MP Commentator: Should ROCOR Receive Greeks into Its Clergy?

Alexey Rodionov | May 27, 2026

 

 

On May 27 in Greece, the day of commemoration of the holy martyr John the Russian is celebrated. The Russian Church, which lives according to the Old Style, celebrates his memory on June 9. But since we will be speaking precisely about Greeks, let us dwell precisely on May 27. Perhaps this is the only example when a saint of Russian origin is far better known in Greece, among the Greek people, than in Russia. And on such an occasion I wanted to reflect a little on what, in fact, the ties of Greeks with the Russian Church ought to be. Neither in the ecclesiastical nor in the civil respect are Greek-Russian ties now in a rather deplorable condition, and from year to year they only grow weaker. And the matter is not some quarrel or ambitions, but very global divergences. The question is not about details, but about the essence of what we believe. More precisely, about the attempts of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to rewrite all this.

In general, what the establishments of the Phanar declared had long been causing alarm in Moscow. There even appeared the term “Eastern Papism,” which later came to be called a heresy. But what Patriarch Bartholomew now declares already goes beyond the bounds of heresy, because, after all, heresy is such a deviation from the truths of the faith which still somehow lays claim to its Christianity, whereas Bartholomew’s present declarations are already not Christianity. And not even simply a translation of a political agenda into the language of theological terms. This is already extreme lust for power, ineptly covered over with Orthodoxy. But at the same time, it is also an attempt to be, at any cost, one of their own for certain political forces, while simultaneously harshly scolding all Orthodox Christians whom this does not suit.

But all the same, there are Greeks who do not want to agree with his agenda. And the question arises as to what Greeks who want none of this should do. Because simply denouncing Patriarch Bartholomew is useless. Denounce him or do not denounce him, he will still press on toward his goal like a tank, along the way turning the accusers into the accused. His numerous visits throughout the world were not meaningless either: he has a great many sympathizers among politicians, businessmen, artists, Orthodox theologians, and leaders of various religious associations. Particular note should be made of his close contacts with every American administration without exception, going back to the 1960s. And this fully enables him to speak from a position of strength in the Orthodox world.

And what, under such conditions, are Orthodox Greeks to do who clearly understand where this path will lead, and who do not want to go down it? To struggle against all this “from within” is pointless. Here, incidentally, Nektarios Harrison is right. Yes, the Old Calendar movement is known in Greece and among Greeks; some even pass over into it, both individually and as entire parishes. But here is the question: to what extent can the Greek Old Calendar movement become precisely a global alternative to the Phanar and all its sympathizers and patrons? And the answer to this question is not especially consoling. There are several main reasons for this.

The first thing that must be mentioned is the schisms among the Old Calendarists. Moreover, these are not simply some personal conflicts; they are also quite serious theological divergences. This chiefly concerns whether there is grace in “World” Orthodoxy, and if so, to what degree. And all the attacks without exception against the supposedly “vile” Metropolitan Cyprian (Koutsoumbas) concern precisely this question. These are not disputes about personalities; they are disputes about where the Church is and where it is not. And so far, no clear resolution of this question is emerging. Incidentally, the same is true in “World” Orthodoxy. For the question of the boundaries of the Church is the most complex and tangled question in all Orthodox ecclesiology. And at present there is no at all convincing solution to it not only among the Greek Old Calendarists, but anywhere at all. So, it is enough for some to draw these boundaries slightly differently, and others immediately begin accusations and attacks.

The second problem is the formulaic and one-sided character of Greek Old Calendarist journalism and apologetics. Although at times it really is interesting and substantial, far more often it is a repetition of truths long since learned by heart among the Old Calendarists, which are hardly likely to captivate the mind of a modern European or American. The question even arises: to whom is all this addressed? In essence, the chief task of such journalism and apologetics is to keep those who have already come to them, rather than to reach those outside. One should also note the absence of any kind of think tanks among the Old Calendarists. The very need for them is not recognized. But it is not enough to say that ecumenism is evil and that Orthodox teaching is not subject to revision. An expert view on many problems of modernity is also needed. And this does not exist. And the result is that whatever each person finds, that is what will be.

The third problem is the limited accessibility both of materials about the Old Calendarists and of what they themselves write. In fact, finding even anything at all in Russian is extremely difficult. The situation with English is somewhat better, but still not especially good. There are the information resources of the Saint Photios Orthodox Theological Seminary in Etna, where, through the efforts of Timothy Shenone, genuinely beautiful content is being produced. There is also the vigorous activity of Subdeacon Nektarios Harrison, which, however, tends rather to confuse matters, since his journalism, heavily tied to politics, is still not typical of the Chrysostomos Synod to which he belongs. Moreover, it suffers from the common defect of all radical Old Calendarists, who are very fond of fighting against things; but however much one reads them, it still remains unclear what they are fighting for.

The fourth problem is of a general character for Orthodox mission as such. There is little money and few trained people. But the most important thing is the absence of a well-established Orthodox tradition in the sphere of missionary work. This leads to every missionary having to act at his own risk, only dimly understanding how to act correctly. And this is precisely what stops many from mission proper. For the question is how I am to preach Orthodoxy without falling away from tradition, in conditions where there is no stable tradition of missionary work. And so most “missionaries” limit themselves to memorized denunciations of ecumenists in blogs, social networks, and YouTube.

The fifth problem is social in character. The Old Calendarist milieu as a whole has become settled over the course of a hundred years. Is it ready for radical transformation and expansion? Here one should agree that the Old Calendar movement among Greeks is sustained by family continuity. As, incidentally, is the New Calendar movement. That is, if, let us say, my parents were Old Calendarists, then I too will be an Old Calendarist. Of course, it is not always exactly this way, but the very base of the Old Calendar movement rests precisely on this. And imagine that New Calendarist Greeks begin to pour en masse into this settled milieu. Will frictions not arise? Will the newcomers be welcome guests, since the former parishioners and clergy will still have to sacrifice something familiar? Are they ready to tolerate the New Style, even if only temporarily? What should be done with heterodox who were received without rebaptism (see point one)?

There are many questions and few answers. And thus, Greeks find themselves, as it were, at a crossroads between extreme modernist ecumenists on the one hand, and an amorphous and at times rather harsh Old Calendar movement on the other. And in such a situation some Greeks quite predictably begin to look toward the Russian Church. But here, of course, there are considerable difficulties. First of all, take Greek press, European press, or even American press in general. It is not customary there to speak well of Russia and the Russian Church. On the contrary, it is customary to emphasize how bad everything is there. That is, only truly courageous people can permit themselves the very decision to pass over into the Russian Church.

The foreign parishes of the Moscow Patriarchate — the Diocese of Chersonesus, the Diocese of Sourozh, the Diocese of Berlin, and the Patriarchal Parishes in the USA and Canada — were traditionally intended for émigrés, chiefly for those who arrived after 1990. Greek laypeople could also come there, if there was no Greek church nearby, or if they liked the local priest of the Moscow Patriarchate. But in these churches, there is nothing specifically Greek, nothing that could especially attract conservative Greeks. The same can be said of the Archdiocese of Western European Parishes. After 2019 they took a rather clear position of not quarreling with the Patriarchate of Constantinople under any circumstances. They did not even leave the Assembly of Orthodox Bishops of France, headed by the Metropolitan of Gaul.

Only the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia remains, which, incidentally, has experience of receiving ethnic Greeks into its jurisdiction directly from the Patriarchate of Constantinople; first and foremost, this means Archimandrite Panteleimon (Metropoulos) and his supporters. There are still people alive who remember everything that happened back in the 1960s and 1970s, and who can offer some advice. And finally, there is the experience of receiving Greeks quite recently, after the Russian Church Abroad broke communion with Constantinople in 2018 and began receiving its disgraced clerics. (https://orthochristian.com/122422.html) Finally, there is also a casus belli, that is, the so-called “Slavic Vicariate” within the Phanariot American Archdiocese. The backbone of this vicariate consists of former ROCOR clerics. And this vicariate was created chiefly in order to undermine the Russian Church Abroad. In this connection, it is easy to suppose that it would be logical precisely for Metropolitan Nicholas (Olhovsky), after he had, by no means without difficulty, fought off the Transcarpathian gang by the name of Belya, which wanted nothing less than to ruin the whole Russian Church Abroad, to begin receiving Greek clergy into the clergy of ROCOR.

And I am certain that Moscow would not have opposed this, but Metropolitan Nicholas said “no.” Moreover, the process of receiving Greek clergy, which had seemingly already begun, was completely blocked by the Council of Bishops of the ROCOR. The already-received Deacon Christos Karafotias was annulled and returned to the Constantinopolitan jurisdiction, where he has already been suspended from serving and defrocked. This was not even mentioned in the official communiqué following the Council. That is, Metropolitan Nicholas does not merely not want to anger the Phanar, but he also obscures any mention of a conflict with it. Earlier, Metropolitan Nicholas alienated from the Russian Church Abroad the cleric of the Church of Greece, Archpriest Peter Heers, although Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) had protected him. I also cannot fail to note the appearance of clergy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople at the recent “Heritage and Calling” conference in Munich. They did not merely sit and listen: they were given the floor. In addition, Bishop Irenei (Steenberg) even forbade the wearing of the Greek-cut cassock in his diocese.

(https://orthodox-europe.org/content/within-our-diocese-may-greek-style-ryassas-be-worn/)

One would like to know what the reason is. But Metropolitan Nicholas is silent, as is his circle. All these facts cannot possibly be accidental. There must have been some very weighty reason that specifically prompted such decisions. There may be many such reasons. There is the long-standing love of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) for everything Greek. And he certainly would not have received any Greeks into ROCOR. There is also the unsuccessful attempt to establish Eucharistic communion with both the Matthewites and the Florinites in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One also cannot fail to recall the highly disappointing results of the stay in ROCOR of the already-mentioned Panteleimon (Metropoulos) and his admirers, who simply created a “state within a state” inside ROCOR. Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) also spoke of the Panteleimonites without any reverence. Archbishop Anthony (Bartoshevich) wrote about them in a far from sympathetic manner in a letter to Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) dated December 12, 1986:

“I learned that Panteleimon has fled to Akakios [Pappas]. For us, obviously, this is for the better. Perhaps this will also resolve the question of our captivity to the Greek Old Calendarists. Enough of looking back at them and thinking about what we can and cannot do. We are part of the Russian Church, and we are not on the same path as the Greeks. Christ the Savior did not leave us a Dogmatics, nor laws about the calendar. He left us only one condition in order to have the right to be called His disciples: ‘that ye love one another!’ And when we place the calendar as the cornerstone and gnaw at one another over it, we swallow a camel and strain out a gnat. <...> Evidently, those who preserve the old calendar are permitted to be pederasts, to hate their neighbor, and to tear the Church into pieces. <...> We have fallen into an Old Calendarist sect and are floundering in its web, finding no way out. It is time to say openly and firmly to the Greeks: stop your outrages, your mutual condemnations, your hostility and hatred between brothers. By your behavior you disgrace the Church and blasphemously call yourselves True Orthodox Christians.” (https://kirillov-v-y.livejournal.com/37675.html)

After this, the “Greek” question in ROCOR was closed until 1994, when ROCOR entered into Eucharistic communion with the Synod in Resistance. In that same year Metropolitan Petros (Astyfides) of Astoria also wanted to join ROCOR, but the matter stalled. The communion established with the Synod in Resistance proved unstable and was broken off in the mid-2000s, when it was already clear that the reunion of ROCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate was not far off. As far as I know, no Greek from the Synod in Resistance transferred at that time; but a number of Russian, Western European, and American ROCOR clerics did settle in the Synod in Resistance, not wishing to find themselves in the Moscow Patriarchate. The history of relations between ROCOR and the Synod in Resistance in the years 1994–2005 still awaits its painstaking researcher, but it is noticeable that in present-day ROCOR, no one especially regrets the break with them.

And so, in 2018, ROCOR, having broken communion with the Phanar, once again began receiving priests of the Patriarchate of Constantinople into its clergy. For the most part these were Americans or Europeans who had converted to Orthodoxy and had served in the Patriarchate of Constantinople. For understandable reasons, it was easier for them to transfer to ROCOR than for ethnic Greeks. The first whom Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) received into ROCOR was Priest Mark Tyson of the Carpatho-Russian Diocese, received on October 15, 2018. On October 28, 2018, from the dissolved “Russian” Exarchate, the Nativity of Christ parish in Florence was received, headed by Archpriest George Blatinsky. In December 2018 it became known that Priest Nectarios Trevino had transferred to ROCOR from the Carpatho-Russian Diocese. (link)

On January 25, 2019, the parish of the former Exarchate in Florence was also received into ROCOR. In March 2019 it became known that ROCOR had opened a new missionary parish in Lubbock, Texas, to serve several families who had left the local parish of the Greek American Archdiocese of Constantinople. In July 2019 the priests Spyridon Bailey, Emmanuel Hatzidakis, and John Maridakis were received into ROCOR. The latter two were, in fact, ethnic Greeks. But here is what is noteworthy: already on July 23, 2019, Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) revoked his decree receiving Priest John Maridakis into ROCOR, “in connection with serious accusations brought against [him], requiring investigation.” He remained in ROCOR for only ten days.

Here one cannot fail to say that the Patriarchate of Constantinople has always been rather ethnocentric, and now its ethnocentrism has already been taken to the limit. Therefore, the Phanariots are quite prepared to put up with ethnic Russians, Europeans, or Americans leaving them; but Greeks leaving for ROCOR is not merely a casus belli — it is already a direct summons to wipe ROCOR off the face of the earth. This is precisely what we saw. On October 13, 2019, Archimandrite Alexander (Belya), a ROCOR cleric suspended from serving, served for the first time as a cleric of the American Archdiocese. On March 9, 2020, Archbishop Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis) established the “Slavic Vicariate.” And on August 18, 2020, Archimandrite Alexander (Belya) filed a lawsuit against ROCOR for alleged defamation against him, demanding millions of dollars in damages for his supposed “loss of reputation.” Only on March 31, 2025 did ROCOR manage to fend off Alexander (Belya)’s harassment.

However, I cannot fail to note especially the existence of two anonymous internet resources actively engaged specifically in attacking ROCOR. These are the blog “Pokrovskaya Pravda” and the website rocorabuse.org. By a strange coincidence, they appeared precisely in 2025, when Belya’s lawsuit fell apart in court. The editorial teams of both resources are clearly very well informed about what is happening in ROCOR, but their authors clearly belong neither to the “splinters” nor to the Old Calendarists. And since that is so, almost certainly Phanariot structures stand behind all this. In any case, an attempt to ask the question Cui prodest? leaves no alternatives. All the more so since the flagrant moral crimes of the Belya family have in no way interested the authors of these resources.

I will note one more circumstance: the very reliance on receiving fugitive Orthodox clergy instead of training and ordaining one’s own has always been risky. This is shown by the history of the Old Believer Beglopopovtsy, the history of ROCOR in the time of Philaret (Voznesensky), the history of ROCOR’s “Russian parishes,” and, finally, the history of the “Slavic Vicariate.” The matter here is not only that those who leave any Church are most often not the most successful or scrupulous. In general, the principle of forming any sort of structure out of clerics who have violated their oath is spiritually risky. After all, if some cleric has once left his ecclesiastical authority contrary to his oath, where is the guarantee that he will not repeat this?

Meanwhile, the Phanar has made yet another attempt to crush ROCOR. This time, by presenting it to the public as a puppet of the Kremlin. In November 2025, a number of influential Republicans, headed by U.S. Representative Joe Wilson, appealed to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, asserting that: “The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) is actively seeking to expand its political influence in the United States, including through an event reportedly planned for November 18, 2025.” Let me recall that on that day a number of clerics of ROCOR, the OCA, and the Serbian and Antiochian Churches met with American congressmen, lobbying for the interests of the UOC. This provoked a very harsh statement by a number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives against ROCOR itself.

On November 21, 2025, Metropolitan Nicholas had to publish something like a declaration containing admiration for the political system of the United States and full loyalty to its authorities. In the end, on December 16, 2025, the leader of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate and the third-ranking person in the country, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, delivered a speech from the rostrum of the U.S. Congress in which he made accusations against the Russian Orthodox Church in connection with the inter-Orthodox demonstration held on December 16, 2025, organized by the Society of St. John of Shanghai. Although he had precisely the Moscow Patriarchate in mind, if the matter had been pursued, the blow would have fallen specifically on ROCOR.

But the matter did not proceed, and for the first time in more than five years ROCOR gained at least relative peace. It is quite obvious that behind all these attacks stood the “Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate” and personally Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis), for whom the overly conservative and overly independent ROCOR had long since become something like an obstacle on their broad path of apostasy from Christ... In all this, it is logical to suppose that Metropolitan Nicholas (Olhovsky), having received the long-awaited deliverance from the “sword of Damocles,” preferred not to provoke the already-mentioned Archons unnecessarily by receiving into his clergy Bishop Emilianos of Meloa (Koutouzis) and his deacon Christos Karafotias. Incidentally, at the UOJ they arranged an hour-and-a-half of chatter on this subject.

Well then, Metropolitan Nicholas can be understood; but let the inhabitants of the Phanar themselves also understand one simple thing. Although the Council of Bishops of ROCOR refused to receive Greek clerics of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the very problem that conservative Greek clerics, alien both to the extreme modernism of the Phanar and to the extreme rigorism of the Old Calendarists, have nowhere to go does not disappear. And sooner or later this problem will arise again. At the same time, it is important to understand that only the Russian Church is strong and independent enough to go openly against the Phanar and its “Archons” and to be able to protect those Greeks whom it shelters. As they say, we will follow the development of events.

 

Russian source: https://rocor-observer.livejournal.com/438533.html