25 August / 7 September 1992
Dear Father Dimitri!
I am sending you the volume of my
writings which has just come off the press. I do this under the impression of
your article which I have just read, entitled “An Attempt to Understand.”
At the end of this third volume,
you will find my article about you, written more than ten years ago under the
impression of, and in connection with, your inner repentance before the Moscow
Patriarchate.
All these years I remembered you
with love and sorrow, fearing that through repentance before the enemies of God
you had already destroyed your soul. However, comparing your statement, made
“under duress,” with your latest article, I see that something common has
remained between you and me in our convictions.
You write: “But will we have to
choose? We forget that the world is moving toward its end. Terrible ecology,
the decline of morals, increasing crime.” This is an extremely incomplete list
of the signs of the approaching end on your part. There is something still more
terrible. Here among us, the factual existence is already very
noticeable—though not yet fully consolidated—of a non-Christian international
government; the preparation of a single worldwide currency; the striving to
destroy national borders; statements by the Jews about the imminent appearance
to the world of the “Messiah,” in our understanding the Antichrist... There was
published, though noticed by very few, an agreement of the Pope with the Jews
concerning joint work for the preparation of the coming of the “Messiah.”
The Second Coming of the true
Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ, will take place without human labor and
political machinations. A large body of literature has appeared concerning the
creation of a new, all-uniting religion, which hardly reaches you. The atheist
Gorbachev has involved himself in this matter, by agreement with the Pope, and
the Jews are trumpeting here that in the very near future their Messiah will
appear to the world. In the language of contemporary activists this is called
the creation of a “New World,” which many years ago had already been declared
the goal of Masonry. The first and chief victory of these dark forces was the
removal in Russia of Him Who, according to the word of the Apostle Paul, was in
the world “he that restraineth.”
There are many prophecies
concerning the manifestation of the Son of Lawlessness in the age of the
Apocalypse. As for the optimistic predictions of Saint Seraphim, they are of
doubtful origin, often being the fruit of optimism and spiritual delusion. The
authenticity of the warnings of Saint John of Kronstadt is more certain. The
desired blessedness of the Antichrist’s world is presented to us by the false
prophets as a model of the bright future, which in history already existed and
passed by unrecognized, and was rejected by our people. We are already living
through the beginning of the final period in the life of mankind.
Now, from what has been foretold,
there may remain a little flock, to which I myself would wish to belong by the
mercy of God. It is little because the majority in our time is being enticed
into the nets of falsehood and sin. To save someone close to us from this is
possible only according to the measure of our love for God and for those who
are in error.
When the Holy Fathers exposed
heresy and drew those who had deviated into it back into the Church, this was a
manifestation of their love for those in error. We must do this not for the
sake of, as you write, “our truth,” but for the sake of God’s truth.
I shall give an example: an
important matter separating us from the Patriarchate is Ecumenism — a heresy
against the dogma of the uniqueness of the Church, confessed in the Symbol of
Faith. In 1948, at the conference of representatives of various Orthodox
Churches in Moscow, the incompatibility of Ecumenism with Orthodoxy was very
clearly defined. Especially good was the report of Archpriest G. Razumovsky.*
In 1961, the KGB recognized that
Ecumenism was useful for Soviet policy. The Patriarchate was ordered to adopt
it and to enter into membership in the World Council of Churches. This command
of the godless continues to be carried out by the Moscow Patriarchate even to
this day.
Tell me: if the rejection of
Arianism, as a heresy against the Church’s teaching concerning Christ as the
Son of God, was a proclamation of the Truth, then why does that which entered
into the Creed—the faith in His Body, the Church, as ONE—not have the same
significance and not deserve confession? Why was Arius’ distortion of Orthodoxy
before the face of God inadmissible, while the acceptance of the heresy of
many-churched Ecumenism by order of the godless must be covered over and
observed even to this day in the supposedly free Church of Patriarch Alexy II?
Why should the condemnation of heresies by Councils be recognized as acts of
love toward those seduced by Arius and other heretics, while the rejection, in
the same order, of the hierarchy of Ecumenism is to be considered an act
contrary to love? Where in the patristic examples is the confession of the
truth obligatory only to the measure of one’s personal safety, that which we
call Sergianism?
Was not, for example, the first
canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, listing a whole series of condemned
heresies, an act of love? Was this an act of malice, or, on the contrary, one
indicating the right path to the faithful?
The onset of apocalyptic time
ought to make us, as the remaining “little flock,” especially careful in
preserving the truth, when we are now being told of the imminent appearance of
the “Son of perdition.”
May God help you to consider all
the material being sent without prejudice and to make the right decision.
May the mercy of God be with you.
Bishop Gregory
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