in the church of St. Demetrius in Pskov.
The region, on the insistence of Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky), remained ecclesiastically part of the Leningrad diocese under Metropolitan Alexis (Simansky), whose name was commemorated in each service, until anti-German leaflets signed by Alexis were dropped by the Soviet air force on the territory. However, the name of Sergius (Stragorodsky) continued to be commemorated, not as diocesan bishop, but as locum tenens, and then Patriarch. While remaining formally within the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) carried out the commands of the Germans. For example, in the summer of 1943 he ordered that a thanksgiving service with the participation of all the clergy should take place in Pskov to mark the Germans’ handing back of the land into the hands of the peasantry.
Shortly after being elected Patriarch, in an encyclical dated October 14, 1943, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) threatened all the clergy who were cooperating with the Germans with an ecclesiastical trial. The Germans countered by confronting Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) with the acts of the Vienna conference of the ROCA, which condemned Sergius’ election as uncanonical, and demanded that he approve of them. On April 28 or 29, 1944, Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) was ambushed and shot. No one knows who did it, but there are good reasons for believing that the act was done by Soviets dressed in German uniforms and that the leader of the murderers was Dr. Aschach, local head of German counter-intelligence.[73]
In Belorussia, the Germans tried to create an autocephalous Belorussian Orthodox Church which would be independent of both Great Russian and Polish influence (Catholic Poland was doing a lot of missionary work in the region). To this end Archbishop Pantaleimon (Rozhnevsky) was brought out of retirement and given the metropolitan see of Minsk, and a group of thirty Belorussian nationalists were brought in from Poland and Austria to rekindle Belorussian nationalism. However, neither the metropolitan nor the majority of the Orthodox in Belorussia were willing to break ties with the Moscow Patriarchate, and at a Council in Minsk in 1942 the Synod of what we may call the Belorussian Autonomous Church insisted that the autocephaly of their Church would have to be approved by the other Autocephalous Churches.[74] This displeased the Germans, who appointed Bishop Philotheus of Slutsk in his place.
“In August-September 1942,” writes Michael Woerl, “under pressure from both the Germans and their Belorussian nationalist cohorts, Archbishop Philotheus summoned a council of the Belorussian Church with the blessing of Metropolitan Panteleimon, but only he, Bishop Athanasius, and Bishop Stefan (Sevbo)… were allowed to take part. On the question of the Belorussian Church declaring itself to be autocephalous, the bishops stated that this could not be done without the knowledge and agreement of the other local Churches, which they knew would be impossible because, among other things, a world war was in progress. However, a letter addressed to the heads of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches was signed by Metropolitan Panteleimon and given to the German authorities, but it was never sent.
“Archbishop Philotheus and his fellow hierarchs persistently sought the return of Metropolitan Panteleimon, who finally was allowed by the Germans to return to Minsk in April of 1943. In May of 1944, the council of bishops met, and rejected the idea of seeking the autocephaly that had been attempted by the nationalistic element.”[75]
Throughout this period, the Belorussian Church not only had no contact with the Moscow Patriarchate (MP): the Germans forbade the commemoration of Sergius. So formally speaking the Belorussians were not part of the MP. Moreover, in October, 1943, it was was represented by a bishop and a priest at a Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA) in Vienna, so de facto it was now in communion with the ROCA. At that council the election of Metropolitan Sergius as “Patriarch” was condemned as uncanonical, and a bishop, George, was consecrated for the see of Gomel and Mozyr by the ROCA.[76] Further evidence for the genuine Orthodoxy of the Belorussian Church is provided by the fact that it had good relations with the Catacomb Christians in the region[77], and that the entire episcopate was received into the ROCA “in their existing rank” on April 23 / May 6, 1946.[78]
In the Ukraine, the Germans allowed the creation of two Churches independent of the MP. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church was in essence a reactivation of the Lypkivsky “self-consecrators’” schism, which had flourished in the Ukraine in the 1920s before being eliminated by Stalin. In December, 1941, Metropolitan Dionysius of Warsaw appointed Bishop Polycarp of Lutsk to administer the Ukrainian Church in the Ukraine. Into it, without reordination, poured the remnants of the Lypkivsky schism, which soon led this Church onto the path of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. About 40% of the Orthodox in the Ukraine were attracted into this Church, which was especially strong in the home of Ukrainian nationalism in the West; but it had no monastic life, and very soon departed from traditional Orthodoxy.
On August 18, 1941, a Council of Bishops meeting in the Pochaev monastery elected Metropolitan Alexis (Gromadsky) as leader of the Ukrainian Autonomous Church, which based her existence on the decision of the 1917-18 Local Council of the Russian Church granting the Ukrainian Church autonomy within the framework of the Russian Church. Although the Germans tended to favour the Autocephalous Church over the Autonomous Church, it was the latter which attracted the majority of believers (55%) and opened the most churches. It even attracted catacomb priests, such as Archimandrite Leontius (Filippovich), who after his consecration as Bishop of Zhitomir restored about 50% of the pre-revolutionary parishes in his diocese and ordained about two hundred priests, including the future leader of the “Seraphimo-Gennadiite” branch of the Catacomb Church, Gennadius Sekach, before he (Leontius) himself fled westwards with the Germans and joined the ROCA.[79] Also linked with the Autonomous Churches was the Georgian Schema-Archbishop Anthony (Abashidze), who lived in retirement in Kiev and may have taken part in the consecration of Bishop Theodosius.
Andrew Psarev writes: “The Ukrainian Autonomous Church was formally subject to the Moscow Patriarchate, insofar as her leading hierarchs considered that they did not have the canonical right to declare themselves an autocephaly. But since the Moscow Patriarchate was subject to the Bolsheviks, in her administrative decisions the Autonomous Church was completely independent, which is why her spiritual condition was different from that of the Moscow Patriarchate.”[80]
However, some catacomb communities refrained from joining any of the official jurisdictions. In Kiev, for example, Archimandrite Michael (Kostyuk), together with Schema-Abbess Michaela (Shelkina) directed a very large community of catacomb monks and nuns, and was able to build an above-ground church which had no relations with the Soviet bishops during the German occupation.[81]
The Josephite branch of the Catacomb Church also continued to exist independently; and it is probably from this period that the following anathema attached to the Order for the Triumph of Orthodoxy in Josephite parishes dates: “To those who maintain the mindless renovationist heresy of sergianism; to those who teach that the earthly existence of the Church of God can be established by denying the truth of Christ; and to those who affirm that serving the God-fighting authorities and fulfilling their godless commands, which trample on the sacred canons, the patristic traditions and the Divine dogmas, and destroy the whole of Christianity, saves the Church of Christ; and to those who revere the Antichrist and his servants and forerunners, and all his minions, as a lawful power established by God; and to all those.. who blaspheme against the new confessors and martyrs (Sergius of Nizhni-Novgorod, Nicholas of Kiev and Alexis of Khutyn), and to.. the renovationists and the other heretics – anathema.”[82]
“On the whole,” writes M.V. Shkvarovsky, “the Catacomb Church in North-West Russia preferred to remain underground. The point was that the ‘Pskov Orthodox Mission’ (1941-1943), which existed with the permission of the commanding officers of the army group ‘North’, was in canonical submission to the Moscow Patriarchate and tried to winkle out the secret communities. Schema-Bishop Macarius (Vasilyev), who settled in the Pskov-Caves monastery at the end of 1941, foretold the unsuccessful end of the war for Germany. Together with the secret Bishop of Pskov John (Lozhkov), he tried to enter into relations with Metropolitan Seraphim (Lyade) of Berlin and Germany, who belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. However, the hieromonk whom he sent, Nicephorus (Richter-Mellin), was detained in Konigsberg on a train and sent back.
“The well-known historian of the Catacomb Church I. Andreyev (Andreyevsky) wrote that in spite of the insistent demands of the exarch of the Baltic, Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky), the True Orthodox priests, who began to serve in some of the opened churches, refused to commemorate the patriarchal locum tenens. ‘Thus, for example, in the city of Soltsy in Novgorod diocese the mitre-bearing Protopriest Fr. V., former dean of the churches of the city of Minsk, who then became a catacomb priest, in spite of the very severe command of the dean of the Novgorod region Fr. Basil Rushanov, categorically refused to commemorate the Soviet Metropolitan Sergius. This was in 1942. And in 1943 and 1944 Fr. V. began to commemorate Metropolitan Anastasius [Gribanovsky], (head of the Russian Church Abroad).’
“The fact that most of the communities of the True Orthodox Christians in Leningrad region during the occupation remained underground allowed them to continue their activity even after the end of the war, in spite of the deaths of their leaders…
“In a series of other regions of the country the German High Command was more favourably disposed to the Catacomb Christians: in the Bryansk, Orel, Voronezh districts, and also in Belorussia, the Crimea and on the Don.”[83]
Although this period of revival in the southern and western regions was brief, it had important consequences for the future of the Russian Church. First, many of the churches which were reopened in this period were not again closed by the Soviets when they returned, in view of the pact Stalin had come to with the patriarchate (about which more below). Secondly, some of those bishops and priests who could not, or chose not to, escape westwards after the war went underground and helped to keep the Catacomb Church alive in the post-war period. And thirdly, the ROCA received an injection of new bishops and priests from those who fled westwards to Germany in the closing stages of the war.
The war necessitated a certain reactivation of Russian patriotism by the Soviets. For, as Overy writes, “by 1942 it was evident that the Communist Party alone could not raise the energies of the people for a struggle of this depth and intensity. The war with Germany was not like the war against the kulaks, or the war for greater production in the 1930s, although the almost continuous state of popular mobilization which these campaigns produced in some ways prepared the population to respond to emergency and improvisation. During 1942 the war was presented as a war to save historic Russia, a nationalist war of revenge against a monstrous, almost mythical enemy. The words ‘Soviet Union’ and ‘Communism’ appeared less and less frequently in official publications. The words ‘Russia’ and ‘Motherland’ took their place. The ‘Internationale’, the anthem of the international socialist movement played on state occasions, was replaced with a new nationalist anthem. The habits of military egalitarianism ingrained in the Red Army were swept aside. New medals were struck commemorating the military heroes of Russia’s past; the Tsarist Nevsky Order was revived but could be won only by officers. Aleksandr Nevsky, the Muscovite prince who drove back the Teutonic Knights in the thirteenth century, was a singularly apt parallel. In 1938 Stalin had ordered Sergei Eisenstein to produce a film on Nevsky. He interfered with the script to make the message clear about the German threat (and the virtues of authoritarianism). In 1939 the film was withdrawn following the Nazi-Soviet pact, but in 1942 it again became essential viewing.
“The mobilization of tradition did not stop with past heroes. During 1942 the Russian Orthodox Church [Moscow Patriarchate]… was suddenly rehabilitated… Metropolitan Sergei… appealed to the faithful on the very day of the German invasion to do everything to bring about victory.”[84]
Thus while the captive peoples of the Soviet Union were joyfully throwing off the yoke of the antichristian oppressor in the German-occupied West, the leader of the official Russian Orthodox Church – the “compatriarch”, as the Germans called him – was urging them to put it on again. Even after his evacuation to Ulyanovsk, Metropolitan Sergius continued his “patriotic” appeals (twenty-three in two years) – a patriotism that was entirely Soviet in nature, being directed against the interests of True and Holy Russia. At the same time he continued to proclaim the “saving” lie that religion was safe in the hands of the communists: “With complete objectivity we must declare that the Constitution, which guarantees complete freedom for the carrying out of religious worship, in no way constrains the religious life of believers and the Church in general…” Concerning the trials of clergy and believers, he said: “These were purely political trials which had nothing to do with the purely ecclesiastical life of religious organizations and the purely ecclesiastical work of individual clergy. No, the Church cannot complain about the authorities.” Sergius followed this up by announcing further huge contributions towards the outfitting of a tank unit in the name of Demetrius Donskoy.[85]
Stalin could see that Metropolitan Sergius’ church, far from being any kind of threat to his regime, was actually proving very useful in channelling Russian patriotic and religious feeling into pro-Soviet and anti-German channels. He also noted that the German policy of granting religious freedom in the occupied territories had won them a large measure of sympathy from the native populations.[86] And he realized that his own anti-religious policy, as well as alienating his own people, would continue to make the Western Allies lukewarm in their support for him, fighting, as they claimed to be, for freedom and democracy.[87]
For these and other reasons Stalin decided to enter into an alliance of mutual benefit with Metropolitan Sergius’ church; and on September 4, 1943, Metropolitans Sergius, Nicholas and Alexis – who with Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) constituted the whole hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate – were summoned to meet Stalin and Molotov in the Kremlin.
Anatolius Levitin-Krasnov has described this meeting as follows: “It was Molotov who began the conversation. He said that the Soviet government and Stalin personally would like to know the needs of the Church. While the other metropolitans remained silent, Metropolitan Sergius suddenly spoke up… The metropolitan pointed out the need for the mass re-opening of churches.. for the convocation of a church council and the election of a patriarch… for the general opening of seminaries, because there was a complete lack of clergy. Here Stalin suddenly broke his silence. ‘And why don’t you have cadres? Where have they disappeared?’ he said… looking at the bishops point blank… Everybody knew that ‘the cadres’ had perished in the camps. But Metropolitan Sergius… replied: ‘There are all sorts of reasons why we have no cadres. One of the reasons is that we train a person for the priesthood, and he becomes the Marshal of the Soviet Union.’ Stalin smiled with satisfaction: ‘Yes, of course. I am a seminarian…’ Stalin began to reminisce about his years at the seminary…[88] The chat lasted until 3 a.m. It was during this chat that the future Statute of the Russian Orthodox Church and the conditions in which she would operate were [orally] drafted.”[89]
As a result of this meeting, the Soviet church acquired a precarious, semi-legal existence – the right to open a bank account, to publish The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and a few booklets, to reopen some seminaries and churches, and, most important, to “elect” a new patriarch after the release from prison of some of the most malleable bishops. In return, it had to accept censorship and control of every aspect of its affairs by a newly constituted Council for Russian Orthodox Affairs.[90]
This body, later renamed the Council for Religious Affairs, was headed by an NKVD colonel, G. Karpov. Radzinsky comments: “Karpov was also head of the Fifth Department of the NKVD, whose assignment was to combat ‘the counterrevolutionary clergy.’ In the NKVD Karpov’s duty was to fight the church, in the council [-] to assist it…”[91]
At first, the council’s control was exercised downwards via the bishops in accordance with the Church’s rigidly centralized structure. From 1961, however, its control came to be exercised also from below, through the so-called dvadsatky, or parish councils of twenty laypeople each, who could hire and fire priests at will, regardless of the bishops. Thus for all its increased size and external power, the Moscow Patriarchate remained as much a puppet of Soviet power as ever.
As Vasilyeva and Knyshevsky write: “There is no doubt that Stalin’s ‘special organ’ and the government (to be more precise, the Stalin-Molotov duet) kept the patriarch under ‘eternal check’. Sergius understood this. And how could he not understand when, on November 1, 1943, the Council made it obligatory for all parishes to submit a monthly account with a detailed description of their activity in all its facets?”[92]
The first “patriarch” of the Soviet Church, Sergius, died soon after his enthronement, on May 2, 1944. In November, a council of bishops was convened to discuss the election of a new patriarch. Archbishop Luke (Voino-Yasenetsky) pointed out that according to the rules of the Council of 1917-18, the patriarch had to be elected by a secret ballot from a selection of candidates. However, his suggestion was rejected, and a single candidate, Metropolitan Alexis (Simansky) of Leningrad, the man who had annulled Metropolitan Benjamin’s anathema against the renovationist Vvedensky, was put forward. So in January he was duly “elected”, by 17 unanimous voices (Archbishop Luke was not invited to attend).[93]
Some have seen in the behaviour of Archbishop Luke proof that the Moscow Patriarchate was not completely sovietized at this time, and that its hierarchy still contained some true bishops. Unfortunately, however, there is clear evidence that Archbishop Luke, like the other hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate, was infected by the Soviet bacillus to such an extent that he deviated from Orthodox teaching. Thus he wrote that Christ’s commandment to love one’s neighbour did not apply “to the German murderers… it is absolutely impossible to love them.” And again: “How shall we now preach the Gospel of love and brotherhood to those who do not know Christ, but who have seen the satanic face of the German who claims to be a Christian?”[94] Such unchristian sentiments were possible only for one who allowed revolutionary morality to obscure the light of Christian truth. Indeed, Archbishop Luke (who has recently been canonized by the Moscow Patriarchate) is known to have said that if he had not been a priest he would have been a communist.[95]
In the period from the Stalin-Sergius pact of September, 1943 to the enthronement of the new “patriarch” Alexis in January, 1945, the 19 bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate (they had been only four at the beginning of the war) were more than doubled to 41. Now the great majority, not only of the Catacomb, but also of the sergianist hierarchs, had perished in the prisons or the camps before the Second World War. So when Sergius became “patriarch”, he (or rather the OGPU) had only hierarchs of the most dubious quality to call on in order to fill up the ranks of the depleted Moscow Patriarchate. Therefore the newly consecrated bishops were enrolled almost entirely from “repentant renovationists”, who, being presented for ordination by the atheist authorities, were received with a minimum of formalities, without regard for the rules of the council of 1925 regarding the reception of renovationists. (That the Moscow Patriarchate received renovationists into the church without the repentance laid down by Patriarch Tikhon is witnessed even by patriarchal sources.[96]) Of course, this did not trouble “Patriarch” Sergius, or his successor, “Patriarch” Alexis, who were both “repentant renovationists”. But it meant that the new, post-war generation of bishops was quite different from the pre-war generation in that they had already proved their heretical, renovationist cast of mind, and now returned to the neo-renovationist Moscow Patriarchate like a dog to his vomit (II Peter 2.22), forming a heretical core of bishops which controlled the patriarchate while being in complete obedience to the atheists.
The Catacomb Bishop “A.” (probably Anthony Galynsky-Mikhailovsky) wrote: “Very little time passed between September, 1943 and January, 1945. Therefore it is difficult to understand where 41 bishops came from instead of 19. In this respect our curiosity is satisfied by the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate for 1944. Looking through it, we see that the 19 bishops who existed in 1943, in 1944 rapidly gave birth to the rest, who became the members of the 1945 council.
“From the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate we learn that these hasty consecrations were carried out, in the overwhelming majority of cases, on renovationist protopriests.
“From September, 1943 to January, 1945, with a wave of a magic wand, all the renovationists suddenly repented before Metropolitan Sergius. The penitence was simplified, without the imposition of any demands on those who caused so much evil to the Holy Church. And in the shortest time the ‘penitent renovationists’ received a lofty dignity, places and ranks, in spite of the church canons and the decree about the reception of renovationists imposed [by Patriarch Tikhon] in 1925…
“As the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate informs us, the ‘episcopal’ consecrations before the ‘council’ of 1945 took place thus: the protopriest who had been recommended (undoubtedly by the civil authorities), and who was almost always from the ‘reunited’ renovationists or gregorians, was immediately tonsured into monasticism with a change in name and then, two or three days later, made a ‘hierarch of the Russian Church’.”[97]
The way in which the renovationist-sergianist hierarchs sharply turned course at a nod from the higher-ups was illustrated, in the coming years, by the Moscow Patriarchate’s sharp change in attitude towards ecumenism, from strictly anti-ecumenist in 1948 to pro-ecumenist only ten years later.
These rapid transformations throughout the Church hierarchy were made possible by the fact that the Church, having meekly submitted to the rule of the totalitarian dictator Stalin, was now in effect a totalitarian organization itself. All decisions in the Church depended effectively on the single will of the patriarch, and through him, of Stalin. For, as Fr. Sergius Gordun has written: “For decades the position of the Church was such that the voice of the clergy and laity could not be heard. In accordance with the document accepted by the Local Council of 1945, in questions requiring the agreement of the government of the USSR, the patriarch would confer with the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church attached to the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. The Statute did not even sketchily outline the range of questions in which the patriarch was bound to agree with the Council, which gave the latter the ability to exert unlimited control over church life.”[98]
Hieromonk Nectarius (Yashunsky) has described how Sergius introduced papism into the Moscow Patriarchate: “Metropolitan Sergius’ understanding of the Church (and therefore, of salvation) was heretical. He sincerely, it seems to us, believed that the Church was first of all an organization, an apparatus which could not function without administrative unity. Hence the striving to preserve her administrative unity at all costs, even at the cost of harming the truth contained in her.
“And this can be seen not only in the church politics he conducted, but also in the theology [he evolved] corresponding to it. In this context two of his works are especially indicative: ‘Is There a Vicar of Christ in the Church?’ (The Spiritual Heritage of Patriarch Sergius, Moscow, 1948) and ‘The Relationship of the Church to the Communities that have Separated from Her’ (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate).
In the first, although Metropolitan Sergius gives a negative answer to the question (first of all in relation to the Pope), this negative answer is not so much a matter of principle as of empiricism. The Pope is not the head of the Universal Church only because he is a heretic. But in principle Metropolitan Sergius considers it possible and even desirable for the whole of the Universal Church to be headed by one person. Moreover, in difficult times in the life of the Church this person can assume such privileges even if he does not have the corresponding canonical rights. And although the metropolitan declares that this universal leader is not the vicar of Christ, this declaration does not look sincere in the context both of his other theological opinions and of his actions in accordance with this theology.”
In the second cited article, Metropolitan Sergius explained the differences in the reception of heretics and schismatics, not on the basis of their objective confession of faith, but on the subjective (and therefore changeable) relationship of the Church’s first-hierarch to them. Thus “we receive the Latins into the Church through repentance, but those from the Karlovtsy schism through chrismation”. And so for Sergius, concludes Fr. Nectarius, “for salvation it is not the truth of Holy Orthodoxy but belonging to a legal church-administrative organization that is necessary”![99]
This heretical transformation of the patriarchate into a western-style papacy has been described by Fr. Vyacheslav Polosin thus: “If Metropolitan Sergius was ruled, not by personal avarice, but by a mistaken understanding of what was for the benefit of the Church, then it was evident that the theological foundation of such an understanding was mistaken, and even constituted a heresy concerning the Church herself and her activity in the world. We may suppose that these ideas were very close to the idea of the Filioque: since the Spirit proceeds not only from the Father, but also from the Son, that means that the vicar of the Son… can dispose of the Spirit, so that the Spirit acts through Him ex opere operato.. It follows necessarily that he who performs the sacraments of the Church, ‘the minister of the sacrament’, must automatically be ‘infallible’, for it is the infallible Spirit of God Who works through him and is inseparable from him… However, this Latin schema of the Church is significantly inferior to the schema and structure created by Metropolitan Sergius. In his schema there is no Council, or it is replaced by a formal assembly for the confirmation of decisions that have already been taken – on the model of the congresses of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
“The place of the Council in his structure of the Church is taken by something that is lacking in the Latins’ scheme – Soviet power, loyalty to which becomes something in the nature of a dogma… This scheme became possible because it was prepared by Russian history. But if the Orthodox tsar and the Orthodox procurator to some extent constituted a ‘small Council’, which in its general direction did not contradict.. the mind-set of the majority of believers, with the change in the world-view of those came to the helm of Soviet power this scheme acquired a heretical character, since the decisions of the central ecclesiastical authorities, which were associated in the minds of the people with the will of the Spirit of God, came to be determined neither by a large nor by a small Council, but by the will of those who wanted to annihilate the very idea of God (the official aim of the second ‘godless’ five-year-plan was to make the people forget even the word ‘God’). Thus at the source of the Truth, instead of the revelation of the will of the Holy Spirit, a deadly poison was substituted… The Moscow Patriarchate, in entrusting itself to the evil, God-fighting will of the Bolsheviks instead of the conciliar will of the Spirit, showed itself to be image of the terrible deception of unbelief in the omnipotence and Divinity of Christ, Who alone can save and preserve the Church and Who gave the unlying promise that ‘the gates of hell will not overcome her… The substitution of this faith by the vain hope in one’s own human powers, which can save the Church in that the Spirit works through them, is not in accord with the canons and Tradition of the Church, but ex opere operato proceeds from the ‘infallible’ top of the hierarchical structure.”[100]
The power over the Church that the 1945 council gave to the atheists was revealed in 1974 in a secret report to the Central Committee by the modern successor of the Council for Religious Affairs: “The Synod [of the Moscow Patriarchate] is under the control of the [Soviet government’s] Council for Religious Affairs. The question of the selection and placing of its permanent members was and remains completely in the hands of the Council, and the candidature of the non-permanent members is also agreed beforehand with responsible members of the Council. All issues which are to be discussed at the Synod are first discussed by Patriarch Pimen and the permanent members of the Synod with the leaders of the Council and in its departments, and the final ‘Decisions (Opredeleniya) of the Holy Synod’ are also agreed.”[101]
After the enthronement of Alexis, writes Alexeyev, “Stalin laid upon the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church the duty of congratulating Alexis on his election in the name of the head of the government, and of giving him a commemorative present. The value of the gift was determined at 25-30,000 rubles. Stalin loved to give valuable presents. It was also decided to ‘show gratitude’ to the foreign bishops for their participation in the Council. The commissariat was told to hand over 42 objects from the depositories of the Moscow museums and 28 from the Zagorsk state museum – mainly objects used in Orthodox worship – which were used as gifts for the Eastern Patriarchs. Thus, for example, Patriarch Christopher of Alexandria was given a golden panagia with valuable stones… Naturally, the patriarchs were expected to reciprocate, and they hastened to express the main thing – praise… Patriarch Christopher of Alexandria said: “Marshal Stalin,… under whose leadership the military operations have been conducted on an unprecedented scale, has for this purpose an abundance of divine grace and blessing”.(!!!)”[102]
After the 1945 council, the Soviet Church began a powerful diplomatic offensive designed to convince believers abroad of the legitimacy of the Soviet State and Church. Thus in 1945, while Metropolitan Nicholas was being feted in Britain, Patriarch Alexis visited the Middle East, where he acted like a secular representative of the Soviet government. For example, he intervened in the Greek civil war by calling on the Greek people to support the Communists and reject the Royalists and British Imperialists (Stalin himself adopted a more neutral stance).
The Soviet Church capitalized on the wave of pro-Soviet feeling following on the victories of the Red Army to split the Russian émigré communities in several countries, removing several dioceses from the jurisidiction of the Russian Church Abroad. Thus in Iran Bishop John of Urmia joined Moscow. In Palestine, the Soviets, supported by the new Israeli government, forcibly seized some ROCA churches.[103] In China all the Russian bishops except one – the renowned wonderworker John (Maximovich) of Shanghai – accepted Soviet passports and returned to the Moscow Patriarchate.[104] In Bulgaria, Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) did the same – although, according to his spiritual daughter, Abbess Seraphima (Lieven), he continued to call the Soviet power “satanic” and to oppose the infiltration of communist influence into the Bulgarian Church.
Metropolitan Valentine of Suzdal and Vladimir writes: “I remember the year 1956, the Dormition men’s monastery in Odessa, where I was an unwilling witness as there returned from the camps and prisons, having served their terms, those hierarchs who returned to Russia after the war so as to unite with the ‘Mother Church’ at the call of Stalin’s government and the Moscow patriarchate: ‘the Homeland has forgiven you, the Homeland calls you!’ In 1946 they trustingly entered the USSR, and were all immediately captured and incarcerated for 10 years, while the ‘Mother Church’ was silent, not raising her voice in defence of those whom she had beckoned into the trap. In order to be ‘re-established’ in their hierarchical rank, they had to accept and chant hymns to Sergianism, and accept the Soviet patriarch. And what then? Some of them ended their lives under house arrest, others in monastery prisons, while others soon departed for eternity.”[105]
In Western Europe the situation was no better. The Paris metropolia, or “Eulogians” (after their leader, Metropolitan Eulogius), had become infected with the heresy of sophiology, which led to a schism with the ROCA as early as 1927. For several years it could not make up its mind whether to join Moscow or Constantinople, but finally settled for Constantinople because the Greeks did not impose any political demands and were more tolerant of the Parisians’ heresies. In America, meanwhile, two bishops joined Moscow, and then, at the council of Cleveland in November, 1946, four out of the eight bishops of the American metropolia returned to the patriarchate before again separating (without returning to ROCA) when they saw what submission to the Moscow Patriarchate really meant.
“In preparation for the council,” writes Andreyev, “it was very interesting and characteristic that the same persons who fought for the Moscow jurisdiction and the split from the [ROCA] Synod and ‘helped’ Metropolitan Eulogius in Europe, moved from Paris to America and began to ‘help’ Metropolitan Theophilus [the leader of the American Metropolia]. With unusual knowledge of church matters, these professors of engineering and other fine arts began to state authoritatively that ‘the Moscow Patriarchate has not deviated from the dogmas, canons and rites of Orthodoxy in any way, and the politics conducted by its head, even though it is condemned today by many, cannot have a decisive influence on its canonical position.’ In this way the Cleveland council prepared itself by only a formal cooperation with the Synod Abroad, and then, completely backing down from its position, pronounced this resolution: ‘We are passing the resolution to request His Holiness, the Patriarch of Moscow, to reunite us to his bosom and be our spiritual father, under the stipulation that we preserve our full autonomy, which exists at the present time. Since the hierarchical authority of the patriarchate is incompatible with the hierarchical authority of the Synod Abroad of the Russian Orthodox Church, the American Church is continuing any administrative subordination to the Synod Abroad.”[106]
However, in the confusion that took place in Europe after the end of the Second World War, many unworthy bishops and priests (some of them Soviet agents) succeeded in infiltrating themselves into the ROCA’s ranks. Already during the war, the renovationist “Bishops” Ignatius (Zhebrovsky) and Nicholas (Avtonomov) had been received, it appears, with the minimum of formalities, and appointed to the sees of Vienna and Munich, respectively, before being removed at the insistence of zealous laymen.[107] And the former renovationist and leading ROCA hierarch in Western Europe during the war, Metropolitan Seraphim (Lyade) twice secretly petitioned to be received into the MP “in his existing rank” before his death in 1950 – but was refused.[108] Another senior bishop, Metropolitan Seraphim (Lukyanov) joined to the MP, was received back in his existing orders, and then returned again for good in 1954. Again, among the twelve Belorussian and Ukrainian bishops who were received “in their existing rank” by the ROCA in 1946, at least one proved to be a Judas – Archbishop Panteleimon (Rudyk), whose immorality left a trail of destruction in various countries before he, too, returned to the MP.
In retrospect, it is easy to say that the ROCA hierarchs should have been stricter in checking the candidates to the episcopate, and stricter in their method of receiving those of renovationist or sergianist orders. But in the confusion prevailing after the war, when even the first hierarch, Metropolitan Anastasy, had to flee from Serbia at short notice without the Church’s files, that was easier said than done. The main task was to provide pastors for the vast numbers of Russian “DPs” who found themselves in the western zones of occupation; and it was only natural to take those hierarchs, true or false, who presented themselves.
At the same time, it must be admitted that part of the reason for the infiltration of so many traitors into the ranks of the ROCA was a considerable softening in her stance towards the Moscow Patriarchate since the early 1930s. This was clearly discernible for the first time in the Epistle of the Hierarchical Council of the ROCA in 1933, which, according to Archbishop Nikon of Washington, was penned by Metropolitan Anastassy: “As regards relations toward the Mother Church, the Russian ecclesial organization abroad has considered itself no more than a branch of the latter, bound organically to the whole body of the Church of Russia, even though temporarily deprived only of outward unity with the latter in ecclesiastical administration.”
“To the present day the entire Church organization abroad has considered and still considers itself an extraordinary and temporary institution, which must be abolished without delay after the restoration of normal social and ecclesiastical life in Russia.”
“We are taking fully into
account the extraordinary difficulties of the position of Metropolitan Sergius,
who is now the de facto head of the Church of Russia, and are aware of
the heavy burden of responsibility for the fate of the latter, which lies upon
him. No one, therefore, has the audacity to accuse him for the mere attempt to
enter into dialogue with the Soviet regime so as to obtain legal standing for
the Church of Russia. Not without foundation does the deputy locum tenens of
the Patriarchal Throne say in his aforementioned Declaration that only
‘armchair dreamers can think that such a vast community as our Orthodox Church,
with all its organization, can exist peacefully in a country while walling
itself off from the authorities.’ While the church exists on earth, it remains
closely bound up with the fates of human society and cannot be imagined outside
time and space. It is impossible for it to refrain from all contact with a
powerful societal organization such as the government; otherwise it would have
to leave the world.”[109]
This liberal line is evident also in the Resolution of the Hierarchical Council of the ROCA in 1938, with Metropolitan Anastasy again its main representative:
“There was DISCUSSION about concelebration with clergy found in the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod.
“METROPOLITAN ANASTASSY points out that clergy who arrive from Russia who had been part of the named jurisdiction are immediately allowed into prayerful communion, and he brings up the opinion of Metropolitan Kyrill, found in his Epistle printed in Church Life, that the sin of Metropolitan Sergius does not extend to the clergy subordinate to him.
“IT WAS RESOLVED: To recognize that there are no obstacles to prayerful communion and concelebration with the clergy of Metropolitan Sergius.”
Again, in its Hierarchical Council in 1946, it was declared by all the bishops on May 10: “The Higher Church Administration in Russia in the person of the current Head of the Russian Church Patriarch Alexey has more than once already addressed the bishops abroad with an exhortation to enter into canonical submission to the patriarchate, but, listening to the directions of our pastoral conscience, we do not find it morally possible to acquiesce to these appeals as long as the Higher Church Administration in Russia is found in an unnatural union with the atheistic power and as long as the whole Russian Church is deprived of true freedom, which is inherent in it by its Divine nature”.
These documents were quoted in 2002 by Protopriest Alexander Lebedev, a leading proponent of the union of the ROCOR with Moscow, in order to demonstrate that the ROCOR’s position in relation to Moscow had always been “condescending”. As a general statement, this is not true. But as a statement with regard to the policy under Metropolitan Anastasy’s presidency, it is broadly correct.
Several local Orthodox Churches, such as the Serbian, the Bulgarian and the Romanian, were now brought within the Soviet Church’s orbit. The Uniate Church of Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Moscow Patriarchate at the “Reunion council” of Lvov in 1946, thus forcing those uniate bishops and priests who refused to join into an underground situation until the Gorbachev era. A little later the uniates of Czechoslovakia, too, were forced into the Moscow Patriarchate, and those of Romania into the Romanian Patriarchate.
This process was consolidated by the council held in Moscow in July, 1948, which was attended by representatives of the Constantinopolitan, Antiochian, Alexandrian, Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, Polish and Georgian Churches (the Georgian Church had been granted autocephaly by Moscow shortly after the Stalin-Sergius pact in 1943). Only the Jerusalem patriarchate, the Russian Church Abroad and the True Orthodox Churches of Russia, Greece, Cyprus and Romania were not represented. Here, the glorification of the Moscow Patriarchate went together with a denunciation of the Catholic and Protestant West and a condemnation of the ecumenical movement, which had received a new lease of life at the First General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam that year.
It is now known that all the decisions of the council were planned a year and a half before by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.[110] Moreover, the hierarchs’ special epistle clearly shows that their motives were purely political: “The world is going through a stormy time in which the irreconcilable differences between the Catholic and rationalist-Protestant West, on the one hand, and the Orthodox East, on the other, are clearly manifest… We servants of the Orthodox Church have been painfully impressed by the fact that those who are stirring up a new war are children of the Christian Catholic and Protestant world. We are deeply grieved that from the stronghold of Catholicism, the Vatican, and the nest of Protestantism, America, instead of the voice of peace and Christian love we hear blessing of a new war and hymns in praise of atomic bombs and such-like inventions, which are designed for the destruction of human life. All Christians, regardless of nation and creed, cannot help blaming the Vatican for this policy. We fervently beseech the Chief Pastor, our Lord Jesus Christ, that He enlighten the Catholic hierarchy with the light of His Divine teaching and help it to realize the abyss of its sinful fall.”[111]
The most theological contribution to this council came from Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev) of Boguchar (Bulgaria). He prepared three reports: against the ecumenical movement, on the old and new calendars, and on the Anglican hierarchy. Seraphim expressed a “particular opinion” on the calendar question, considering the council’s resolution on this question to have been inadequate. In his report against Ecumenism he stressed that the presence of Orthodox representatives at ecumenical conferences, even as observors, constituted apostasy from Holy Orthodoxy. Protopriest G. Razumovsky also spoke well: “The Russian Orthodox Church,” he said, “had always taught and still teaches that Pentecost, or the descent of the Holy Spirit, has already taken place and that the Christians do not have to wait for a new appearance of the Holy Spirit, but the glorious Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The diminution of the significance of the single sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the prophecy of a future ‘third hour’, in which the expected Kingdom of the Holy Spirit will be revealed is characteristic of the teaching of the Masons and the heretics; while the newly revealed prophecy of the expected Ecumenical Pentecost can be nothing other than an old echo of the false teaching of these deceived heretics.”[112]
While chastising the West for its political sins, the patriarchate continued to glorify Stalin in the most shameful way, having truly become the State Church of the Bolshevik regime. Already during the war, the cult of Stalin, probably the greatest persecutor in the history of the Church, reached idolatrous proportions. He was “the protector of the Church”, “the new Constantine”. Thus Fr. Gleb Yakunin writes: “From the beginning of the war and the church ‘renaissance’ that followed it, the feeling became stronger in the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate that a wonderful act of Divine Providence in the historical process had happened in Russia. God’s instrument in this process was, in their opinion, the ‘wise, God-established’, ‘God-given Supreme Leader’.”[113]
Together with the cult of Stalin went the enthusiastic acceptance of communist ideology. Thus just after the war the MP expressed itself as follows concerning the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR: “On this day in all the cathedrals, churches and monasteries of our country there will be offered the bloodless Sacrifice, whose beginning was laid by Him Who brought into the world the ideas of love, justice and equality. Deeply moved church-servers will come out onto the ambons and bless their children to hurry from the churches to the voting urns. They will bless them to cast their votes for the candidates of the bloc of communists… They themselves will cast their votes… The ideal of such a person is – Stalin…”[114]
However, the apotheosis of the Moscow Patriarchate’s “cult of the personality” of Stalin came on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday in 1949, when a “Greeting to the Leader of the peoples of the USSR” was addressed to Stalin in the name of the whole Church and published in The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate (1949, N 12). “Without the slightest hesitation,” write Fr. Gleb Yakunin and a group of Orthodox Christians, “we can call this address the most shameful document ever composed in the name of the Church in the whole history of the existence of Christianity and still more in the thousand-year history of Christianity in Rus’.”[115]
Again, on the day after Stalin’s death in March, 1953, Patriarch Alexis wrote to the USSR Council of Ministers: “In my own name and in the name of the Russian Orthodox Church I express my deepest and sincerest condolences on the death of the unforgettable Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, the great builder of the people’s happiness. His death is a heavy grief for our Fatherland and all the peoples who dwell in it. His death has been taken with deep grief by the whole of the Russian Orthodox Church, which will never forget his benevolent attitude towards the needs of the Church. His radiant memory will never be erased from our hearts. Our Church intones ‘eternal memory’ to him with a special feeling of unceasing love.”[116]
Again, in 1955 he declared: “The Russian Orthodox Church supports the totally peaceful foreign policy of our government, not because the Church allegedly lacks freedom, but because Soviet policy is just and corresponds to the Christian ideals which the Church preaches.”[117]
Contrary to what is often believed, Stalin never changed his basic hostility to the Church. In 1947 he wrote to Suslov: “Do not forget about atheistic propaganda among the people”. The bloodletting in the camps continued; and from 1947 to 1953 not one church was opened, while more than 700 were subject to closure…[118]
In response to the MP’s description of Stalin as “the chosen one of the Lord, who leads our fatherland to prosperity and glory”, Metropolitan Anastasy, first-hierarch of the ROCA, wrote that this was the point “where the subservience of man borders already on blasphemy. Really – can one tolerate that a person stained with blood from head to foot, covered with crimes like leprosy and poisoned deeply with the poison of godlessness, should be named ‘the chosen of the Lord’, could be destined to lead our homeland ‘to prosperity and glory’? Does this not amount to casting slander and abuse on God the Most High Himself, Who, in such a case, would be responsible for all the evil that has been going on already for many years in our land ruled by the Bolsheviks headed by Stalin? The atom bomb, and all the other destructive means invented by modern technology, are indeed less dangerous than the moral disintegration which the highest representatives of the civil and church authorities have put into the Russian soul by their example. The breaking of the atom brings with it only physical devastation and destruction, whereas the corruption of the mind, heart and will entails the spiritual death of a whole nation, after which there is no resurrection.”[119]
Thus the ultimate intention of the authorities – the complete destruction of the Church – remained unchanged in the post-war period. This fact was forcibly re-imposed upon the consciousness of believers in 1959-64, when most of the seminaries and monasteries and 12-15,000 of the parish churches, were closed. The Khrushchev persecution demonstrated how fragile and one-sided was the State-Church accord, and how easily the State’s concessions could be retracted without compunction or compensation.[120]
Victor Aksyuchits writes: “After the Stalinist epoch ideology was forced to abandon its policy of total attack within the country and change to a tactic combining concessions with single-minded regional conquests. Destalinisation and the Khrushchev thaw expressed the necessity of once more narrowing the sphere of ideological pressure for the sake of preserving the power of communism. The authorities tried by all means to parasitize on the newly liberated realities – the strictly regulated democratization of some spheres of life. But the laws of the preservation of communism demand, in proportion to the weakening of ideological control in separate spheres, an increase in pressure on the spiritual centre of reality: cruel persecutions began against the Church and Christians. Their plan was completely to annihilate religion, but the authorities were forced to stop once again in the face of the prospect of massive martyrdom, which in the new historical situation could have severely undermined its international prestige and the internal strength of the USSR. Communism was once again forced to change its tactics and the direction of its blows.
“In the Moscow Church the authorities introduced the 1961 reform of unhappy memory, which presented them with new possibilities for destroying the organism of the Church from within. The priests were completely separated from the economic and financial administration of the parishes, and were only hired by agreement as ‘servants of the cult’ for ‘the satisfaction of religious needs’. The diocesan organs of administration of the life of the parishes were suspended… Now the atheist authorities not only carried out the ‘registration’ of the priests and ‘the executive organs’, but also took complete control of the economy and finances of the parishes, appointing the wardens and treasurers, and using all their rights, naturally, to promote the atheists’ aim of destroying the Church.”[121]
Patriarch Alexis cooperated both with the 1961 statute on the parishes and with other measures harmful to the Church during the Khrushchev persecution.[122] However, the greatest service that the patriarchate rendered to the Soviets in the post-war period was probably its entrance into the ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches in December, 1960.
We have seen that, as late as the Moscow council of 1948, the Moscow Patriarchate, in obedience to its communist masters, had adopted an anti-western and anti-ecumenical position. However, this position began to change in the late 1950s, and as Fr. Sergius Gordun has demonstrated on the basis of recently declassified documents from the Soviet Council of Religious Affairs, the patriarchate was pushed into joining the WCC by the atheist head of the Council for Religious Affairs.
Thus on January 16, 1958, Metropolitan Nicholas asked the Council how he was to reply to the suggestion of the WCC general secretary that he meet representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. Comrade Karpov, head of the Council for Religious Affairs, said that he should reply that they in principle agreed to a meeting in June-July of that year. Another important meeting took place between the new head of the Council for Religious Affairs, Kuroyedov, and Patriarch Alexis on June 15, 1960. “Kuroyedov declared that he had carefully studied the external activities of the Patriarchate and he had come to conclusion that the situation was quite unsatisfactory. ‘In recent years the Patriarchate has not undertaken a single major initiative for the unification of the Orthodox Churches around the Russian Orthodox Church headed by the Moscow Patriarchate – initiatives, that is, aimed at exposing the reactionary activities of the Pope of Rome and the intensification of the struggle for peace. The Patriarchate is not using those huge opportunities which she enjoys; she has not undertaken a single major action abroad… The Russian Orthodox Church is not emerging as a unifying centre for the Orthodox Churches of the world, usually she adopts a passive stance and only weakly exposes the slanderous propaganda concerning the position of religion and the Church in our country… The Council recommended to Metropolitan Nicholas that he work out suggestions for intensifying external work. However, Metropolitan Nicholas has not fulfilled this request of the Council and has put forward suggestions which in no way correspond to the requirements discussed with the metropolitan in this regard.’ Then Kuroyedov suggested that Metropolitan Nicholas be released from his duties as president of the Department of Foreign Relations and that they be imposed on another, more fitting person.”
The “suggestion” was accepted, Metropolitan Nicholas suddenly died (presumed murdered), and the new foreign relations supremo turned out to be Archimandrite Nicodemus (Rotov), whom we now know to have been a KGB agent with the code-name “Adamant” and a secret Catholic bishop entrusted by the Pope with the leadership of all the Catholics in the USSR![123]
Fr. Sergius continues: “The personality of Archimandrite Nicodemus (Rotov), later Metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod, is linked with the change in the position of the Moscow Patriarchate in relation to the ecumenical movement. As is well known, the Conference of the heads and representatives of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches, which took place in Moscow in 1948, accepted a resolution declaring that ‘the aims of the ecumenical movement… do not correspond to the ideals of Christianity and the tasks of the Church of Christ as those are understood by the Orthodox Church’. In this connection particular mention was made of the ecumenical movement’s turn towards involvement in social and political life, which was not acceptable for Orthodoxy. This position was maintained by the Moscow Patriarchate until 1960. In a conversation which took place on April 2, 1959, his Holiness Patriarch Alexis informed the Council about the attitude of the Russian Church to the ecumenical movement, and declared that she intended gradually to increase her links with the World Council of Churches and to send her observers to its most important conferences, but would not become a member of this organization. However, a year and a half later this position changed. In the notes of a conversation which took place between Patriarch Alexis and V.A. Kuroyedov on September 15, 1960, there is the following phrase: ‘The Patriarch accepted the recommendation of the Council concerning the entry of the Russian Orthodox Church into the membership of the World Council of Churches and evaluated this as a major action of the Russian Orthodox Church in its activities abroad.’ What was the aim of the Council for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church in recommending that the Russian Church enter the World Council of Churches? To conceal, it would seem, the anti-ecclesiastical policy of the Soviet government. Having cornered the Church, the Council wanted to create the image of a free and active Russian Church abroad…”[124]
The KGB-enforced entry of the Moscow Patriarchate into the WCC had an immediate and devastating effect on the Orthodox position. For the Soviets not only constituted numerically the largest single Church in the WCC; they also controlled, through the KGB, all the other delegates from behind the iron curtain.
Communism and Ecumenism therefore met in the unholy union of “Ecucommunism”.[125] As Deacon Andrew Kurayev writes: “Sergianism and Ecumenism intertwined. It was precisely on the instructions of the authorities that our hierarchy conducted its ecumenical activity, and it was precisely in the course of their work abroad that clergy who had been enrolled into the KGB were checked out for loyalty.”[126]
The patriarchate entered the WCC at the Fourth General Assembly in New Delhi in December, 1960. Three months before that, however, the Orthodox Churches in the WCC met on Rhodes to establish a catalogue of topics to be discussed at a future Pan-Orthodox Council. This was used by the Moscow Patriarchate as a way of ensuring that no topic which might prove embarrassing to the Soviet government would be discussed.
For, as Gordienko and Novikov write, “in the course of the debate on the catalogue, the Moscow Patriarchate’s delegation suggested the removal of some of the subjects (The Development of Internal and External Missionary Work, The Methods of Fighting Atheism and False Doctrines Like Theosophy, Spiritism, Freemasonry, etc.) and the addition of some others (Cooperation between the Local Orthodox Churches in the Realisation of the Christian Ideas of Peace, Fraternity and Love among Peoples, Orthodoxy and Racial Discrimination, Orthodoxy and the Tasks of Christians in Regions of Rapid Social Change)… Besides working out the topics for the future Pre-Council, the First Conference passed the decision ‘On the Study of Ways for Achieving Closer Contacts and Unity of Churches in a Pan-Orthodox Perspective’, envisaging the search for contacts with Ancient Eastern (non-Chalcedonian) Churches (Monophysites), the Old Catholic, Anglican, Catholic, and Protestant Churches, as well as the World Council of Churches.”[127]
In other words, the Orthodox henceforth were to abandon the struggle against Atheism, Freemasonry and other false religions, and were to engage in dialogue towards union with all the Christian heretics – while at the same time persecuting the True Orthodox and using ecumenical forums to further the ends of Soviet foreign policy in its struggle with the Capitalist West![128]
This “Communist Christianity” again appeared in an encyclical of the patriarchate “in connection with the Great October Socialist Revolution”, which supposedly “turned into reality the dreams of many generations of people. It made all the natural riches of the land and means of production into the inheritance of the people. It changed the very essence of human relations, making all our citizens equal and excluding from our society any possibility of enmity between peoples of difference races and nationalities, of different persuasions, faiths and social conditions.”[129]
Meanwhile, the Catacomb Church continued to exist, albeit with extreme difficulty. On July 7, 1944, Beria wrote to Stalin asking permission for the deportation of 1,673 Catacomb Christians from the Ryazan, Voronezh and Orel regions to Siberia. He described the Catacomb Christians as “leading a parasitical way of life, not paying taxes, refusing to fulfil their obligations and service, and forbidding their children to go to school.”[130]
According to Andreyev, “the Underground or Catacomb Church in Soviet Russia underwent her hardest trials after February 4th, 1945, that is, after the enthronement of the Soviet Patriarch Alexis. Those who did not recognize him were sentenced to new terms of imprisonment and were sometimes shot. Those who did recognize him and gave their signature to that effect were often liberated before their terms expired and received appointments… All secret priests detected in the Soviet zone of Germany were shot. All priests who did not recognize Patriarch Alexis were also shot…”[131]
Towards the end of the war the NKVD GULAG administration made the following decisions: “1. To enrol qualified agents from among the prisoners who are churchmen and sectarians, ordering them to uncover the facts concerning the anti-Soviet activity of these prisoners. 2. In the process of the agents’ work on the prisoners, to uncover their illegal links with those in freedom and coordinate the work of these links with the corresponding organs of the NKVD.”
As a result of these instructions, many catacomb organizations among the prisoners were liquidated. For example, “in the Ukhtoizhemsky ITL an anti-Soviet group of churchmen prisoners was liquidated. One of the leaders of this group, the priest Ushakov, composed prayers and distributed them among the prisoners. It turned out that he had illegal links with a Bishop Galynsky [one of the most important Catacomb hierarchs]”[132]
Some important Catacomb bishops, such as Athanasius (Sakharov) of Kovrov and the Leningrad Protopriest Basil Veryuzhsky, apostasised to the Soviet church at this time. Only in the central regions of Tambov, Lipetsk, Ryazan and Voronezh was there a certain increase in catacomb activity, which was remarkable also for the large number of young people who took leading positions in the movement.[133] But a new wave of persecution in the early 1950s sharply reduced the numbers of Catacomb Christians active in these regions, too.
And so the True Christians retreated deeper and deeper into the catacombs, fearing false brethren and abandoning all hope of influencing the broad masses of the people in the near future. The greatest destroyers remained the patriarchal priests. Thus Archbishop Lazarus writes: “The catacomb believers feared the Moscow Patriarchate priests even more than the police. Whenever a priest came for some reason or other, he was met by a feeling of dread. The catacomb people would say, ‘A red detective has come.’ He was sent deliberately, and he was obliged to report everything to the authorities. Not infrequently, hierarchs and priests told the people outright, directly from the ambon, ‘Look around, Orthodox people. There are those who do not come to church. Find out who they are and report to us; these are enemies of the Soviet regime who stand in the way of the building of Socialism.’ We were very much afraid of these sergianist-oriented priests.”[134]
However, in the 1950s there was still quite a large net of catacomb communities served by many wandering priests and a few holy bishops, such as Peter (Ladygin) (+1957) and Barnabas (Belyaev) (+1963).[135]
The sufferings of the Catacomb
priests and believers is illustrated by the life of a Catacomb priest from
Vyatka province, who was on the run from the authorities for nearly fifty
years: “Can a man living in freedom stand what a hunted man experiences…? It is
hard for us to understand now how real and terrible that threat was. 40 people suffered for Fr. Nicetas at
one time. Batyushka went from place to place, they couldn’t catch him, so they
began to arrest his spiritual children. One woman was arrested just for giving
him some cream. It seems that in her simplicity she didn’t think of hiding that
from the persecutors. They tortured those whom they arrested, beat them,
demanding the addresses where batyushka was hiding.
“Among those arrested was Matushka
Catherine Golovanova. She was arrested twice. The first time they came and
tried to torture her to reveal where Fr. Nicetas was; two policmen dressed in
civil clothes took her to the house which they had under surveillance – an
elderly man and his wife were living there. On seeing matushka, they rejoiced,
and the wife, thinking that matushka was accompanied by her own people, started
to talk joyfully. Matushka couldn’t stop her because the police were careful
that she not give her any sign. The woman gave away the secret of Fr. Nicetas’
whereabouts: ‘O Matushka, dear one, how are you? You know, we accompanied Fr.
Nicetas like this: we hung a bag full of shoes on him and he went…’ Matushka
finally succeeded in winking at her, the woman stopped short. ‘Well, why have
you stopped?’ asked the searchers. ‘I remember nothing…’ ‘We’ll lean on you now
– you’ll remember.’ They took off their outer clothing, under which, as under a
sheep skin, was the inner wolf – policeman’s uniforms and guns. But it was
already late, and the exhausted police wanted to go to sleep. One was dozing at
the table, the other was at the threshold – he was evidently guarding the door
to prevent matushka running away. Matushka waited and waited, then she opened a
window and ran away. She was on the run for half a year, and then they arrested
her again. ‘Well, then,” they said, “how did you run away?’ ‘How? Well, they
were sleeping and I thought: why should I simply sit here, I opened the window
and left.’ ‘You did well,’ they said. But now they didn’t doze. They condemned
all forty at one go (according to another source – thirty at the beginning).
Matushka Golovanova was the chief culprit. They really gave it to her at the
interrogation: many years later Matushka S. saw scars from the interrogations
on her back.
“They tortured them so much that
some of them couldn’t stand it and revealed the addresses where they could find
Fr. Nicetas; but it seems that the pursuers had so despaired of catching Fr.
Nicetas that they didn’t believe them even when they told them the truth.
“At the trial one woman in her
simplicity said: ‘If you let me go, I’ll go to Fr. Nicetas again the same day.’
Not believing her, they said: ‘We’ve been looking for him for so many years
without finding him, and you’ll find where he is in one day?!’
“They gave Fr. Nicetas’ parishioners
sentences of many years in length. Matushka Golovanova was given twelve years,
two of them in a lock-up…
“While Fr. Nicetas’ spiritual children were going to suffer, he himself had another thirty years of suffering and wanderings ahead of him. And he was surrounded by the sufferings of the people; the war tormented Russia, their own Russian people tormented the Russian people.”[136]
Many Catacomb Christians were thrown out of their homes and forced to live in dug-outs eating grass and roots. Heavy extra taxes were imposed on them and they were forced to work on dangerous sites.[137] In the war they had refused to join the Red Army, and after the war they sometimes refused even to use electricity and radio, considering it to be “Ilyich’s lamp” and “a gift of the Antichrist”. They refused to allow their children to be taught Marxism-Leninism or join the pioneer and komsomol movements, and so often had their children taken away from them.[138]
By the beginning of the 1960s, however, the pressure was beginning to wane. Thus “when, in 1961,” writes Archbishop Lazarus, “the priests’ rights were taken away from them and given to the church council, they quieted down and it was easier for us; at least we could get to our priests and priests began more freely to come to us, to confess and commune us. From 1961 the Moscow Patriarchate calmed down in its attitude towards us. Of course, when foreigners asked representatives of the M.P., ‘Does a catacomb church exist?’ the answer was always ‘No’. That was a lie. There were catacomb believers all over Russia, just as there are today…”[139]
The relaxation of pressure from the patriarchate was almost certainly a result of the fact that the patriarchate was now the object of persecution itself. Although the numbers of believers killed and imprisoned was only a fraction of the numbers in earlier persecutions, the Khrushchev persecution of 1959-64 closed some thousands of patriarchal churches and forced many patriarchal priests to serve illegally. These “pseudo-catacombs”, as one catacomb bishop has called them, did not merge with the True Orthodox Church and continued to commemorate the Soviet patriarch.[140]
Another aspect of the Khrushchev offensive against religion was the infiltration of agents into the official church. Anatoly Golitsyn, who defected from the KGB in 1961, writes: “As part of the programme to destroy religion from within, the KGB, in the late 1950s, started sending dedicated young Communists to ecclesiastical academies and seminaries to train them as future church leaders. These young Communists joined the Church, not at the call of their consciences to serve God, but at the call of the Communist Party in order to serve that Party and to implements its general in the struggle against religion.”[141]
However, another government measure of this period served to swell the numbers of the True Orthodox Church considerably. In 1961 new legislation against secret Christians was passed, of which the most important was the legislation on passports.
Now passportisation had been introduced into the Soviet Union only in 1932, and only for the most urbanized areas. Already then it was used as a means of winkling out Catacomb Christians. Thus Shkvarovsky writes: “Completing their liquidation of the Josephites, there was a meeting of regional inspectors for cultic matters on March 16, 1933, at a time when passportisation was being introduced. The meeting decided, on the orders of the OGPU, ‘not to give passports to servants of the cult of the Josephite confession of faith’, which meant automatic expulsion from Leningrad. Similar things happened in other major cities of the USSR.”[142]
Catacomb hierarchs did not bless their spiritual children to take passports because in filling in the forms the social origins and record of Christians was revealed, making them liable to persecution.[143] Also Catacomb Christians did not want to receive what they considered to be the seal of the Antichrist, or to declare themselves citizens of the antichristian kingdom.
In the 1930s the peasants had not been given passports but were chained to the land which they worked. They were herded into the collective farms and forced to do various things against their conscience, such as vote for the communist officials who had destroyed their way of life and their churches. Those who refused to do this – refusals were particularly common in the Lipetsk, Tambov and Voronezh areas – were rigorously persecuted, and often left to die of hunger. Thus passportisation in the cities and collectivisation in the countryside constituted two forms of the Bolsheviks’ struggle to force everyone in the country to accept the Soviet ideology.
On May 4, 1961, however, the Soviet government issued its decree on “parasitism” and introduced its campaign for general passportisation. In local papers throughout the country it was announced that, in order to receive a Soviet passport, a citizen of the USSR would have to recognize all the laws of Soviet power, past and present, beginning from Lenin’s decrees. Since this involved, in effect, a recognition of all the crimes of Soviet power, a movement arose to reject Soviet passports, a movement which was centred mainly in the country areas among those peasants and their families who had rejected collectivization in the 1930s.
E.A. Petrova writes: “Protests against general passportisation arose among Christians throughout the vast country. A huge number of secret Christians who had passports began to reject, destroy and burn them and loudly, for all to hear, renounce Soviet citizenship. Many Christians from the patriarchal church also gave in their passports. There were cases in which as many as 200 people at one time went up to the local soviet and gave in their passports. In one day the whole of a Christian community near Tashkent gave in 100 passports at once. Communities in Kemerovo and Novosibirsk provinces gave in their passports, and Christians in the Altai area burned their passports… Protests against general passportisation broke out in Belorussia, in the Ukraine, and in the Voronezh, Tambov and Ryazan provinces… Christians who renounced their Soviet passports began to be seized, imprisoned and exiled. But in spite of these repressions the movement of the passportless Christians grew and became stronger. It was precisely in these years that the Catacomb Church received a major influx from Christians of the patriarchal church who renounced Soviet passports and returned into the bosom of the True Orthodox Church.”[144]
In the 1970s the detailed questionnaires required in order to receive passports were abandoned, but in 1974 it was made obligatory for all Soviet citizens to have a passport, and a new, red passport differing significantly from the old, green one was issued for everyone except prisoners and the hospitalized. Its cover had the words: “Passport of a citizen of the Soviet Socialist Republics”, together with a hammer and sickle, which was still unacceptable to the passportless, who therefore continued to be subject to prison, exile and hunger. Those who joined the Catacomb Church at this time often erased the word “citizen”, replacing it with the word “Christian”, so that they had a “Passport of a Christian of the Soviet Socialist Republics”.[145]
The issue of passports is of greater theological and practical importance than might at first appear. In essence it comes down to the question whether the Soviet State can be considered “Caesar” to which “the things of Caesar” are due (payment of taxes, civic loyalty, army service), or “the collective Antichrist”, obedience to whom involves compromises that are unacceptable for the Christian conscience. Although the majority of members of the True Russian Church in this century have not made an issue of this, it remains debatable whether obedience to the 1918 anathema against the Bolsheviks does not in fact require rejection of the Soviet State, Soviet passports, Soviet army service, etc., in a way that only the passportless demonstrated. Since the fall of communism in 1991, as we shall see, the possession of passports has ceased to be such a burning issue (its place has been taken by that of the new identity cards with the number 666). However, the question whether the Soviet Union was a state “established by God” (Romans 13.1), or, on the contrary, an anti-state established by Satan (Revelation 13.2), remains a critical one. The True Orthodox position is that since the Soviet Union was anathematised by the Church, neither it, nor any modern state claiming continuity from it, can command the allegiance of Orthodox Christians.
The situation in the ROCA began to stabilise after the Synod moved its headquarters to New York. With regard to the MP, on October 14/27, 1953, the Sobor decreed that “in cases where it is revealed that those who have received their rank from the hierarchy of the MP by the Communists with the intention of preaching in holy orders the Communist principles of atheism, such an ordination is recognized as neither grace-bearing nor legal.” And on October 27 / November 9, 1959 the Sobor decreed that in cases where doubts arise as to whether the clergyman applying to be received into the ROCA was “a conscious agent of the atheist government”, the ordination of such a clergyman was not to be recognized as valid and he was to be “received by public repentance and, moreover, a penance may be imposed on him under the supervision of the Diocesan Bishop.”[146]
The Metropolia Archbishop John (Shahovskoj) argued that the position of the ROCA towards the MP in this period was hypocritical insofar as it simultaneously called the MP apostate and sorrowed over the persecutions in the USSR and the closure of churches, although, according to its logic, it should have rejoiced over the closure of apostate churches. In reply, the secretary of the ROCA Synod, Fr. George Grabbe, replied that while calling the MP “apostate” and even, in some cases, using the word “gracelessness”, the ROCA never, at any of its Synodal sessions, expressed any doubt that the pastors and laymen belonging to the MP who were faithful to God were true pastors. Then, citing examples of the infiltration of agents into the hierarchy of the MP, Fr. George continued: “That is the gracelessness we are talking about! We are talking about those Judases, and not about the few suffering people who are vainly trying to save something, the unfortunate, truly believing pastors”.[147]
Of course, this answer raised more questions than it answered. If all or most of the hierarchy were KGB agents (and this was established beyond doubt in 1992), and therefore graceless, how could the priests whom they ordained and who commemorated them be true priests? And how could the laymen be true laymen if they communicated from false bishops and priests? Is it possible in general to speak about faithful priests and laity commemorating a faithless and apostate bishop? These questions never received satisfactory answers and continued to give the ROCA’s witness in relation to the MP an ambiguous character for decades to come.
Until Metropolitan Anastasy’s retirement in 1964, no major decision was taken as to the status, in the ROCA’s eyes, of “World Orthodoxy” – neither of the Moscow Patriarchate, nor of the other Local Churches that were in full communion with Moscow. Concelebrations continued intermittently with both the Greek new calendarists and with the Serbian and Jerusalem patriarchates (the ROCA owned several monasteries and other property in the Holy Land). New calendar dioceses of Bulgarians and Romanians, French and Dutch were formed under the aegis of the ROCA Synod (usually on the initiative of Archbishop John (Maximovich) of Western Europe). The ROCA was neither in official communion with World Orthodoxy nor clearly separated from it: it existed in a kind of canonical limbo, a Russian Church Outside Russia of almost global jurisdiction but claiming to be part of the Russian Church inside Russia. The question was: which Russian Church inside Russia was it part of, which was the “Mother Church” – the Moscow Patriarchate or the Catacomb Church?
The answer to this question was left deliberately vague. On the one hand, there was clearly no communion with the hierarchy of the MP, which was seen to have compromised itself with communism and whose patriarch was considered to have been uncanonically elected. On the other hand, communion was said never to have been broken with the suffering people of Russia. But which people was being talked about? The Soviet people, who considered themselves citizens of the Soviet state, or the True Orthodox Russians of the Catacombs, who rejected such citizenship?
Metropolitan Anastasy appears to have considered the “Mother Church” to have been the Moscow Patriarchate – although he was clearly not in communion with it. Thus he wrote to Metropolitan Theophilus of New York: “Your proposed union with the Patriarchate has not only a spiritual, but a canonical character, and binds you with the consequences. Such a union would be possible only if the Mother Church were completely free…”[148]
Many Catacomb priests were commemorating Metropolitan Anastasy at this time. They would have been surprised – and shocked – to learn that he considered the “Mother Church” of Russia to be their deadly enemy, the Moscow Patriarchate. Nor would they have agreed with the idea that the only difference between the True Church and the false was the relative lack of freedom of the latter…[149]
With regard to the Eulogians and American Metropolia, both schisms from the ROCA, Metropolitan Anastasy was also lenient. Thus on October 19, 1956, in reponse to a statement by Bishop Leonty of Chile that the ROCA should treat the Eulogians as renovationists and not permit any concelebrations, the metropolitan said that the Eulogians were different, since they were heretics.[150] And yet the ROCA had herself condemned the Eulogians’ teaching on Sophianism as heresy![151]
In 1957, however, in his last will and testament, Metropolitan Anastasy clearly drew the boundaries as follows: “As regards the Moscow Patriarchate and its hierarchs, then, so long as they continue in close, active and benevolent cooperation with the Soviet Government, which openly professes its complete godlessness and strives to implant atheism in the entire Russian nation, then the Church Abroad, maintaining Her purity, must not have any canonical, liturgical or even simply external communion with them whatsoever, leaving each one of them at the same time to the final judgement of the Council (Sobor) of the future free Russian Church.”
Again, on October 18, 1959, in his address at the opening of the Hierarchical Council of the ROCA, he said: “We must not only teach others, but ourselves also fulfil [that which we teach], following the examples of the Moscow saints whom we have commemorated today. They stand before us as Orthodox zealots, and we must follow their example, turning aside completely from the dishonesty of those who have now occupied their throne. Oh if they could but arise, they not only would not recognise any of their successors, but rather would turn against them with severe condemnation. With what zeal would St. Philip be set aflame against the weak-in-faith representatives of the Church, who look with indifference at the flowing of the innocent blood of their flock, and yet do not condemn the enemies of the Church, but try in every way to flatter the atheistic authority. How the great adamantine St. Hermogen would have arisen in righteous indignation, seeing the hierarchy remaining deceitfully silent at a time when atheist propaganda is being widely disseminated, forgetting that by their silence they are betraying God. Let us in every way turn aside from them, but at the same time let us arm ourselves with apostolic zeal. We must avoid every kind of contact with them like the plague. You know that these people with their thoroughly burned consciences will never cease to wage war against us, although they constantly change their methods of warfare.”[152]
In 1961, moreover, he showed that he had not forgotten the Catacomb Church, declaring, in the name of the whole Church Abroad: “We consider ourselves to be in spiritual unity precisely with the Secret Church, but not with the official administration of the Moscow Patriarchate led by Patriarch Alexis, which is permitted by the atheist government and carries out all its commands…”[153]
However, this still left the possibility that they considered themselves to be in unity, if not with the “official administration” of the MP, at any rate with the people…
This kind of ambiguity in relation to the Church in Russia was displayed by other leading hierarchs of the ROCA. Thus in 1955 Archbishop Vitaly (Maximenko) of Jordanville made two diametrically opposed statements in one and the same book. First he wrote, in the spirit of the Catacomb Church: “The patriarchate has destroyed the essential dogma of the Church of Christ, and has rejected Her essential mission – to serve the regeneration of men, and has replaced it by the service of the godless aims of communism, which is unnatural for the Church. This falling away is more bitter than all the previous Arianisms, Nestorianisms, Iconoclasms, etc. And this is not the personal sin of one or another hierarch, but the root sin of the Moscow Patriarchate, confirmed, proclaimed and bound by an oath in front of the world. It is, so to speak, dogmatized apostasy…”[154]
This is an inspired definition: dogmatized apostasy. Not simply apostasy in the face of overwhelming external force, “for fear of the Jews”, but dogmatized apostasy – that is, apostasy justified, sanctified, raised to the level of a dogma. When apostasy is justified in this way, it becomes deeper, more serious and more difficult to cure. It becomes an error of the mind as well as a disease of the will. For it is one thing for a churchman out of weakness to submit himself and his church to the power of the world and of the Antichrist. That is his personal tragedy, and the tragedy of those who follow him, but it is not heresy. It is quite another thing for the same churchman to make the same submission “not for wrath, but for conscience’s sake” (Romans 13.5) – to use the words of the apostle as perverted by Sergius in his declaration. For this shows that the churchman has in fact suppressed his conscience, both his personal consience and his Church consciousness. This is both heresy and apostasy.
However, only a few pages later, Archbishop Vitaly writes that the Providence of God had placed before the ROCA the duty “of not tearing itself away from the basic massif, the body, the root of the Mother Church: in the depths of this massif, which is now only suffocated by the weight of Bolshevism, there are even now preserved the spiritual treasures of Her millennial exploit. But we must not recognise Her contemporary official leaders, who have become the obedient instrument of the godless authorities.”[155] As V.K. justly comments: “In these words is contained a manifest incongruity. How did Archbishop Vitaly want, without recognising the official leadership of the MP, at the same time not to be torn away from its body? Is it possible ‘to preserve the spiritual treasures’ in a body whose head has become ‘the obedient instrument of the godless authorities’ (that is, the servants of satan and the antichrist), as he justly writes of the sergianist leaders?… The Holy Scriptures say: ‘If the firstfruit is holy, the lump is also holy; and if the root is holy, so are the branches’ (Romans 11.16). And on the other hand: ‘A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit’ (Matthew 7.18).”[156]
A few pages later in the same book, Archbishop Vitaly writes that we must speak about “our great duty before the Mother Russian Church [i.e. the Moscow Patriarchate] “with complete love and devotion to Her, with profound reverence before the exploit of Patriarch Sergius…”![157] Unfortunately, as V.K. again justly points out, the archbishop did not succeeded in clarifying in what the great “exploit” of “Patriarch” Sergius – the greatest traitor in the history of the Russian Church – consisted.[158]
Such ambiguity continued to be the norm in the ROCA for decades to come. It gradually undermined her confessing stance, as became known also to the Catacomb Church at the fall of communism. However, it did not lead immediately to communion with the MP. And in his last will and testament Metropolitan Anastasy issued an important warning against any hasty union with the MP: “As regards the Moscow Patriarchate and its hierarchs, then, so long as they continue in close, active and benevolent cooperation with the Soviet Government, which openly professes its complete godlessness and strives to implant atheism in the entire Russian nation, then the Church Abroad, maintaining her purity, must not have any canonical, liturgical, or even simply external communion with them whatsoever, leaving each one of them at the same time to the final judgement of the Sobor of the future free Russian Church…”[159]
Metropolitan Anastasy’s rule represents a “holding operation”, a preservation of the status quo in a very difficult period interrupted by the chaos of the Second World War. If it left certain important questions unanswered – questions which would have to be answered unambiguously sooner or later, – it at any rate kept the voice of opposition to the MP alive in the West. But the bad seeds that had been sown by infiltrators were not uprooted; and in the 1960s, as Archbishop Averky of Syracuse remarked in a letter to the ROCA’s new chief-hierarch, Metropolitan Philaret, “a tendency has appeared among a small group of bishops to create ‘its own party’ and strive for all power in the Church, scandals have begun among us which, alas, are leading our Church to destruction, all the while broadening and deepening their activity from that time until now.”[160]
As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, the ROCA began to be forced to define its attitude to “World Orthodoxy” more precisely in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the first contacts were made between the ROCA and the Greek Old Calendarist Church – first with the “Florinite” branch, and then also with the “Matthewites”. At this point two parties began to appear: the one in favour of retaining communion with “World Orthodoxy” and the new calendarists, which was led by Archbishop Anthony of Geneva, and the other opposed to such communion, which led by Archbishops Anthony of Los Angeles and Averky of Syracuse.
These more-or-less concealed divisions in the ROCA came to the surface again when Metropolitan Anastasy died in 1964. There was such animosity between the supporters of the two candidates for the vacant post of metropolitan, Archbishops Nicon and John Maximovich, that to avoid a schism Archbishop John withdrew his own candidature and put forward in his place the youngest bishop, Philaret (Voskresensky) of Brisbane. The suggestion was then universally accepted, and Bishop Philaret was enthroned as metropolitan in a service that used the ancient text for the enthroning of a metropolitan of Moscow for the first time in centuries.[161]
The new metropolitan faced a daunting task. For he had, on the one hand, to lead his Church in decisively denouncing the apostasy of World Orthodoxy, communion with which could no longer be tolerated. And on the other, he had to preserve unity among the members of his own Synod, some of whom were in spirit closer to “World Orthodoxy” than True Orthodoxy…
The
first Official Epistle of a Hierarchical Council of the ROCA under her new
metropolitan was dated June 4/17, 1964, and appeared to continue the line
adopted by Metropolitan Anastasy in relation to the MP:”They [the God-opposing
Communists] have contrived a new, truly diabolical plan in their war against
the faithful: it is now forbidden by the godless government of the USSR for
children and young men and women from the ages of 3 to 18 to be allowed into
God’s churches and to be communed with theBody and Blood of Christ. And in
order to mock the Church even more, this directive by the authorities has to be
enforced by the clergymen themselves – they are the ones who must prohibit
youth from approaching the Chalice of Christ
and demand the removal of children and youth from the churches”….
“But the true situation is
this: not many clergymen are left in the USSR, not many open churches are left,
the faithful rarely can attend services And now even at these rare services,
which Christians, if they are not extremely old men and women, attend at the
risk of being tagged by the active Soviet “watchers” and thus lose their
jobs--parents cannot bring their young children, who, in their tender childhood
and youth, so need graceful communion to the Fountain of life--to Christ the
Savior, just as young little saplings need the light and the warmth of the sun.”
This Epistle appears to accept the MP as a grace-bearing institution. However, the MP had just joined the World Council of Churches, and in the next year, 1965, the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate would “lift the anathemas” against Rome. This would bring about a definite, albeit unstable and short-lived hardening in the attitude of the ROCA to the MP…
Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate, under the leadership of the KGB general, Metropolitan of Leningrad and secret Catholic bishop Nicodemus (Rotov), was taking large strides in the international ecumenical forum. Thus in October, 1969, Metropolitan Nicodemus gave communion to Catholic students in the Russicum in Rome. This was followed, on December 16, by a decision of the Russian Holy Synod to give permission to Orthodox clergy to administer the sacraments to Old Believers and Catholics.
This decision created “amazement, sorrow and perplexity” in the Greek Church, and “a new and problematic situation, from the ecumenical, pastoral and theological standpoint”, according to the Ecumenical Patriarchate.[162]
And yet had not Athenagoras said that hierarchs and theologians should not stand in the way of the people’s path to intercommunion? It is difficult to regard this reaction of the Greek new calendarists as anything other than jealousy at the Russian Church’s jumping ahead in the ecumenical race. And it did not in any case lead to any decisive action.
More serious was the ruling of the Synod of the ROCA “to consider the decision of the Moscow Patriarchate granting Roman Catholics access to all the sacraments of the Orthodox Church as in violation of the holy canons and contrary to Orthodox dogmatical doctrines. Entering thus into communion with the heterodox, the Moscow Patriarchate estranges itself from the unity of the holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church. By its action it does not sanctify the heretics to whom it offers the sacraments, but it itself becomes part of their heresy.”[163]
Archbishop Averky of the ROCA commented on this decision: “Now, even if some entertained some sort of doubts about how we should regard the contemporary Moscow Patriarchate, and whether we can consider it Orthodox after its intimate union with the enemies of God, the persecutors of the Faith and Christ’s Church, these doubts must now be completely dismissed: by the very fact that it has entered into liturgical communion with the Papists, it has fallen away from Orthodoxy [emphasis in the original] and can no longer be considered Orthodox…”[164]
The decision of the Moscow Patriarchate to give communion to Catholics put the other Russian jurisdiction in North America, the Metropolia, into a difficult position; for in the early 1960s the Metropolia (a body in schism from the ROCA since 1946) had been, through Fathers John Meyendorff and Alexander Schmemann, among the most conservative participants in the ecumenical movement.
However, this Church had been secretly negotiating with the Moscow Patriarchate for a grant of autocephaly. According to the deal eventually agreed upon, the patriarchate was to declare the Metropolia to be the autocephalous Orthodox Church of America (OCA) in exchange for the Japanese parishes of the Metropolia coming within the jurisdiction of the patriarchate. This deal, which was recognized by none of the other Autocephalous Churches and was to the advantage, in the long run, only of the patriarchate and the KGB, was made public in December, 1969 – just at the moment that the patriarchate announced that it had entered into partial communion with the Catholics. Thus the former Metropolia found that it had been granted autocephaly by a Church that was now in communion with the Catholics.
Naturally, this dealt a death blow to such anti-ecumenist opinion as still existed in that Church, which left the Russian Church Abroad and the Greek Old Calendarists – including, in 1970, eleven out of the twenty monasteries on Mount Athos – as the only Churches still free from, and able to speak openly against, the heresy of Ecumenism.
In its judgement on the OCA’s autocephaly, the 1971 ROCA Council of Bishops passed over the heretical, ecumenist aspect of the matter, and concentrated on the illegality of the church that had given the autocephaly:-
“The Council of Bishops, having listened to the report of the Synod of Bishops concerning the so-called Metropolia’s having received autocephaly from the Patriarchate of Moscow, approves all the steps taken in due course by the Synod of Bishops to convince Metropolitan Irinei and his colleagues of the perniciousness of a step which deepens the division which was the result of the decision of the Cleveland Council of 1946 which broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
“The American Metropolia has received its autocephaly from the Patriarchate of Moscow, which has not possessed genuine canonical succession from His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon from the time when Metropolitan Sergii, who later called himself Patriarch, violated his oath with regard to Metropolitan Petr, the locum tenens of the patriarchal throne, and set out upon a path which was then condemned by the senior hierarchs of the Church of Russia. Submitting all the more to the commands of the atheistic, anti-Christian regime, the Patriarchate of Moscow has ceased to be that which expresses the voice of the Russian Orthodox Church. For this reason, as the Synod of Bishops has correctly declared, none of its acts, including the bestowal of autocephaly upon the American Metropolia, has legal force. Furthermore, apart from this, this act, which affects the rights of many Churches, has elicited definite protests on the part of a number of Orthodox Churches, who have even severed communion with the American Metropolia.
“Viewing this illicit act with sorrow, and acknowledging it to be null and void, the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, which has hitherto not abandoned hope for the restoration of ecclesiastical unity in America, sees in the declaration of American autocephaly a step which will lead the American Metropolia yet farther away from the ecclesiastical unity of the Church of Russia. Perceiving therein a great sin against the enslaved and suffering Church of Russia, the Council of Bishops DECIDES: henceforth, neither the clergy nor the laity [of the Russian Church Abroad] are to have communion in prayer or the divine services with the hierarchy or clergy of the American Metropolia.”[165]
The depth of the OCA’s fall is indicated by the fact that when one large OCA parish in Bridgeport, Connecticut (1200 dues-paying members, 5000 people in all) applied to join the ROCA in 1972, it was discovered that no less than 43 out of the 46 members of the parish council were Freemasons! It was decided nevertheless to receive them, Masons and all – but to no avail. Five years later, the parish returned to the OCA.[166]
However, before leaving the ill-fated Metropolia, let us listen to its last Orthodox statement on Ecumenism, which was issued by the Great Council of the Russian Metropolia in March, 1969: “The basic goal of the ecumenical movement.. is the unity of all Christians in one single body of grace. And here the Orthodox Church firmly confesses that such a genuine unity is founded, above all, on the unity of faith, on the unanimous acceptance by all of the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Traditions as they are wholly and integrally preserved by the Church. Real love for brothers separated from us [sic – a misleading description of heretics, who are not our brothers in Christ] consists therefore not in silencing all that divides us, but in a courageous witness to the Truth, which alone can unite us all, and also in a common search for the ways to make that Truth evident to all. Only in this way did the Orthodox Church always understand her participation in the ecumenical movement…
“However, within the ecumenical movement there has always existed another understanding of unity. This other understanding seems to become more popular today. It recognizes virtually no importance at all in agreement in faith and doctrine, and is based on relativism, i.e., on the affirmation that the doctrinal or canonical teachings of the Church, being ‘relative’, are not obligatory for all. Unity is viewed as already existing, and nothing remains to be done except to express it and strengthen it through ecumenical manifestations or services. Such an approach is totally incompatible with the Orthodox concept of the ecumenical movement.
“The differences between these two approaches is nowhere better manifested than in the attitudes towards concelebration and intercommunion among divided Christians. According to the Orthodox doctrine, the prayers and the sacraments of the Church, especially the Divine Eucharist, are expressions of full unity – in faith, in life, in service of God and man – as given by God. This unity with other Christians we seek, but we have not reached it yet. Therefore in the Orthodox understanding, no form of concelebration, i.e., no joint participation in liturgical prayer or the sacraments, with those who do not belong to the Orthodox Church can be permitted, for it would imply a unity which in reality does not exist. It would imply deceiving ourselves, deceiving others, and creating the impression that the Orthodox Church acknowledges that which in fact she does not acknowledge.”[167]
[1] Apostolic Constitution, 10:19, P.G. 1, 633.
[2] Metropolitan Calliopius of Pentapolis, Deinopathimata G.O.X., vol. 1, Piraeus, 1990, p. 30 (G).
[3] Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit., p. 15.
[4] From The New York Times, June 7, 1917, p. 22: “A miniature civil war between Venizelists and the supporters of King Constantine of Greece was fought in the basement of the St. Constantine’s Greek Orthodox Church at 64 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, last night when the Constantine faction sought to expel the pastor of the church for omitting the usual custom of saying ‘long live the King’ in every Sunday prayer.
“Police were called in to untangle the difficulties, and while the king’s men were at the Adams Street police station making complaints about the religious, political and military zeal of the Venizelists, the supporters of the pro-Allies ex-Premier elected a Board of Trustees and informed the pastor of the church, the Rev. Stephano Papmacaronis, that he could omit to pray for the King.”
[5] Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit.,
pp. 17-18.
[6] Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit.,
p. 22.
[7] See Monk P. of the Holy Mountain, Saint Arsenius of Cappadocia, Thessaloniki, 1989, p. 81. By an acute irony, Arsenius was canonized by the new calendarist Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1986!
[8] Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit.,
pp. 45-48.
[9] Orthodox Life, vol. 22, no. 2, March-April, 1972; reprinted in Fr. Basile Sakkas, The Calendar Question, op. cit., and V. Moss, The Imperishable Word, op, cit. For further witnesses and photographs, see Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit., pp. 81-92, and Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Papa-Nicholas Planas, Boston, 1961, pp. 117-119.
[10] Quoted in “Re[2]: [paradosis] (unknown)”, 1 January, 2003, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com.
[11] The Orthodox Word, nos. 160-161, September-December, 1991, pp. 268-270.
[12] K.V. Glazkov, “Istoricheskiye prichiny nyekotorykh sobytij v istorii Rumynskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi do II mirovoj vojny”, Tserkovnaia Zhizn’, NN 3-4, May-August, 2000, pp. 48-49 ®.
[13] Metropolitan Blaise, in Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 2 (1479), 15/28 January, 1993, pp. 6-7 (R).
[14] Cf. the words of the Lord in Revelation (2.5): “Repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place”.
[15] Metropolitan Vlasie, The Life of the Holy Hierarch and Confessor Glicherie of Romania, Etna, Ca.: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1999, pp. 24-25.
[16] Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos, “The True Orthodox Christians of Romania”, The Orthodox Word, January-February, 1982, vol. 18, no. 1 (102), pp. 6-7.
[17] Letter to Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), in Glazkov, op. cit., p. 54.
[18] Glazkov, op. cit., p. 55.
[19] The Zealot Monks of Mount Athos, Syntomos Istoriki Perigraphi tis Ekklesias ton Gnision Orthodoxon Khristianon Ellados, Mount Athos, 1973, pp. 8-11 (G); Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit., pp. 101-111.
[20] “[orthodox-synod] A Rejoinder to a Challenge of the Legitimacy of the Orthodox Monastic Brotherhood of the Holy Monastery of Esphigmenou”, orthodox-synod@yahoogroups.com, January 29, 2003.
[21] Hieromonk Theodoritus (Mavros), Avvakoum, Le Zélote aux Pieds Nus, a translation from the Greek by the Fraternite Orthodoxe de St. Gregoire Palamas, Paris, 1986, pp. 37-42 (F).
[22] Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit.,
pp. 64-80.
[23] Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit.,
pp. 93-100.
[24] Ibid., pp. 112-115.
[25] Ibid., pp. 116-119.
[26] Ibid., pp. 120-137.
[27] Ibid., pp. 143-149.
[28] Ibid., pp. 150-157.
[29] Ibid., pp. 166-172.
[30] Ibid., pp. 173-186.
[31] Protopriest Vladyslav Tsypin, Russkaia Tserkov’, 1925-1938, Moscow: Monastery of the Meeting of the Lord, 1999, p. 109 ®.
[32] George Lardas, The Old Calendar Movement in the Greek Church: An Historical Survey, B.Th. Thesis, Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1983, p. 12.
[33] Monk Anthony Georgans, Atheologites “Theologies” Atheologitou “Theologou”, Gortynia: Monastery of St. Nikodemos, 1992, pp. 7-8 (G).
[34] Monk (now Bishop) Ephraim, Letter on the Calendar issue, op. cit.
[35] Monk Paul, op. cit., p. 78.
[36] St. Elijah skete, Mount Athos, Uchenie Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi o Sviashchennom Predanii i otnoshenie ee k novomu stiliu, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1989, p. 25 (R).
[37] I Phoni tis Orthodoxias, 844, November-December, 1991, pp. 26-27 (G).
[38] I Agia Skepe, 122, October-December, 1991, p. 109 (G).
[39] Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Papa-Nicholas Planas, op. cit., pp. 54-55, 108-110.
[40] Bishop Andrew of Patras, Matthaios, Athens, 1963, pp. 50-66 (G).
[41] Hieromonk Matthew Karpadakes (later Bishop of Bresthena), preface to the third edition of Theion Prosevkhytarion, Athens, 1934 (G).
[42] Holy Transfiguration Monastery, The Struggle against Ecumenism, Boston, 1998, p. 46.
[43] Metropolitan Calliopius (Giannakoulopoulos) of Pentapolis, Ta Patria, volume 7, Piraeus, 1987, p. 43 (G).
[44] Ibid., pp. 277-278.
[45] Alexandris, op. cit., p. 200.
[46] Elijah Angelopoulos, Dionysius Batistates, Chrysostom Kavourides, Athens, 1981, pp. 21-25 (G).
[47] Syntomos Istorike Perigraphe, op. cit., pp. 23-24.
[48] Metropolitan Calliopius, Ta Patria,
volume 6, Piraeus, 1984, pp. 67-74 (G).
[49] Over ten priests were killed or died in prison, including Fathers Pambo, Gideon and Theophanes. See Victor Boldewskul, “The Old Calendar Church of Romania”, Orthodox Life, vol. 42, no. 5, October-November, 1992, pp. 11-17.
[50] Metropolitan Blaise, Pravoslavnaia
Rus’, op. cit.
[51] Glazkov, op. cit., pp. 57-59.
[52] Metropolitan Cyprian, op. cit.
[53] Quoted in Hieromonk Amphilochius, Gnosesthe tin Alitheian, Athens, 1984, pp. 17-18 (G).
[54] Bishop Andrew, op. cit., pp. 68-74.
[55] Metropolitan Calliopius, Ta Patria,
op. cit., p. 282.
[56] Karamitsos, op. cit., pp. 123-35.
[57] See “Starets Feodosij Karul’skij Svyatogorets”, Russkij Palomnik, B 23, 2001, pp. 15-43 ®.
[58] Pis’ma
Blazhennejshago Mitropolita Antonia (Khrapovitskago), Jordanville, 1988, p.
195 ®.
[59] Pis’ma Blazhennejshago Mitropolita Antonia (Khrapovitskago), op. cit., p. 197.
[60] Archbishop Theophanes differed from Metropolitan Anthony on a number of issues – some, like the controversy over M. Anthony’s “Dogma of Redemption”, of major dogmatical importance. Eventually, convinced that “betrayal” had taken place in the ROCA Synod, he retired to France as a hermit, dying in 1940. Many consider him the greatest theologian of the Russian Church Abroad, if not of the whole Russian Church in the 20th century. For his life, see Schema-Monk Epiphanius (Chernov), Vie de Monseigneur Theophane, Archeveque de Poltava et de Pereiaslav, Lavardac: Monastery of St. Michael, 1988 (F); Richard Betts and Vyacheslav Marchenko, Dukhovnik Tsarskoj Sem’i, Moscow, 1994 ®.
[61] Archbishop Theophanes, Kratkie kanonicheskiye suzhdenia o letoschislenii, in V.K., Russkaia Zarubezhnaia Tserkov’ na Steziakh Otstupnichestva, St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 29-30 ®.
[62] Volkogonov, D. Lenin, London: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 386.
[63] For further details of the persecution, see Danilushkin, M.B (ed.) Istoria Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi, St. Petersburg: “Voskresenie”, 1997, vol. I, p. 588 ®.
[64] V.I. Alexeyev, F. Stavrou, “Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ na Okkupirovannoj Nemtsami Territorii”, Russkoe Vozrozhdenie, 1980 (IV), no. 12, pp. 122-124 (R).
[65] Volkogonov, op. cit., pp. 385-386.
[66] That Nicholas was an agent was confirmed by a secret letter from Beria to Stalin published in Moskovskaia Pravda (12 March, 1996), in which it was proposed “under the cover of NKVD agent B.D. Yarushevich, Archbishop of the Leningrad diocese, to create an illegal residency for the NKVD of the USSR so as to organize the work of agents amidst churchmen”. See also Protopriest Michael Ardov, “Russkij Intelligent v Arkhierejskom Sanye”, Tserkovnie Novosti, N 1 (77), January-February, 1999, p. 8 ®.
[67] Volkogonov, op. cit., p. 386.
[68] Solzhenitsyn, The Mortal Danger, London: The Bodley Head, 1980, pp. 39-40.
[69] Quoted in Fomin, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem, Sergiev Posad, 1993, p. 237 ®.
[70] Fomin, op. cit., p. 125; Wassilij Alexeev and Keith Armes, “German Intelligence: Religious Revival in Soviet Territory”, Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 5, no. 1, Spring, 1977, pp. 27-30.
[71] O. Vasilyeva, “Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ v 1927-1943 godakh”, Voprosy Istorii, 1994, 4, p. 44 (R).
[72] According to another source, the mission had 221 churches and 84 priests to serve in them.
[73] Vasileva, op. cit.; Bishop Tikhon of San Francisco (OCA), “Truth/Consequences”, ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU, archives for September 21, 1999.
[74] See Mikhail Woerl, “Dobrij Pastyr’”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 24 (1597), December 15/28, 1997, p. 7 ®.
[75] Woerl, “A Brief Biography of Archbishop Filofei (Narko)”, Orthodox Life, vol. 50, no. 6, November-December, 2000, pp. 25-26.
[76] Woerl, “Dobrij Pastyr’”, op. cit., p. 8. George later became bishop of Chicago and Detroit. See “Episkop Vasilij Venskij – 1880-1945gg.”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 18 (1663), September 14/27, 2000, p. 5 ®.
According to Reader Gregory Mukhortov (personal communication), the Belorussian synod consecrated another bishop, Theodosius (Bakhmetev) just before the arrival of the Soviets late in 1944. However, according to the anonymous author of Kto yest’ kto v rossijskikh katakombakh, (St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 36-37 ®), Theodosius was consecrated in 1942 or 1943 as vicar-bishop of Pinsk, which at that time entered the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian Autonomous Church in the Kiev Caves Lavra by Schema-Archbishop Anthony (Abashidze), Archbishop Panteleimon (Rukyk) and the Catacomb Bishops Elias and Macarius.
[77] “Good, albeit also not unambiguous relations were established between the True Orthodox Christians and the Belorussian Church. In particular, thanks precisely to the catacombniki the Belorussian Church took a more anti-patriarchal stand and entered into conflict with Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky), who was trying to infiltrate his people into Belorussia. The most ardent relations were with Bishop Stefan (Sevbo) of Smolensk (+1963), who even ordained several priests for the True Orthodox Christians and of whom a good memory was preserved in the ‘catacombs’. It was precisely in the Smolensk province and Mozhaisk district of Moscow province that the True Orthodox Christians became so active that they regenerated and greatly increased their flock, which had become very thin on the ground since the repressions of 1937” (Archbishop Ambrose (von Sievers), “Istinno-Pravoslavniye Khristiane i Vojna 1941-1945gg.”, Russkoe Pravoslavie, N 1 (15), 1999, pp. 23-24 ®).
[78] The whole of the Ukrainian Autonomous Church was also received into the ROCA at this time. See Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 20 (1545), October 15/28, 1995, p. 4; Alexeyev, W. and Stavrou, T., The Great Revival, Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co., 1979, chapter 4.
[79] Alexeyev & Stavrou, The Great Revival, op. cit., chapter 5; Friedrich Heyer, Die Orthodoxe Kirche in der Ukraine, Koln: Rudolf Muller, 1953 (in German); “Archbishop Leonty of Chile”, The Orthodox Word, 1981, vol. 17, no. 4 (99), pp. 148-154; Bishop John and Igumen Elijah, Taynij Skhimitropolit, Moscow: Bogorodichij Tsentr, 1991 (R); Andrei Psarev, “Zhizneopisanie Arkhiepiskopa Leontia Chilijskij (1901-1971 gg.)”, Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, N 4 (556), April, 1996, pp. 9-14 (R).
[80] Psarev, op. cit., p. 10. The Ukrainian Autonomous Church was also represented at the ROCA’s Council in Vienna in 1943, which condemned the election of Sergius as uncanonical (Werl, op. cit.).
[81] Chernov, op. cit.; A. Smirnov, “Ugasshie nepominayushchie v bege vremeni”, Simvol, N 40, 1998, pp. 250-267 ®.
[82] S. Verin, “Svidetel’stvo russkikh katakomb”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 14 (1563), July 1/14, 1996, pp. 11-12 (R).
[83] Shkvarovsky, Iosiflyanstvo: techenie v Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi, St. Petersburg: Memorial, 1999, pp. 187-188 ®.
[84] Richard Overy, Russia’s War, London: Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 161-162.
[85] Grabbe, Russkaia Tserkov’, op. cit., pp. 80-81.
[86] Hitler, “who was utterly irreligious” (Overy, op. cit., p. 162), only feigned religious tolerance for political reasons. Thus he said: “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, only to enslave them.” (Cited in Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Harper Collins, 1991, p. 801). But at the same time he recognized that Christianity “can’t be broken so simply. It must rot and die off like a gangrened limb.” And on April 11, 1942, he said: “We must avoid having one solitary church to satisfy the religious needs of large districts, and each village must be made into an independent sect, worshipping God in its own fashion. If some villages as a result wish to practise black magic, after the fashion of Negroes or Indians, we should do nothing to hinder them. In short, our policy in the wide Russian spaces should be to encourage any and every form of dissension and schism.” (Cited by W. Alexeyev and T. Stavrou, The Great Revival, op. cit. pp. 60-61)
[87] D. Volkogonov, Triumf i Tragedia, Moscow: Novosti, 1989, book II, part 1, pp. 382-83 (R); Shkvarovsky, Iosiflyanstvo, op. cit., p. 185.
[88] Stalin is said to have “told the British ambassador that, in his own way, ‘he too believed in God’. The word began to appear in Pravda with a capital letter.” (Overy, op. cit., p. 162).
[89] A. Levitin-Krasnov, Likhie Gody, 1925-1941, Paris: YMCA Press, 1977 (R). For a more detailed account of this meeting, see Vasilieva, O., Knyshevsky, P. “Tainaia Vecheria”, Liternaturnaia Rossia, N 39, September 27, 1991 (R).
[90] It was nicknamed “Narkombog” (People’s Commissar for God) and “Narkomopium” (People’s Commissar for Opium).
[91] Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 508.
[92] Vasilyeva, O., Knyshevsky, P., op. cit.
[93] Fr. Sergius Gordun, “Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Svyateishikh Patriarkhakh Sergii i Aleksii”, Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia, vol. 158, I-1990, p. 92 (R).
[94] Zhurnal Moskovskoj Patriarkhii, N 2, 1944, pp. 26-28; N 4, 1943, p. 25 (R); cited in Pospielovsky, The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 208-209.
[95] Protopriest Valerius Lapkovsky, “Kto Vozdvigal Pamyatnik Arkhiepiskopu Lukye?” Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 17 (1566), September 1/14, 1996, p. 10 ®.
[96] See Metropolitan John (Snychev) of St. Petersburg, Mitropolit Manuil (Lemeshevsky), op. cit., p. 185.
[97] “Pis’mo 2-oye Katakombnogo Episkopa A. k F.M.”, Russkij Pastyr’, 14, III-1992; Russkoe Pravoslavie, 1996, N 2 (2), pp. 10, 11 (R).
[98] Gordun, op. cit., p. 94.
[99] Hierodeacon Jonah (now Hieromonk Nectarius) (Yashunsky), “Sergianstvo: Politika ili Dogmatika?”, 29 April / May 12, 1993, pp. 2-3, 5 (MS) (R). Since, for Sergius, salvation is not the Truth of Holy Orthodoxy, it is not surprising to find the seeds of ecumenism in him. Thus in his article, “The Relationship of an Orthodox Person to his Church and to the Heterodox” (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1993, no. 3): “Outside the Church one does not find an immediate darkness between the Church and the heretical communities. Rather, there is found a partial shadow, which in its own way falls upon the schismatics and the self-willed (heretics). These two groups cannot be in the strict sense considered strangers to the Church nor completely torn away from Her.”
[100] Polosin (Sergius Ventsel), “Razmyshlenia o Teokratii v Rossii”, Vestnik Khristianskogo Informatsionnogo Tsentra, N 48, November 24, 1989 (R).
[101] Time, December 7, 1981; Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church, London: Croom Helm, 1986, p. 215.
[102] V. Alexeyev, “Marshal Stalin doveriaet Tserkvi”, Agitator, N 10, 1989, pp. 27-28 (R).
[103] See “How the ROCA lost Jerusalem”, Vertograd-Inform, N 20, October, 2000, pp. 23-36.
[104] Archbishop John did once commemorate “Patriarch” Alexis in Harbin, but after the Liturgy he said that he would never do this again and repeatedly asked forgiveness from the ROCA Synod (Fr. Andrew Kencis monpress@telusplanet.net, December 3, 1998). He was banned by the new Soviet Archbishop of Peking, Victor, on June 15, 1946. For more details on Orthodoxy in China in this period, see Tatiana Senina, “‘And his lot is among the saints…’”, Vertograd-Inform, N 15, January, 2000, pp. 6-25 (English edition), and Monk Benjamin, “Arkhiepiskop Ioann (Maksimovich) kak okhranitel’ tserkovnago imushchestva v Shankhaye”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 23, December 1/14, 1999, pp. 5- 7 ®.
[105] Archbishop Valentine, Nativity Epistle, 2000/2001.
[106] I.M. Andreyev, History of the Russian Church from the Revolution to our Days, Jordanville, 1952; quoted in Is the Grace of God present in the Soviet Church?, op. cit., p. 88.
[107] See Chernov, “Proniknovenie Obnovlenchestva v Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi”, op cit.; letter of Archbishop Averky of Syracuse to Metropolitan Philaret of New York, September 14/27, 1966 (R).
[108] Chernov, “Proniknovenie Obnovlenchestva…”, op. cit., p. 3.
[109] http://www.russianorthodoxchurch.ws/english/pages/history/1933epistle.html; http://www.russianorthodoxchurch.ws/Poslania/poslanie.sobor.1933.html ®
[110] Documents in M. Shkarovskij, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ i Sovietskoe Gosudarstvo s 1943 po 1964 gg. (in Russian).
[111] Zhurnal Moskovskoj Patriarkhii, 1948, no. 12, p. 6 (R); cited in Yakunin, “V sluzhenii k kul’tu (Moskovskaia Patriarkhia i kul’t lichnosti Stalina), in Furman, D.E., Fr. Mark Smirnov (eds.), Na puti k svobode sovesti, Moscow: Progress, 1989, p. 197 ®.
[112] See Archimandrite Charalampus Vasilopoulos, Oikoumenismos khoris m aska, Athens: Orthodoxos Typos, 1988, p. 122 (G).
[113] Yakunin, op. cit, p. 190.
[114] The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, N 1, 1946; quoted in Obnovlentsy i Moskovskaia Patriarkhia: preemstvo ili evoliutisia?, Suzdal, 1997, p. 13.
[115] Cited in Potapov, What is False is also Corrupt, p. 223.
[116] Izvestia, March 10, 1953 (R); Yakunin, op. cit., p. 199.
[117] Quoted in Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1999, p. 635.
[118] Nikolai Savchenko, in Vertograd-Inform, September, 1998, Bibliography, pp. 1,2 (in Russian).
[119] I.M Andreyev, Is the Grace of God present in the Soviet Church? Wildwood, Alberta, 2000, pp. 32-33 (with some changes in the translation).
[120] Pospielovsky, Russkaya Mysl’, no. 3698, 5 November, 1987 (R).
[121] Aksyuchits, “70 lyet Vavilonskogo plenenia”, Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia, 1988, no. 152 (R).
[122] See G. Pankov, “O politike Sovetskogo gosudarstva v otnoshenii Russkoj pravoslavnoj tserkvi na rubezhe 50-x – 60-x godov”, in Bessmertny, A.R. & Filatov, S.B., Religiya i Demokratia, Moscow: Progress, 1993, pp. 217-31 (R).
[123] “Nyekotorie Stranitsy Biografii Mitropolita Nikolaia (Yarushevicha)”, Vertograd-Inform, N 7-9 (16-18), 1996, pp. 16-17 ®; Andrew and Mitrokhin, op. cit., p. 636.
[124] Gordun, op. cit., pp. 120, 133, 134. See Potapov, op. cit., p. 228 (for Nicodemus’ KGB connections) and Fr. Sergius Keleher, Passion and Resurrection: The Greek Catholic Church in Soviet Ukraine, 1939-1989, L’viv: Stauropegion, 1993, pp. 101-102 (for his Catholic connections).
[125] V. Moss, “Ecucommunism”, Living Orthodoxy, September-October, 1989, vol. XI, no. 5, pp. 13-18.
[126] Kurayev, “Vo dni pechal’niye Velikago posta”, Den’, no. 13, March 29 / April 4, 1992 (R).
[127] “The Russian Orthodox Church in the System of Contemporary Christianity”, in A. Preobrazhensky (ed.), The Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow: Progress, 1988, p. 387.
[128] See William C. Fletcher, Religion and Soviet Foreign Policy, 1945-1970, London: Oxford University Press, 1973, chapter 9.
[129]
Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1967; translated in Orthodox Life,
110, March-April, 1968, p. 25.
[130] I.F. Bugayem, “Varvarskaya aktsia”, kraevedcheskiy zhurnal Otechestvo, N 3, 1992, pp. 53-73 (R); text in Shkvarovsky, Iosiflyanstvo, op. cit., pp. 262-263.
[131] Andreyev, “The Catacomb Church in the Russian Land”, op. cit.
[132] Irina Osipova, Khotelos’ by vsyekh poimenno nazvat’, Moscow: Fond “Mir i Chelovek”, 1993, pp. 161, 193 (R). “Bishop Galynsky’s” full name was Archbishop Anthony Galynsky-Mikhailovsky.
[133] Shkvarovsky, Iosiflyanstvo, op. cit., pp. 192-197.
[134] “Out from the Catacombs”, Orthodox America, vol. X, no. 10 (100), June, 1990, pp. 5-6.
[135] On Bishop Peter, see “Kratkoye opisaniye biografii menye nyedostojnago skhiepiskopa Pyotra Ladygina” (MS, 1948); Tserkovnaia Zhizn’, NN 7-8, July-August, 1985; Schema-monk Epiphanius (Chernov), Katakombnaia Tserkov’ na Rossijskoj zemle (MS) (R). On Bishop Barnabas, see V. Moss “Holy Hieroconfessor Barnabas of Pechersk”, Orthodox Life, January-February, 1995.
[136] “I vrata adovy nye odoleyut yeyo…”, Suzdal’skiye Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti, N 4, June-July, 1998, pp. 32-40 ®.
[137] In 1986, for example, the Catacomb Bishop Vladimir (Abramov) was sentenced to work at Chernobyl, but he escaped.
[138] Bishop Ambrose (von Sievers), “Gosudarstvo i ‘katakomby’”, in Filatov, S.B. Religia i prava cheloveka, Moscow: Nauka, 1996, pp. 105, 111 (R)
[139] “Out of the Catacombs”, op. cit., p. 6.
[140] See Danilushkin, op. cit., chapter 18.
[141] Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception, London and New York: Edward Harle, 1998, p. 116.
[142] Shkvarovsky, Iosiflyanstvo, op. cit., p. 171.
[143] See Danilushkin, op. cit., p. 535.
[144] E.A. Petrova, “Perestroika Vavilonskoj Bashni – poslednij shans veslukavogo antikhrista”, Moscow, 1991, pp. 5-6 (MS) (R). Cf. Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society, Oxford: Westview Press, 1993, chapter 3.
[145] Bishop Ambrose, “Gosudarstvo i ‘katakomby’”, op. cit., p. 104.
[146] Letter of Protopresbyter George Grabbe to Archbishop Anthony of Geneva, May 6/19, 1969, in Bishop Gregory Grabbe, Pis’ma, Moscow, 1998, pp. 14-15 ®.
[147] Quoted by Deacon Nicholas Savchenko, “Pis’mo otkolovshikhsia”, Otkliki na deiania Arkhierrjskogo Sobora RPTsZ 2000 goda i na prochie posleduiuschie za nim sobytia, Paris, 2001, p. 9 ®.
[148] Metropolitan Anastasy, in Fr. Alexey Young, The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, San Bernardino, CA: the Borgo Press, 1993, p. 47.
[149] The disillusion felt by some Catacomb priests who were able to flee to the West and then found a different spirit reigning in the ROCA is described by Professor I.M. Andreyev: “Not only were we ready to die, but many did die, confident that somewhere there, outside the reach of the Soviet authorities, where there is freedom – there the Truth was shining in all its purity. There people were living by it and submitting to it. There people did not bow down to Antichrist. And what terror overwhelmed me when, fairly recently, I managed to come abroad and found out that some people here ‘spiritually’ recognise the Soviet Church. Spiritually! Many of us there fell, ‘for fear of the Jews’, or giving in to the temptation of outward cooperation with the authorities. I knew priests of the official Church who, at home, tore their hair out, who smashed their heads making prostrations, begging forgiveness for their apostasy, calling themselves Cain – but nonetheless they did not recognise the Red Church. But these others abroad – it is precisely spiritually that they submit to it. What good fortune that our priest-martyrs, in dying, tid not find out about this betrayal!” (Russia’s Catacomb Saints, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 1982, p. 49).
[150] Fr. Alexander Lebedev, “[orthodox-synod] 1956 ROCOR Sobor on Eulogian Jurisdiction”, orthodox-synod@yahoogroups.com. November 30, 2002.
[151] True the Eulogian jurisdiction had obtained a retraction of his views from the leading Sophianist, Fr. Sergei Bulgakov. However, the Eulogians did not clearly condemn the heresy, and their jurisdiction continued to be a hothouse of heresy for decades. See Andrew Blane (ed.), Georges Florovsky. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993, p. 67.
[152] Quoted by Irina Pahlen, “[orthodox-synod] Metropolite Anastassy”, orthodox-synod@yahoogroups.com. December 3, 2002.
[153] Metropolitan Anastasy, in Nashi Vesti, 1991, no. 4 ®.
[154] Archbishop Vitaly (Maximenko), Motivy moyej zhizni, Jordanville, 1955, p. 25 (R).
[155] Archbishop Vitaly, op. cit., p. 45.
[156] V.K. Russkaia Zarubezhnaia Tserkov’ na Steziakh Otstupnichestva, St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 48 ®.
[157] Archbishop Vitaly, op. cit., p. 77.
[158] V.K., op. cit., p. 49.
[159] Metropolitan Anastasy, in Young, op. cit., pp. 55-56.
[160] Archbishop Averky, letter of September 14/27, 1966 (R). See also Sergius Nosov, “Drugaia Pravda”, Moskva, February, 1993 (R).
[161] Young, op. cit., pp. 54-55.
[162] Eastern Churches Review, vol. III, no. 1, Spring, 1970, pp. 91, 92.
[163] Decision of March 18/31, 1970. Cf. the Decree of the Sobor of Bishops of September 15/28, 1971: “The lack of accord of the decree of the Moscow Patriarchate, concerning the granting of communion to Roman Catholics, with Orthodox dogmatic teaching and the Church canons is completely clear to any person even slightly informed in theology. It was justly condemned by a decree of the Synod of the Church of Greece. The holy canons do permit the communication of a great sinner who is under penance (epitimia) when he is about to die (I Ecumenical 13, Carthage 6, Gregory of Nyssa 2 and 5), but there is not a single canon which would extend this to include persons foreign to the Orthodox Church, as long as they have not renounced their false doctrines. No matter what explanation Metropolitan Nikodim and the other Moscow hierarchs might try to give of this act, it is completely clear that by this decision, even though with certain limitations, communion has been established between the Moscow Patriarchate and Roman Catholics. Furthermore, the latter have already made the decision to permit members of the Orthodox Church to receive communion from them. All this was particularly clearly demonstrated in the service held on December 14, 1970, in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, when Metropolitan Nicodemus gave communion to Catholic clerics. It is perfectly clear that this act could not be justified by any need. By this act the Moscow Patriarchate has betrayed Orthodoxy. If the 45th Canon of the Holy Apostles excommunicates from the Church an Orthodox bishop or cleric who has “only prayed together with heretics”, and the 10th Apostolic Canonc forbids even prayer together with those who are excommunicated, what can we say about a bishop who dares to offer the Holy Mysteries to them? If catechumens must leave the church before the sanctification of the Gifts and are not permitted even at point of death to receive communion until they are united to the Church, how can one justify the communicating of persons who, being members of heretical communities, are much farther away from the Church than a catechumen, who is preparing to unite with her? The act of the Moscow Synod, which was confirmed by the recent Sobor of the Moscow Patriarchate in Moscow in Moscow, extends the responsibility for this un-Orthodox decision to all participants of the Moscow Sobor and to their entire Church organization. The decision to admit Catholics to communion is an act which is not only anticanonical, but heretical as well, as inflicting harm on the Orthodox doctrine of the Church, since only true members of the Church are called to communicate of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The Moscow decree, logically considered, recognizes as her members those who, through their doctrinal errors, in both heart and mind are far from her.”
[164] Archbishop Averky, Contemporary Life in the Light of the Word of God: Sermons and Speeches (1969-1973), vol. III, Jordanville, p. 216.
[165] In Young, op. cit., pp. 117-118.
[166] Information supplied by Fr. Alexander Lebedev (the priest appointed to the parish by the ROCA), “Re: [Paradosis Our Beliefs – Some Thoughts in Response to Keith and Gregory”, 17 July, 2002, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com, and by Fr. John Shaw, “Re: [Paradosis] Masonry and the ROCOR, 20 and 21 July, 2002, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com.
[167] The Orthodox Church, May, 1969, cited in Eastern Churches Review, vol. II, no. 4, Autumn, 1969, pp. 425-26.