Metropolitan Agafangel: On the "New Style" Liturgical Calendar

May 19 / June 1, 2023

The Church of Christ derives its existence from Christ and His disciples. All Church Tradition is handed down in sequence from generation to generation; we receive it from our fathers in order to pass it on to our descendants—as our fathers believed, so we also believe; what our fathers received, that we also receive; what they rejected, we also reject. “Hold fast what thou hast” is said in the Revelation of John the Theologian (3:11), and these same words were left as his testament by our hierarch St. Philaret, the third First Hierarch of ROCOR. Tradition is sequential and monolithic in its development; cardinal, “revolutionary” innovations are wholly excluded from it, and it is precisely toward such innovations that ecclesiastical modernism and the accompanying “new style” are directed.

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The decree of the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council (see also Apostolic Canon 7 and Canon 1 of the Council of Antioch) prescribes that all Christians celebrate Pascha on one and the same day; naturally, this also applies to other significant feasts. Later, Canon 7 of the Second Ecumenical Council and Canon 95 of the Council in Trullo explicitly called those who do not observe this rule—namely the Quartodecimans, who celebrate Pascha with the Jews on the 14th of Nisan—heretics. That is, those who reject the calendar accepted by the Church are, according to the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, heretics.

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The Catholics fell away from the Church of Christ in 1054, and from that time to our own day they have accepted, and continue to accept, many innovations which remove them ever farther from the Church of the Holy Fathers. One such heretical innovation was the “correction” of the church calendar in 1582 at the initiative of Pope Gregory XIII. Thanks to this “reform,” the heretics celebrated Pascha together with the Jews on the 14th of Nisan (and even earlier than they did) many times.

The new calendar adopted by the papists was rejected in the very year of its appearance (1582) by Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II, and was then condemned by three Pan-Orthodox Councils (in 1583, 1587, and 1593) “as a pernicious papal innovation.” These conciliar decrees remain in force to this day and directly excommunicate from the Church all “new-calendarists.”

The very introduction of the “new calendar” from the outset served to deepen the division between the Orthodox and the papists.

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To our great regret, after the fall of the Orthodox Russian Empire, the Eastern Local Churches, having been deprived of material support from the Empire, sought other financial sources to maintain the accustomed comfort of their existence. At first, some of them, hoping for continued funding, even supported the Soviet authorities and the renovationist church created by it. But, realizing that they would receive no money from there, they turned to the Masons and to the various associations created by them, similar to the present-day World Council of Churches. These agreed to help, but demanded certain concessions. It is evident that one of these concessions, aimed at bringing about a schism in the Church of Christ, was the transition of the Local Orthodox Churches under their control to the “new style.”

Despite its obvious harmfulness, the reform of the church calendar was carried out in 1924 in the Churches of Constantinople, Greece, and Romania, and then in certain other Local Churches as well. This departure occurred after nineteen centuries of the entire Orthodox Church’s life according to the one Julian calendar common to all. The very fact that the “new style” was accepted by some group, and not by the whole Church, contradicts the dogma of the conciliarity of the Orthodox Church, as well as the dogma of the Unity of the Church, the visible form of which has always been a common calendar.

It is evident that the new calendar was adopted within the framework of the pan-heresy of ecumenism, with the aim of destroying the Church of Christ and creating in its place a worldwide global mega-church. Thus, those who accepted the “new calendar” for the sake of unity with heretics and those of other faiths fell away from Sacred Tradition and the Holy Fathers and went after the papist heretics.

The Church has its own boundaries, and the destruction of those boundaries signifies falling away from the Church—truth, once mixed with falsehood, ceases to be truth.

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The transition to the new style means the loss of connection with one’s past—beginning with one’s believing parents and forefathers, and further, with all one’s Christian ancestors, and thus with Sacred Tradition and with the Church founded by Christ.

Of course, to unbelieving people, who are accustomed to celebrating two Nativities of Christ as they do the New and Old New Year, this is a matter of indifference. But believing people will find themselves faced with a dangerous temptation, with a choice between two paths: to remain in unity with their pious forebears and with the Church in which they abode, or to go the way of a world free from faith in God.

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It must be acknowledged that the Moscow Patriarchate is not only its leaders, but also millions of ordinary believing people who, unfortunately, in their blindness follow a corrupt caste of false shepherds selected and appointed by the Soviet special services. Ordinary people have been misled by Soviet propaganda, which for many years instilled in them the idea that the leadership of the MP is the true and lawful hierarchy. But this is not so at all—the present leadership of the MP is analogous to the Pharisees of the Gospel, whom Christ rebuked and who became the initiators of His crucifixion. Today the Orthodox Church must decisively depart from the Pharisees and follow Christ, just as it once did two thousand years ago.

In Ukraine the Orthodox Church has need not of reform, but of a return to the conciliarity established by the Ecumenical Councils and the Holy Fathers, from the loss of which the Church, unfortunately, proceeded from the reforms of Peter I to the formation by Stalin in 1943 of the Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, when conciliarity was finally destroyed by the God-fighting authorities together with traitors from among the pure hierarchy of the MP. After that, ALL bishops and abbots of the largest churches and monasteries of the MP were appointed not by the Church itself, but by her enemies, from among the faithful supporters of the satanic power. This, unfortunately, continues in the Russian Federation to this day.

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A reform is now planned in Ukraine, aimed at the destruction of Orthodoxy already in our own country. To our great regret, it has so come about on our land in the last century that the questions of the Church are decided by people far removed from her and hostile toward her—and to the question of with whom one should be, with Christ, His Church, and our pious forefathers, or with the world which lieth in evil, they give a perfectly definite answer: one must keep step with the world that has rejected Christ.

Of course, this new reform will cut off from the presently emerging “official” Ukrainian church the majority of believing people. Will there be those who replace them? I think not.

It only remains to hope that those carrying out these reforms in Ukraine do so out of ignorance and truly strive, as they suppose, to bring benefit to our fatherland. May God grant that their eyes be opened to the fact that the path to Christ and Eternal Life is one, and every other path is a road leading to Hell. True Christians will not go by such a road, nor will they wish it for others.

 

Russian source:

http://internetsobor.org/index.php/stati/avtorskaya-kolonka/mitropolit-agafangel-o-perekhode-na-novyj-stil