On the 2006 ordination of a Spiritual Son of Archbishop Mark of Berlin by the Moscow Patriarchate

From: Archbishop Chrysostomos [of Etna]

To: Monastery

Date: 2006-3-15 16:31

Subject: Re: link

http://www.mospat.ru/index.php?page=30105&lng=0 

[Updated link: https://mospat.ru/en/news/75228]

I read this. Too sad. What's a man to say?

The tragic thing is that, from a theological or ecclesiological standpoint, it is a mockery of the ROCA. Orthodox theologians have for some time, and quite wrongly, adopted the Latin notion that Eucharistic communion and Grace are standards of external ecclesiastical communion. This is not, in fact, the basis of our Orthodox concept of unity in the Church. We are at all times unified in the Eucharist (in Christ), often with those from whom we are temporarily (and rightly) separated administratively and jurisdictionally and who may, despite the infractions that justify and indeed necessitate our separation from them, have, by God's Providence, Grace (and this for the sake of misled souls).

This is made abundantly clear in St. Basil the Great's canonical ruminations on Baptismal Grace among those who may have fallen to some heresy. He makes very careful and subtle distinctions between the various heretical groups, in fact, telling us where Grace may or may not be. (Ironically, it is an abuse of this subtlety that led Father Florovsky, in an article written early in his career and which he constantly said that he regretted, to speculate about St. Augustine's notion of Grace beyond certain established boundaries. One can understand this speculation, of course, in a way that the ecumenists do not. Father Georges came to understand the proper boundaries of the Church, as he saw the ecumenical veer in directions that disappointed and then shocked him.)

The point is that we are measured by the purity of our confession of Faith, as Bishop Photii in Bulgaria once so eloquently pointed out in addressing an assembly of our clergy, not by the question of who has or does not have Grace or by the incidental issue of whether we maintain external communion with this or that group. It is, in fact, in jurisdictional terms that we express the purity of our witness, walling ourselves off from error or spiritual ailments, in order to preserve our confessional purity. It is here that Metropolitan Cyprian so perfectly and so correctly planted the roots of our resistance. The question of Grace or external Eucharistic communion transcends this responsibility of ours. If we are cured of ontological disease by the Mysteries, it is by the purity of our confessional witness that we are protected from heresy and spiritual malaise and vouchsafed the salvific action of the Mysteries. This lesson from Church history and the Fathers is lost on the superficial thing that passes itself off as "theology" today: an exercise in folly at the expense of the spirit.

Thus, since Ordination is, as the pronouncements of the Oecumenical Synods so clearly attest, a matter of jurisdiction and administrative integrity, this act is a clear mockery of the ROCA. It is a binding statement that the ROCA is subject to the MP and that the MP is its standard of Faith and confession. Thus, should it surprise us that the ROCA website now sponsors the ecumenical confession of the MP's Bishop Hilarion? Not in the least. It must now line up with its "master," little knowing that it has relinquished its integrity. Who could do anything but lament?

The tragedy in all of this is that you and I are probably much more universalist in our views and far more tolerant of other religions, in terms of genuine Christian love for all men, than those who would prefer to see the Church as an ethnic priority. The worst aspect of ecumenism is, indeed, its intolerance of those of us who have embraced the criterion of Truth and wish to preserve it. God preserve us. I wonder: who, in the Church today will have the stamina to hold forth?

Least Among Monks, 

+ AC