Monday, March 9, 2020

Greek Archdiocese creates "Slavic" Vicariate

For those keeping score at home... in Europe the EP's Russian parishes left their newly formed vicariate for a fledgling Muscovite archdiocese. In the US some ROCOR parishes left and became an EP vicariate. Regardless of the extenuating circumstances here, we are left with a complicated situation in world Orthodoxy where Russians are talking about serving people in places like Africa and the EP is setting up legal entities in the Czech Republic. The sharp-eyed will note that there are already autocephalous Orthodox bodies in place there. Once formed it is hard to undo such idiosyncratic configurations. I still long for the day other jurisdictions get out of the otherwise pristine Alaska and leave it to the episcopate that has been serving that lands for hundreds of years. It only makes sense, but sense is not what put those parishes under non-local omophoria.

Ironically, it is under the idea of "better serving" such-and-such group that we find Orthodox patriarchates painting over each other in evangelizing/proselytizing efforts in the Far East, South America, and maybe soon places like Kenya and Slovakia.

God willing this brinksmanship will end in my lifetime because I find it ever harder to explain to my children (much less my parishioners) why Patriarch W is saying or doing something in country X when Orthodox group Y is tragically dying at the hands of Islamic/dictatorship group Z. In the interest of time, I often make the physical emotive equivalent of the Facebook "It's complicated" status and hope that will suffice for any given conversation.


New York (GOARCH) - On Monday, March 9, 2020, following approval of the Mother Church of Constantinople last November after the request of the Holy Eparchial Synod, His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and Exarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, announced the creation of the Vicariate for the Orthodox Christian Communities of Slavic Tradition.

The new Vicariate will report directly to Archbishop Elpidophoros and at the beginning includes hundreds of faithful belonging to the following three Orthodox communities: Saint Matrona of Moscow Cathedral of Miami, Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker Monastery in North Fort Myers, Florida, and Saint John the Forerunner and Baptist Cathedral of Brooklyn. The clergy of the Vicariate are Very Rev. Archimandrite Alexander Belya, Very Rev. Archpriest Vasiliy Deyak, Rev. Archpriest Oleksandr Belya, Rev. Archpriest Ioann Spasyuk, Rev. Protodeacon Rostislav Zadorozhnyy and Rev. Deacon George A. Hero.

Archbishop Elpidophoros has appointed Very Rev. Archimandrite Alexander Belya as the first Vicar of the Vicariate.

23 comments:

  1. Well Belya got his promotion, wonder if it will be all he hoped it would be or if we’ll see him joining another jurisdiction down the road for a better offer.

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    1. Not clear where he'd go, except maybe to one of the little Old-Calenderist jurisdictions.

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  2. How fitting it is at this time to be serving the St. Basil Liturgy on the Lenten Sundays wherein we pray:"calm the dissensions of the churches, quench the ragings of the nations, quickly destroy and uproot the risings of heresy through the power of Thy Holy Spirit, receive us all into Thy kingdom, showing us to be sons of light and sons of the day, grant us Thy peace and Thy love, O Lord our God, for all things hast Thou given unto us."

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  3. Belya was laicized last month by ROCOR. Now he is an EP Vicar?

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  4. Reminds me of the rocor situation when they brought in Bondi and his Western rite group and promoted the recently divorced Bondi to archimandrite,,,,,that did not last long

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  5. Picking up people who crash out of ROCOR surrounded by pretty serious charges of corruption is not a good look... It looks like GOARCH follows the same vetting procedures that the EP used with their Ukrainians.

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  6. More and more, I suspect that "Canonical Territories" are quickly becoming a lost cause, not just in the USA but worldwide; and that some new structure, unknown to us now, will emerge for the Church. Lord help us!

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    1. Reality can be postponed for only so long. Change will happen.

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  7. Such a godly methodology employed by phanariots. ‘Making things better by making things worse’. Smacks of nothing so much as nihilism. And enabled by the canonical silence of the rest if the Church, it is prevailing. I cannot express the depth of my disgust.

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  8. The Greek hierarchs (possibly others) do not think America is a serious country, so America will not get a serious Church. America is just a place for the kids to get rich and get an education and recruit more tithing parishes and missions. Perhaps the hierarchs are right.

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    1. Greeks, Slavs and Middle Easterners mainly regard America as a cash cow to milk while the milking's good--not a real country with a real people who can populate a real Church. I exaggerate of course, but I'm getting angry at hierarchs piously condemning "phyletism" everywhere but in their own ethnic nationalist, overlapping jurisdictions.

      Maybe they're taking the long view: they don't think America can hang together as a real country so they're forming their own national Churches in advance. Maybe Americans should do the same, assuming there's any agreement on who's American.

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  9. I just want to point out a few very big differences between the Greek Vicariate and the Archdiocese of Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe (AROCWE):

    1) The clergy from AROCWE accepted into the Moscow Patriarchate are not suspended or defrocked.

    2) "Russians are TALKING about serving people in places like Africa and the EP is SETTING UP legal entities in the Czech Republic."
    I too am nervous about dissolving canonical boundaries, but let's point out facts. On one hand, you have some Russians (I have heard priests and laypeople, but no hierarchs) TALKING about Africa, whereas the EP has actually gone forward and created legal entities in the Czech Republic. Discussions among priests and laypeople is NOT the same as taking action.

    3) There is a historical link between the AROCWE and the Moscow Patriarchate that simply does not exist between the EP and this "Slavic Vicariate". Just take the Alexander Nevskiy Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris as an example. The founder of the Cathedral, Fr. Joseph Vasiliev, was a cleric of the Moscow Patriarchate. The consecration was performed by Metropolitan Leontiy Lebedinskiy, who at the time was bishop of Tallinn, a vicar bishop of Saint Petersburg. GOARCH's Vicariate is not a "homecoming," it is an entirely new venture.

    4) I too am bothered by this idea of "better serving" believers in a given area. It sounds like some people are proposing a model in which Local Churches "compete" to provide the best "services" which is absolutely horrifying. Oddly enough. Archimandrite Cyril Govorun was the first person I heard mention such a setup and described it as being a positive development. He was referring to his belief that bot the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and the OCU (Ecumenical Patriarchate) are "two parallel canonical structures" in Ukraine. I am no one important, but for the record, I do not agree. (the interview is here, but only in Russian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlJWCzAgxsM ). In an interview with the Russian magazine Snob, he mentioned the same idea:
    "Для Украины хорошо, что в ней сосуществуют две параллельные канонические православные структуры, которые, если говорить светским языком, будут конкурировать между собой."
    My translation: "It is good for Ukraine that there are two parallel, canonical Orthodox structures coexisting within it who, if we use secular language, will compete among themselves."
    The interview is available here (in Russian): https://snob.ru/entry/187881/

    Archimandrite Cyril Govorun is still listed on the website of the Moscow Patriarchate ( http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/1314994.html ), but he supports the (in my view) non-canonical OCU. He is, in fact, a great example of just how wishy-washy things have gotten: a monk in the Moscow Patriarchate living in the US saying the creation of the OCU was a good idea because it will compete with the Patriarchate he himself belongs to. I have a feeling Archimandrite Cyril would NOT support the Moscow Patriarchate getting involved in Africa, but I don't know how he would explain this.

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    1. The Moscow Patriarchate's former representations in Africa have ceased commemorating the Pope of Alexandria and only commemorate the patriarch of Moscow now. That is not talk, they have gone into schism with the Church of Alexandria.

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    2. The MP went into schism with the Church of Alexandria by not commemorating the Patriarch of Alexandria? You've lost me here.

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  10. Cyril Govorun has an apt name - he should learn to be quiet.

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  11. The Patriarch of Alexandria threw himself into schism when he decided to start recognizing laymen as hierarchs and clergy.

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  12. ...or we could just admit that we have adopted a Protestant ecclesiology.

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    1. It's not Protestant, rather it's post Empire ethno-national "churches" that has been the de facto norm for a 1000 years. Modern states and their indigenous multi-ethnic, multi-cultural plural ontology just reveals the truth that the Church ecclesiastically has always followed culture. Orthodoxy has a natural conservatism (i.e. it adapts/conforms slowly) so the breakdown of the "canonical order" myth has been slow but it's demise is evident to all but the most ardent internet canonists.

      I wonder how long before the inevitable liturgical/sacramental and dogmatic changes/diversity creep in. It's hard to believe that will be another 1000 years given modern cultural change, communication, travel, etc.

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    2. Competing legalisms each justified by a myopic understanding of God, i.e. the essence of the Protestant mentality. It is hard to love and trust in God's actual Providence rather than trying to use one's own will to create the Kingdom.

      It may well take the total collapse of what we think of as "the Church" for us to realize we are sinking and genuinely cry out to Our Lord, God and Savior.

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    3. Correct. Ecclesia is downstream from culture, a phenomenon practically as constant as the Nicene Creed.

      https://anti-gnostic.com/2019/08/25/ecclesia-is-downstream-from-culture/

      The Church woke up from her dream of long-dead Empire in time to adopt the nation-state model, only to find that their congregants could just pack up and leave when the wars started or the jobs disappeared. What comes next? The Greeks seem to think a neo-Papal model with the EP (and others) planting new ethnic-based jurisdictions in the Americas. The scramble for the New World is on, 400 years later.

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  13. So much for Constantinople's claim "They broke communion with us, but we haven't broken communion with them."

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  15. I have a hard time believing Archbishop Elpidophoros would just accept them without some form of vetting (looking into the accusations and rumors), but it wouldn't be the first time that a hasty or questionable reception has blown up in a Church's face. How's Indonesia these days? It is sad, but not unprecedented. I pray that such is not the case here.

    People who know the actual history of our Church know that there is nothing unusual or world ending about any of this. One Bishop, One Territory was on shaky ground long before the Russian Revolution. Contrary to the Hagiography, Russian "jurisdiction" in America was starting to crack and be challenged with the immigration influx of the late 19th Century. The Greeks never fully accepted it, and the nucleus of what would become the GOA rejected Moscow's authority outright, tying itself to the Church of Greece. The Antiochians were also looking to set up shop as well. It was the personal holiness, charisma and leadership of St. Tikhon that kept jurisdictionalism from taking full hold in America much earlier than it did. Canonical arguments in those days were just as "worthless" as they are now, especially when the passions are involved. There have always been "jurisdictional fights." Look at the Holy Land. Look at Monasteries. Heck, you have such fights between Bishops in the same Church!

    As ugly as Church history is, it is a great comfort to me, because there truly is nothing new under the sun. God is in control. This is NOTHING compared to some of the mess and garbage that has happened in the Church in centuries past.

    I am not defending malfeasance in the Church or the sad tit for tat that is once again happening. The answer to all of this in the Synaxarion. The Lives of the Saints guide us during such times.

    I think Archimandrite Gregory had the best response to this. People are getting too worked up about it, either because they have this image of what "the Church should be" and want to see it "reformed," and then they get bitter when it doesn't happen (the folks who think that throwing stones at bishops they don't like is somehow "helping"), Or they see Church history in these simplistic narratives (Byzantium or Holy Rus) and buy into the propaganda that is coming from wherever, and when the reality of it hits them its like a gut punch. They too get bitter, or spiral looking for the "true Church."

    It is this broken foolishness that marks Orthodoxy that actually affirms for me that it is the true Church of Christ. Because only the Holy Spirit could hold it together like it is and with the Faith intact for so long.

    A wry smile, sign of the cross and a sheepish shoulder shrug is where I am heading on issues like this. We really are something else, aren't we?

    Look to Christ and your spiritual father--- nowhere else. That is the path of the saints, and the only sane reaction to any of this.

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