Bishop Photii of Triaditsa: An Enlightening Interview (1993)

 BISHOP PHOTIOS of TRIADITZA

An Enlightening Interview

The following article appeared in the periodical Troud (No. 20, pp. 1-3), published in Sophia, Bulgaria. The article is translated from the French text of an interview by correspondent Tatiana Matchkovska with Bishop Photios of Triaditza, who was recently consecrated by our Holy Synod for the Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Bulgaria.

(Sophia) On January 17, 1993, Hieromonk Photios (Rosen Dimitrov Siromachov) was consecrated to the Episcopacy at the Monastery of the Holy Martyrs Cyprian and Justina, some twenty kilometers outside of Athens. Presiding over the ceremony was the President of the Holy Synod in Resistance of the True (Old Calendar) Orthodox Church of Greece, Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili, assisted by His Eminence, Bishop Chrysostomos of Etna, His Grace, Bishop Pahomie of the Romanian Old Calendar Orthodox Church, and two other Bishops (Chrysostomos of Christianoupolis and Auxentios of Photiki).

The new Bishop will direct a canonical jurisdiction called the Old Calendar Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The formation of this jurisdiction does not signify the creation of a new Church, but the realization of canonical unity among those Orthodox Bulgarians who oppose ecumenism and modernism and who desire to preserve the Orthodox Faith in all of its purity.

INTERVIEWER: Your Eminence, not long ago you were a professor of ancient Greek at the University of Sophia and regarded as an erudite theologian and philologist with fluency in several languages. This exterior life, it now appears, hid another life, which has led you to the Episcopacy.

ANSWER: I am an ordinary man, similar to my contemporaries. Like so many others, I received no religious education in my home. The decisive moment of my life was the moment that I came to know Archimandrite Seraphim and the writings of the great Russian Prelate, St. Theophan the Recluse. I was then eighteen years old. From that moment on, I decided to dedicate my life entirely to the holy Orthodox Faith. I was wholly ignorant at the time of how I would bring my decision to fruition. I became a spiritual son of Archimandrite Seraphim. I found in him a perfect monk, a man of impeccable conscience, and a defender of the truths of the Orthodox Faith, both in his words and in all of his deeds. In 1968 he was forced to leave the Academy of Theology (at Sophia), where he was a professor of Dogmatics. The reason? He refused to accept the reform of the liturgical calendar, undertaken for the sake of ecumenism. [See the report of the recent repose of Archimandrite Seraphim in “Synod News,” p. 36.]

As for me, I completed my studies at the Academy of Theology in 1981. Unfortunately, instead of finding support for my Orthodox views, I encountered just the opposite. The methodology and the ideas of the majority of the professors, who received their education in the West, were very often contrary to Orthodox teaching and obfuscated almost entirely the rich treasure of Orthodoxy. Moreover, every year "ecumenical prayer services," which I refrained from attending, were organized. I would simply disappear. In order to read the Fathers of the Church in their own language, I also began my study at the university in classical languages (ancient Greek, Latin, etc.). During all of this time, I was disheartened, like a great number of believers, that not a single member of the clergy stepped forward to say a blunt and categorical "no" to ecumenism and to modernism. The change in the liturgical calendar had produced a scandal and division among the members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, bringing upon the body of the Church an ailment (a wound), to quote the words of St. John Chrysostomos. Thus it is that, in 1988,1 was secretly ordained a Priest (indeed, under the communist regime, that was the only possible course), permitting me to serve a "small flock" of believers who had decided to step out of the muddy stream of apostasy.

INTERVIEWER: Is it not possible to compromise on the question of the liturgical calendar?

ANSWER: The new liturgical calendar, the so-called "corrected Julian calendar," which the Holy Synod adopted in 1968 without the approval of the clergy or the people of God, is a repudiation of the liturgical order consecrated by the Church's Holy Tradition. In fact, it corresponds...to the Gregorian (Papal) calendar, which was condemned by local Church Councils in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The enemies of Orthodoxy succeeded in imposing the new liturgical calendar on three or four countries only. Everywhere that it was imposed, it evoked a lively resistance and immediately Old Calendarist Churches were established. Our country has (unfortunately) been the exception, until now. One must say, then, that the question of the calendar is not an unimportant one. It is one step towards a still more vast reform, conceived in the spirit of "ecumenical rapprochement," a rapprochement which intends to obliterate the line between truth and heresy and in the end to appropriate the Church of Christ. Already the very notion of heresy itself has almost been abolished. But the most repugnant thing is that the leadership of our Church continues to involve itself in the ecumenical movement, as evidenced by the fact that they remain members of the World Council of Churches. Now, this organization has for years driven the Orthodox to compromise their Faith, indeed to the point of sacrilege. The violation of Canons X, XLV, and LXV of the Holy Apostles regarding common prayer with the heterodox has become a constant thing. And when one enters into communion with ecumenical Bishops, he likewise betrays the Orthodox Faith.

INTERVIEWER: All the same, things have not yet reached the point of (Eucharistic) communion with the heretics, and a great number of clergymen and laymen disapprove, in principle, of the ecumenical movement, nonetheless reckoning the situation to be not as dangerous as you suggest.

ANSWER: We are waiting, it seems, for a catastrophe to befall us, something so terrible that we can resolutely say, "Ah, this is apostasy." In the meantime, apostasy moves forward in a perfidious fashion, imperceptibly. The apostasy of ecumenism seeks to transform our very way of thinking, to expose us to a new generation of thought. Since it is, as a rule, compatible with the prevailing values (morals) of our time, it is easily taken as a norm, while those who are opposed to it are characterized as eccentrics or, worse yet, fanatics. Meanwhile, the ecumenical movement gains power. A recent example: the joint Declaration signed in Switzerland in 1990, a document bringing to a final resolution dialogues with the Monophysites, whose heresy was condemned by the Fourth Oecumenical Synod. The new Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, has already sent encyclicals to all of the local Orthodox Churches, calling them to engage in the actual implementation of the union initiated by this Declaration. One can foresee, among other things, the lifting of the anathemas against the Monophysites. The Fathers of the Church will then be declared wrong in this respect and the courageous struggle of St. Maximos the Confessor will be rendered meaningless. These heretics will become "pre-Chalcedonian Orthodox," ...communion with whom means that one has left the Orthodox Church. And to think that all of this is being done without the knowledge of the Faithful...!

INTERVIEWER: It is a strong probability that your step will be considered a schism.

ANSWER: Canonical separation from those who spread and defend heresy is not schism. Quite to the contrary, it is indeed those who teach heresy and who introduce innovation into the Church who provoke division and schism. The integrity (unity) of the Church is expressed above all by fidelity to Divine Truth, of which She is the "pillar and ground" (I Timothy 3:15). At the time of St. Basil the Great, almost all of the Bishops were Arians, that is to say, heretics; yet, they did not constitute the Church. The same thing holds for St. Maximos the Confessor and his time.

INTERVIEWER: In view of all of this, what kinds of relations will you have with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church?

ANSWER: As long as it continues to be involved in the ecumenical movement, we cannot have communion with it. We do not say this because we wish to judge others or because we do not consider them a Church. What we wish to do is preserve the Truth in its fullness, just as it has been handed down to us.

INTERVIEWER: You are not, then, a third Church? [Readers should remember that the New Calendar Bulgarian Church is at present divided into two factions, both of which lay claim to the Patriarchal Throne in Sophia.]

ANSWER: ...The Bulgarian Orthodox Church has only one supreme agency, the Synod of Patriarch Maxime. If we have separated from this Synod, our position is not at all aggressive. Our canonical jurisdiction wishes simply to offer Orthodox Bulgarians the possibility of uniting in the Faith of their Fathers, in order to confess that Faith without blemish, that is, without compromise and without modernism....

INTERVIEWER: There is in Bulgaria a group of Old Calendarists who consider the Mysteries of the "official" Church, which follows the new liturgical calendar, to be thereby wholly deprived of Grace.

ANSWER: This is an extreme position which is not ours. We are well aware that, to the extent apostasy progresses, Grace disappears. But we are not so bold as to decide this matter in a decisive manner. Only a council can do such a thing. Our task is to separate ourselves, but without assuming the role of judges.

INTERVIEWER: The Synod of Resistance is comprised of Bishops representing various nationalities, yet its President is Greek. Will we [Bulgarians] not be returning to the jurisdiction of the Phanar [Constantinople] under you?

ANSWER: The Synod in Resistance maintains no communion at all with the Oecumenical Patriarchate, so that the danger of which you speak does not exist. Our Synod defends the principle of the catholicity of Orthodoxy and has made it possible for the Old Calendarist Churches—the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, the True Orthodox Church of Greece, the Romanian Old Calendar Church, and henceforth the Bulgarian Old Calendarists—to be in prayerful communion and to help one another. The President of our Synod, Metropolitan Cyprian, in fact, has even been accused of "Pan-Slavism" for having sheltered the zealot monks recently expelled from the Holy Mountain by the Oecumenical Patriarch.

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. 10 (1993), No. 3, pp. 6-10.