Anastasis Dialogue excursion on recent OCA developments

Someone who is grappling head-on with the heresy of authoritarianism is the new primate of the Orthodox Church in America, Metropolitan Jonah--and grappling very well, as I think this February address shows. Take the following paragraphs, for example:

So where do we start? First, we have to look at basic Orthodox ecclesiology. The Apostles invested the bishops with the leadership of the Church, through sacramental ordination. This is the principle of authority in the Church: sacramental responsibility. This sacramental responsibility is not only over what is "spiritual," but the entire life of the whole Church, in every aspect, because even how we use our money is spiritual and sacramental. There can be no dualism between the spiritual and the material.

I believe that the starting place to understand all this is to understand authority and obedience as responsibility, rather than as "power." Any reduction to "power" is by definition, corruption. Accountability in relation to responsibility is a core element in obedience. Various areas of responsibility are given to the different offices and organs of the Church by the canons. The question is, how are they invested with responsibility and for what, and to whom they are accountable? Accountability is intimately linked with responsibility; the structures of accountability are built as structures of obedience. Then we have to look at the nature of the support of the whole structure: first, financially, with the flow of money and resources; then, the flow of responsibility and accountability in relation to the organs of advice and consensus.

It is interesting that not everyone in His Beatitude's flock is happy with these ideas, especially when they take on a practical shape like re-defining the role and responsibility of the Metropolitan Council, or devolving more and more from the central administration to the dioceses. I saw one poster to an Orthodox discussion list decry all this as tending both toward monasticisization of the OCA and also to making it more Roman Catholic. How she got there (the Roman Church is uber-monastic???) was to begin by interpreting Jonah's understanding of hierarchical responsibility as a call to "unquestioning obedience." She then tied this notion of obedience to monasticism and then, on the strength of Rome's controlling tendencies and its insistence on a celibate priesthood, concluded, q.e.d., that Jonah is really all about power a la Roma. Given that His Beatitude is really trying to de-centralize administration and reduce his own power this is, well, shall we say a surprising conclusion...

Complete article here.