Woe unto them that
call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for
darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.
Isaiah 5.20.
Then shall be
tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, nor
ever shall be.
Matthew 24.21.
The
ecclesiastical situation in
“In
“His Holiness Tikhon enjoys enormous authority and love. It is forbidden
to commemorate his name, in some places people are even persecuted for
commemorating it. He himself does not force anyone to commemorate his name, and
now in
“People in
“The question of the new calendar has not died down and it has many
supporters, especially in view of the fact that the Bolsheviks do not recognize
the old feasts and the believers are very constrained when they go to services.
It seems that the Bolshevisk again want to put pressure on the Patriarch to
introduce the new style…”[1]
Shortly before his death, on the Feast of the Annunciation, 1925, the
Patriarch confided to his personal physician and friend, Michael Zhizhilenko,
that he felt that the unceasing pressure of the government would one day force
the leadership of the Church to concede more than was right, and that the true
Church would then have to descend into the catacombs like the Roman Christians
of old. And he counselled his friend, who was a widower, that when that time
came, he should seek the monastic tonsure and episcopal consecration.[2]
That time came in 1927 with the notorious declaration of Metropolitan
Sergius; and Michael Zhizhilenko, following the advice of his mentor, was
consecrated as the first bishop of the anti-sergianist
The concept of “the
The idea
that the
The first Catacomb hieromartyr was probably the married priest Timothy
Strelkov. He was beheaded by the Bolsheviks in June, 1918. But then his severed
head was miraculously restored to his body. He was forced to go into hiding for
twelve years until he was caught and executed for the second time in 1930.[4]
In 1918, Patriarch Tikhon himself had called on the faithful to form
unofficial, quasi-catacomb brotherhoods to defend the Orthodox Faith. Shemetov
writes: “The brotherhoods which arose with the blessing of the Patriarch did
not make the parishes obsolete where they continued to exist. The brotherhoods
only made up for the deficiencies of the parishes.”[5]
In fact, the organization of unofficial, catacomb bodies like the
brotherhoods became inevitable once it became clear that the
On
On April 12, the deceased Patriarch’s will of
However, not all even of the Orthodox bishops accepted Metropolitan
Peter’s leadership.[11] Thus
Archbishop Andrew of
The transfer of ecclesiastical power by
testaments was indeed unprecedented; but it had received the approval of the
Council of 1917-18, so it could hardly be said to have violated the conciliar
conscience of the Church. There would, however, come a time when “this game
with testaments” would come to end, and the ukaz of 1920 would indeed
become the basis of the Church’s structure. But for two more years at least the
patriarch’s testament enabled the
At the same time, there is no doubt that Metropolitan Peter, like
Patriarch Tikhon before him, was distrusted by many churchmen, who suspected
that he was too close to the communists.[13]
According to A. Smirnov, “priests and monks in opposition to Patriarch Tikhon
and Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa founded the first wave of underground
communities and secret sketes and founded their own Hierarchy. Sergianism arose
much later [in 1927]; the first catacombniks entered into conflict already with
Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Peter on the grounds that they were
collaborators…”[14]
The first need of the Church at that time was the convocation of a
Council to elect a new Patriarch. But, of course, the GPU had no intention of
allowing this. Their aim was a tamed Church – that is, a Church that accepted
legalization from the government on the government’s terms. Or, failing that,
another schism. And that only as a stage towards the Church’s final
destruction; for, as the Central Committee member and leading party ideologist,
I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, had said in 1922, although the schisms in the Church
were in the party’s interests, in principle the party remained the enemy of all
religion and would eventually struggle against all of them.[15]
Encouraged by the Patriarch’s death, the renovationists energetically
tried to obtain union with the
He rejected all overtures towards union with the renovationists. And in
a public proclamation dated July 28, 1925, after protesting against the
propaganda of the uniates and sectarians, which was diverting attention away
from the main battle against atheism, he turned his attention to the
renovationists:-
“At the present time the so-called new-churchmen more and more discuss
the matter of reunion with us. They call meetings in cities and villages, and
invite Orthodox clerics and laymen to a common adjudication of the question of
reunion with us, and to prepare for their pseudo-council which they are
convening for the autumn of this year. But it must be clearly recalled that
according to the canonical rules of the
“Thus the canonical rules forbid Orthodox Christians to take part in
them and still more to elect representatives for such gatherings. In accordance
with the 20th rule of the Council of Antioch, ‘no one is permitted
to convene a Council alone, without those bishops who are in charge of the
metropolitanates.’ In the holy
“The so-called new-churchmen should talk of no reunion with the Orthodox
Church until they show a sincere repentance for their errors. The chief of
these is that they arbitrarily renounced the lawful hierarchy and its head, the
most holy Patriarch, and attempted to reform the Church of Christ by
self-invented teaching (The Living Church, ¹¹. 1-11); they transgressed the
ecclesiastical rules which were established by the Ecumenical Councils (the
pronouncements of the pseudo-council of May 4, 1923); they rejected the
government of the Patriarch, which was established by the Council and
acknowledged by all the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchs, i.e. they rejected that
which the whole of Orthodoxy accepted, and besides, they even condemned him at
their pseudo-council. Contrary to the rules of the holy Apostles, the
Ecumenical Councils and the holy Fathers (Apostolic canons 17, 18; Sixth
Ecumenical Council, canons 3, 13, 48; St. Basil the Great, canon 12), they
permit bishops to marry and clerics to contract a second marriage, i.e. they
transgress that which the entire Ecumenical Church acknowledges to be a law,
and which can be changed only by an Ecumenical Council.
“The reunion of the so-called new-churchmen with the holy Orthodox Church
is possible only on condition that each of them recants his errors and submits
to a public repentance for his apostasy from the Church. We pray the Lord God
without ceasing that He may restore the erring into the bosom of the holy
Orthodox Church.”[16]
The epistle had a sobering effect on many wavering clerics. As the
renovationist Vestnik Sviashchennago Sinoda (Herald of the Holy Synod)
was forced to admit: “Immediately Peter’s appeal came out, the courage of the
‘leftist’ Tikhonites disappeared.” So at their renovationist ‘council’
“Metropolitan-Evangelist” Vvedensky publicly accused Metropolitan Peter of
involvement with an émigré monarchist plot, producing a patently
forged denunciation by the renovationist “bishop” Nicholas of Latin America.[17]
The Bolsheviks gave ready support to the renovationists in their battle
against Peter. Thus Savelev writes: “On
Meanwhile, Tuchkov initiated discussions with Peter with regard to
“legalizing” the Church. This “legalization” promised to relieve the Church’s
rightless position, but on the following conditions:
1)
the
issuing of a declaration of a pre-determined content;
2) the exclusion from the ranks of the bishops of those who were
displeasing to the authorities;
3) the condemnation of the émigré bishops; and
4) the participation of the government, in the person of Tuchkov, in the
future activities of the Church.[19]
However, Metropolitan Peter refused to accept these conditions or sign
the text of the declaration Tuchkov offered him, thereby continuing to be a
rock in the path of the atheists’ plans to seize control of the Church. For, as
he once said to Tuchkov: “You’re all liars. You give nothing, except promises.
And now please leave the room, we are about to have a meeting.”
On
On December 12, Metropolitan Peter was imprisoned in the Lubyanka. The
other possible locum tenentes, Metropolitans Cyril and Agathangel, had
already been exiled. And nearly a month earlier, on November 19, a group of
bishops living in
A
critical turning-point in the history of the Greek Church was the appearance of
the sign of the Cross in the sky over the Old Calendarist monastery of
“Then, regardless of the true motives for their presence, against their
own will, but according to the Will which exceeds all human power, they became
participants in the miraculous experience of the crowd of believers.
“At 11.30 [during the procession of the Litya] there began to appear in
the heavens above the church, in the direction of the North-East, a bright,
radiant Cross of light. The light not only illuminated the church and the
faithful but, in its rays, the stars of the clear, cloudless sky became dim and
the church-yard was filled with an almost tangible light. The form of the Cross
itself was an especially dense light and it could be clearly seen as a
Byzantine cross with an angular cross bar towards the bottom. This heavenly
miracle lasted for half an hour, until
“Human language is not adequate to convey what took place during the
apparition. The entire crowd fell prostrate upon the ground with tears and
began to sing hymns, praising the Lord with one heart and one mouth. The police
were among those who wept, suddenly discovering, in the depths of their hearts,
a childlike faith. The crowd of believers and battalion of police were
transformed into one, unified flock of faithful. All were seized with a holy
ecstasy.
“The vigil continued until
“Many of the unbelievers, sophists and renovationists, realizing their
sin and guilt, but unwilling to repent, tried by every means to explain away or
deny this miracle. The fact that the form of the cross had been so sharply and
clearly that of the Byzantine Cross (sometimes called the Russian Cross), with
three cross-bars, the bottom one at an angle, completely negated any arguments
of accidental physical phenomena.
“The fact that such an apparition of the cross also occurred during the
height of the first great heresy[23] must
strike the Orthodox with an especial sense of the magnitude of the calendar
question and of all that is connected with it. No sensible person can discuss
this question lightly, with secular reasoning or with worldly arguments.
Renovationists, like the Arians in 351, are left without extenuation or
mitigation.”[24]
There were many eyewitness accounts. Thus John Glymis, a retired police
officer, witnesses: “I was one of the men from the Police Institute who were
sent to stop the vigil that night, some fifty years ago, at the country
Another eye-witness, Athanasios Primalis, was driving a tram around
Omonoia square. “Immediately I stepped on the brakes and stopped the vehicle. I
stuck my head out of the tram door and I, the unworthy one, also saw the
Precious Cross of our Lord – may His Name be glorified. It was shining over
However, on hearing of the miracle, the new calendarist bishops
declared: “What appeared before the Old Calendarists, if it really
appeared, was God's testimony that they are in great spiritual deception.
The sign was telling them: 'Oh, unreasonable ones, do you not know that the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross has passed? So many hundreds
of thousands of people agree on the fact that today is September 26, and
you are still thinking it is September 13 and the eve of the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross! Why, unfaithful ones, do
you celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on the 27th, when it
is to be done on September 14?' So, that is what this could mean, if
there was any appearance at all."[26]
But this was a desperate attempt by the
new calendarists: the heavens spoke against them…
The centre of the struggle against the new calendar in the
Greek-speaking lands was
In 1926 the Athonite “Sacred League” was joined by the “Greek Religious
Community of the True Orthodox Christians” in
In 1927 a patriarchal committee succeeded in negotiating a compromise
that was accepted under pressure by all the monasteries but not by all the
monks. The committee assured the Athonites that the calendar reform was not
final in that it had not been accepted by all the Orthodox Churches. Moreover,
the issue was to be reconsidered at an impending Pan-Orthodox Council that
would resolve the matter. In this way, the committee persuaded the Athonites to
continue following the Old Calendar while commemorating the Ecumenical
Patriarch, pending the resolution of the question by a Pan-Orthodox Council.
The compromise was accepted by all the Athonite monasteries, but only partially
by Esphigmenou, which did not resume the commemoration of the Patriarch but did
continue to receive his representatives and to commune with other monasteries
that commemorated him. Moreover, they continued to concelebrate at the
cathedral of the Protatou in Karyes, where the Patriarch was commemorated.
Later, in the 1970s, Esphigmenou would break completely with the Patriarchate.[28]
However, many of the monks refused to accept the compromise – which
turned out to be a deception in that the new calendar had not been abolished by
any competent Council. And to this day
The spirit of these zealot monks is well caught in the following excerpt
from the life of the zealot monk Habbakuk “the barefoot”: “After the adoption
of the new calendar, a large number of Athonite Fathers decided to stop
commemorating their bishop, who was subject to the Patriarch, and to break
communion with the latter and with every church that accepted the innovation of
the new calendar or even continued to be in communion with the innovators. But
the majority of the monks did not dare to subscribe to this decision; whence
the schism which continues to this day and whose effects are felt more and more
acutely. At the beginning, twenty-four monks from the monastery of the Great
Lavra rebelled, among whom was the peaceable Habbakuk.
“The quarrel was so intense that shouting could be heard even in the
courtyard of the monastery. For a place in which a tranquil calm had reigned
only shortly before, it was a harsh trial that suddenly flared up. Father
Habbakuk shut himself in his cell. Prayer-rope in his hand, he prayed without
ceasing that God bring back peace to sorely tried Athos. The monks who were
faithful to Tradition continued, as before, to work in the monastery, but since
they could no longer accept the commemoration of the patriarch they were not in
communion of prayer with the other Fathers and celebrated separately, in a
large chapel which had been granted them. Soon Fr. Habbakuk was exiled for a
certain period to Vigla, to the
“However, the evil one again lay in wait. Soon his position as an old
calendarist brought the elder a second exile to the
“At the beginning of 1927 the community wanted to put an end, once and
for all, to the pitiless quarrel which would end by destroying the monastery. And
to assure them of a better success, they sent a written invitation to the
governor, asking him to come and preside over the synaxis of the elders which
would debate the question of the zealots faithful to the calendar of the
Fathers for the last time. At the suggestion of a brother doctor, Fr.
Athanasius Kambanaou, who was himself a zealot, they had elected Fr. Habbakuk
to represent these Fathers. All the elders were present with the governor in
the chair.
“He immediately asked Habbakuk: ‘Father, how do you explain your
deserting a community in the heart of which you had previously sown anarchy?
And tell me: why are you not in communion with the other Fathers?’ Fr. Habbakuk
replied with meekness and humility: ‘Has your Excellency the Governor read the
holy canons of the Rudder?’ ‘And what does the Rudder say,
Father?’ asked the other. Fr. Habbakuk replied promptly: ‘If you don’t know it,
Sir, go and read it first. Then you can come and judge us.’
“Judging that this reply constituted a grave insult to authority, the
synaxis immediately exiled its author to the holy monastery of Xeropotamou.
Poor Habbakuk was driven out of his place of repentance for the third time.
“About two months later, he was recalled from his exile. That day, which
was March 9, they even asked him to be present at an all-night vigil with the
governor. And in the morning, immediately after the service which had lasted
all night, the governor mounted his mule and hurried back in haste to Karyes.
Then Fr. Habbakuk, seeing an opportunity to make him hear the voice of reason,
took the animal by the halter and set off on the path with him. And as they
were going along he spoke to him as he knew how. He explained to him in a
gentle way which had its effect on the hearer why the Fathers of the
“However, his return did not take place without disappointment. Of the
zealot fathers who had been his companions in the struggle, almost all had
fled, some of their own free will and others constrained by force. And the few
who remained had hastened to rejoin the Catholicon. From then on, Fr. Habbakuk
had no peace until the day when, with one of the brothers who also loved the
virtues, he left the monastery…
“Thus it was his love for the apostolic Tradition of the Church, a pure
and disinterested love which was proof against tribulations and penalties, that
always made him struggle to discern the will of God in everything. It was this
love that had merited him exile to Vigla. But he had his reward: for it was
also there, in the solitude of Vigla, that he was granted a multitude of
spiritual goods, goods which were clearly not earned without sweat and grief,
but which were great gifts for all that.
“… One day a monk whom he loved very much, Fr. Ephraim who was from the
Great Lavra like himself, asked why he had become a zealot. He was given a
reply full of a frank realism: ‘Because God will call me to account; he will
say: “Habbakuk, you knew the law of the Church, how did you come to trample it
underfoot?’ And he added that the new calendar was a ‘sacrifice of Cain’.”[29]
Only in one part of the Russian Church outside Moscow was the new
calendar ever introduced – in Finland, whose Church, as we have seen, had been
taken away from the Russian Church by Patriarch Meletius of Constantinople.
Already on
At a general assembly of the 600 brothers, writes Nun Angelina
(Zhavoronkova), “Abbot Paulinus read out an epistle from Bishop Seraphim in
which he said that both Patriarchs Meletius of Constantinople and Tikhon of
Moscow blessed Valaam to change to the new style from October 4. Two days later
Vladyka Seraphim arrived. He was met by the objections of the brotherhood and
the request that they remain with the old style. This was refused to them, and
less than two weeks later five of the protesting brothers were forcibly
expelled from Valaam and deprived of the mantia.
“… On
“
Fr. Michael [Popov] was the spiritual father of the brotherhood at this
exceptionally difficult time for Valaam. He encouraged everyone to remain
faithful to the traditions of the Holy Orthodox Church. He often served in
distant sketes and deserts and encouraged other Fathers to follow him. His
nearest disciple and follower, Elder Michael the Younger, at that time Fr.
Timon, was one of the most zealous defenders of the Orthodox calendar right
until 1939, when the Valaam brotherhood was forced to leave their beloved
monastery.
“Secret resistance increased especially in 1925. Fr. Michael sent his
spiritual children by night with prosphoras to
“On the question of the calendar, the Valaam monks entered into
correspondence with the Athonite zealots of Holy Orthodoxy, the so-called
zealots, the elders of Karoulia, especially the learned monk Theodosius, who
even wrote a whole composition about the importance of the calendar question.
On Valaam Hieromonk Justinian, the main correspondent in this correspondence,
was a disciple of Elder Michael. While Elder Theodosius was the last spiritual
disciple by correspondence with Elder Theophanes the Recluse.
“In the evening on the eve of the monastery’s feast day of SS. Sergius
and Herman of Valaam,
“Immediately after this repressions began. The antimins were taken from
all the skete churches. Fr. Timon was transferred from the
“On
“I began to pray to the Mother of God, my ‘Surety’, in my heart. ‘Tell
me and indicate my life’s path: Which side should I go to, the new or old
style? Should I go to the cathedral or somewhere else?’ And I, the sinful one,
prayed to the Mother of God during my obedience in the kitchen. When I finished
my evening obedience, I went to my cell and thought in the simplicity of my
heart, ‘Why don’t you answer me, Mother of God?’ But the grace of God did not
abandon me, a sinner. He wants salvation for all. Suddenly the cathedral
appeared before me, the same as it is: the same height, length and width. I was
amazed at this miraculous apparition – how could it enter my small cell? But my
inner voice said to me: ‘Everything is possible with God. There is nothing
impossible for Him.’ ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘one must go to church in the cathedral
according to the new style.’ Then, as I was thinking thus, a blue curtain came
down from above, in the middle of which was a golden cross. The cathedral
became invisible to me, and the inner voice said to me: ‘Go to the old style
and hold to it.’ And I heard a woman’s voice coming from above the corner: ‘If
you want to be saved, hold fast to the traditions of the Holy Apostles and the
Holy Fathers.’ And then the same thing was repeated a second time, and the
third time the voice said: ‘If you want to be saved, keep fast to the tradition
of the Holy Apostles and Holy Fathers, but not these “wise” men.’ After this
miracle, everything disappeared and I remained alone in my cell. My heart began
to rejoice that the Lord had indicated the path of salvation to me, according
to the prayers of the Mother of God.”[32]
“On
“On October 9 the sentence was carried out. One of those exiled from
Valaam, Hieromonk Nicander, the former spiritual father of the famed Lesna
monastery, remembers:
“’We shall never forget that… sad day… Our own Abbot Paulinus and our
own monastic brothers handed us over to the police… For the sake of temporary
comfort, out of fear of men, they drowned out the voice of their conscience and
transgressed the holy canons of the Church… The day of our exile that autumn
was exceptionally quiet,
“On November 15 an Investigative Commission arrived at the monastery,
and in the course of four days interrogated each of the brothers on their own,
asking whether they recognised Bishop Germanus and whether they would serve
with him. Fr. Michael was defrocked by a church court, removed from his
obedience as Spiritual Father and exiled on December 15 to the distant St.
Herman skete. (According to the words of Fr. Athanasius, who left memoirs of
his elder, Fr. Michael was first exiled to Tikhvin island.) Thence he was
transferred to the Skete of St. John the Forerunner in 1926, where he spent the
following eight years [until his death on
In 1939, when the Soviets captured Old Valaam, the spiritual life of the
great monastery came to an end…[34]
On
In 1924 the newly-consecrated Bishop
Theophan, imitating the revolutionary deeds of Meletius, led a successful
insurrection against the Mohammedan King Ahmet Zog, who fled the country.
However, the new government remained in power only for eight months, from May
to December. King Zog returned, and Bishop Theophan was forced to flee to
In 1925, the Albanian Archimandrite
Vissarion (Govanni), who had been elected in 1922 during a “Great Albanian
Orthodox Church Council”, was consecrated as the first national bishop of
In February, 1929, Bishop Vissarion
together with Bishop Victor of the Serbian Orthodox Church, who had been living
in
Immediately after receiving confirmation
from King Zog, the Synod proclaimed the
In April, 1937, the Ecumenical
Patriarchate recognized the autocephaly of the
Quite apart from its illegal autocephaly
and introduction of the new calendar, the blatant phyletism (nationalism) of
this new
The events that followed the arrest and imprisonment of Metropolitan
Peter in December, 1925 are not at all clear. We know that a struggle for power
took place between a group of bishops led by Archbishop Gregory of Ekaterinburg
(
According to the more generally accepted version of events, on December
14, although unable to leave Nizhni-Novgorod at the time, Metropolitan Sergius
announced that he was taking over the Church’s administration in accordance
with Metropolitan Peter’s instruction. However, he was prevented by the OGPU
from coming to
The Gregorians, as they came to be called, gave a brief description of
the succession of first-hierarchal power since 1917, and then declared
concerning Metropolitan Peter: “It was not pleasing to the Lord to bless the
labours of this hierarch. During his rule disorders and woes only deepened in
the
On January 14, Metropolitan Sergius wrote to Archbishop Gregory
demanding an explanation for his usurpation of power. Gregory replied on
January 22, saying that while they recognized the rights of the three locum
tenentes, “we know no conciliar decision concerning you, and we do not
consider the transfer of administration and power by personal letter to
correspond to the spirit and letter of the holy canons.”[41] This
was a valid point which was later to be made by several catacomb bishops. But
Sergius wrote again on January 29, impeaching Gregory and his fellow bishops,
banning them from serving and declaring all their ordinations, appointments,
awards, etc., since December 22 to be invalid.
It was a moot question whether Sergius had the power to act in this way.
On February 26, Archbishop Hilarion of Verey wrote to Sergius from prison: “The
temporary ecclesiastical organ must unite, and not divide the episcopate, it is
not a judge or punisher of dissidents – that will be the Council.”[42]
However, on March 18 Sergius wrote to Metropolitan Peter attempting to justify
his “rights” as “first bishop”, able to ban bishops even before the Council.
And he gave the similar actions of Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Peter
himself as precedents.[43] But
here he “forgot”, as he was to “forget” again later, that his own position was
much weaker than that of the Patriarch or Metropolitan Peter, each of whom were
recognized in their time by the majority of the episcopate as the true head of
the Russian Church.
On January 29, three Gregorian bishops wrote to Metropolitan Peter
claiming that they had not known, in their December meeting, that he had
transferred his rights to Sergius, and asking him to bless their
administration. The free access the Gregorians had to Peter during this period,
and the fact that Sergius was at first prevented from coming to Moscow,
suggests that the GPU, while not opposing Sergius, at first favoured the
Gregorians as their best hope for dividing the Church.[44]
On
February 1 the Gregorians obtained an interview with Metropolitan Peter in
prison, in which they asked him to annul Sergius’ rights as his deputy and, in
view of Sergius’ inability to come to Moscow from Nizhny and the refusal of the
other deputies, Michael of Kiev and Joseph of Rostov, to accept the deputyship,
to hand over the administration of the Church to them. Fearing anarchy in the
Church, Metropolitan Peter went part of the way to blessing the Gregorians’
undertaking. However, instead of the Gregorian Synod, he created a temporary
“college” to administer the Church’s everyday affairs consisting of Archbishop
Gregory, Archbishop Nicholas (Dobronravov) of Vladimir and Archbishop Demetrius
(Belikov) of
Tuchkov proceeded to a further deception: he agreed to summon Demetrius
from
It has been argued by Regelson[45] that
Metropolitan Peter’s action in appointing deputies was not canonical, and
created misunderstandings that were to be ruthlessly exploited later by
Metropolitan Sergius. A chief hierarch does not have the right to transfer the
fullness of his power to another hierarch as if it were a personal inheritance:
only a Council representing the whole
In defence of Metropolitan Peter it may be said that it is unlikely that
he intended to transfer the fullness of his power to Metropolitan Sergius, but
only the day-to-day running of the administrative machine. In fact he
explicitly said this later, in his letter to Sergius dated
The
critical distinction here is that whereas the patriarchal locum tenens
has, de jure, all the power of a canonically elected Patriarch and need
relinquish his power only to a canonically convoked Council of the whole local
Church, the deputy of the locum tenens has no such fullness of power and
must relinquish such rights as he has at any time that the Council or the locum
tenens requires it.
Nevertheless, the important question remains: why did Metropolitan Peter
not invoke ukaz no. 362 and announce the decentralization of the
Church’s administration at the time of his arrest? Probably for two important
reasons:
(1) The restoration of the
patriarchate was one of the main achievements of the Moscow Council of 1917-18,
and had proved enormously popular. Its dissolution might well have dealt a
major psychological blow to the masses, who were not always educated enough to
understand that the Church could continue to exist either in a centralized
(though not papist) form, as it had in the East from 312 to 1917, or in a
decentralized form, as in the catacombal period before Constantine the Great
and during the iconoclast persecution of the eighth and ninth centuries.
(2)
The
renovationists – who still constituted the major threat to the Church in
Metropolitan Peter’s eyes – did not have a patriarch, and their organization
was, as we have seen, closer to the synodical, state-dependent structure of the
pre-revolutionary Church. The presence or absence of a patriarch or his
substitute was therefore a major sign of the difference between the true Church
and the false for the uneducated believer.
On
All this was true; but these arguments were not strong enough to
maintain the Gregorians’ position, which deteriorated as several bishops
declared their support for Sergius. In particular, Archbishop Hilarion of
Verey, who had been released from prison for talks with the GPU, refused to
recognise the Gregorians – for which he received an extension of his sentence.
Another bishop who strongly rejected the Gregorians was Basil of Priluki.
Yaroslavsky, Tuchkov and the OGPU had
already succeeded in creating a schism between Metropolitan Sergius and the
Gregorians. They now tried to fan the flames of schism still higher by
releasing Metropolitan Agathangelus, the second candidate for the post of
patriarchal locum tenens, from exile and persuading him to declare his
assumption of the post of locum tenens, which he did officially from
Only two days before this, on April 22, Metropolitan Sergius wrote to
Metropolitan Peter at the Moscow GPU, as a result of which Peter withdrew his
support from the Gregorians, signing his letter to Sergius: “the penitent
Peter”. It would be interesting to know whether Sergius knew of Metropolitan
Agathangelus’ declaration four days earlier when he wrote to Peter. Hieromonk
Damascene (Orlovsky) claims that Agathangelus did not tell Sergius until
several days later.[50] But the
evidence is ambiguous; for Gubonin gives two different dates for the letter
from Agathangelus to Sergius telling the latter of his assumption of the rights
of the patriarchal locum tenens: April 18 and 25.[51] If the
later date is correct, then Sergius cannot be accused of hiding this critical
information from Metropolitan Peter. If, however, the earlier date is correct,
then Sergius already knew of Agathangelus’ assumption of the rights of locum
tenens, and his keeping quiet about this very important fact in his letter
to Metropolitan Peter was highly suspicious. For he must have realized that
Metropolitan Agathangelus, having returned from exile (he actually arrived in
his see of Yaroslavl on April 27), had every right to assume power as the
eldest hierarch and the only patriarchal locum tenens named by Patriarch
Tikhon who was in freedom at that time. In view of the very ruthless behaviour
now displayed by Metropolitan Sergius, it seems likely that he deliberately
decided to hide the information about Metropolitan Agathangelus’ return from
Metropolitan Peter – and Tuchkov, quickly reassessing the situation, fell in
behind Sergius’ ambitions.
In fact, with the appearance of Metropolitan Agathangelus the claims of both the Gregorians and Sergius to supreme power in the
Church collapsed. But Sergius, having tasted of power, was not about to
relinquish it so quickly. And just as Metropolitan Agathangelus’ rights as locum
tenens were swept aside by the renovationists in 1922, so now the same
hierarch was swept aside again by the former renovationist Sergius.
The chronology of events reveals how the leadership of the
On April 30, Sergius wrote to Agathangelus
rejecting his claim to the rights of the patriarchal locum tenens on the
grounds that Peter had not resigned his post. In this letter Sergius claims
that he and Peter had exchanged opinions on Agathangelus’ letter in
On May 13, Agathangelus met Sergius in
In other words, Sergius in a cunning and complicated way rejected
Agathangelus’ claim to be the lawful head of the Russian Church, although this
claim was now stronger than Metropolitan Peter’s (because he was in prison and
unable to rule the Church) and much stronger
than Sergius’.
On May 20, Agathangelus sent a telegram to Sergius: “You promised to
send a project to the Bishops concerning the transfer to me of the
authorizations of ecclesiastical power. Be so kind as to hurry up.” On the same
day Sergius replied: “Having checked your information, I am convinced that you
have no rights; [I will send you] the details by letter. I ardently beseech
you: do not take the decisive step.” On May 21, Agathangelus sent another
telegram threatening to publish the agreement he had made with Sergius and
which he, Sergius, had broken. On May 22, Sergius wrote to Peter warning him
not to recognize Agathangelus’ claims (the letter, according to Hieromonk
Damascene (Orlovsky), was delivered personally by Tuchkov, which shows which
side the OGPU was on!). However, Peter ignored Sergius’ warning and wrote to
Agathangelus on May 22 (and again on May 23), congratulating him on his
assumption of the rights of patriarchal locum tenens and assuring him of
his loyalty.
At this point Sergius’ last real canonical grounds for holding on to
power – the support of Metropolitan Peter – collapsed.[54] But
Agathangelus only received this letter on May 31, a (OGPU-engineered?) delay
that proved to be decisive for the fortunes of the
On the same day Sergius, savagely pressing home his advantage, wrote to
the administration of the
When Agathangelus eventually received Peter’s letter (which was
confirmed by a third one dated June 9), he wrote to Sergius saying that he
would send him a copy of the original and informing him that he had accepted
the chancellery of the patriarchal locum tenens. And he asked him to
come to
Why did Metropolitan Agathangelus renounce the post of locum tenens
at this point? The reason he gave to Sergius was his poor health; but some
further light is shed on this question by Schema-Bishop Peter (Ladygin), who
wrote that when Metropolitan Agathangelus returned from exile, “everyone began
to come to him. Then Tuchkov with some archimandrite came to Agathangelus and
began to demand from him that he hand over his administration to Sergius.
Metropolitan Agathangelus did not agree to this. Then Tuchkov told him that he
would now go back into exile. Then Agathangelus, because of his health and
since he had already been three years in exile, resigned from the
administration [the post of locum tenens] and left it to Peter of
Krutitsa as the lawful [locum tenens] until the second candidate,
Metropolitan Cyril, should return from exile. I heard about this when I
personally went to him in
The astonishing extent of Sergius’ usurpation of power is revealed in
his fifth letter to Agathangelus, dated June 13, in which he refused to submit
even to Metropolitan Peter insofar as the latter, “having transferred to me,
albeit temporarily, nevertheless in full, the rights and obligations of the locum
tenens, and himself being deprived of the possibility of being reliably
informed of the state of ecclesiastical affairs, can neither bear
responsibility for the course of the latter, nor, a fortiori, meddle in
their administration… I cannot look on the instructions of Metropolitan Peter
that have come out of prison as other than instructions or, rather, as the advice of a person without
responsibility [italics mine – V.M.].”
A
sergianist has commented on this letter: “It turns out that, once having
appointed a deputy for himself, Metropolitan Peter no longer had the right to
substitute another for him, whatever he declared. This ‘supple’ logic, capable
of overturning even common sense, witnessed to the fact that Metropolitan
Sergius was not going to depart from power under any circumstances.”[57]
Sergius also said that Agathangelus was given over to a hierarchical
trial for his anticanonical act, for greeting which Metropolitan Peter “himself
becomes a participant in it and is also subject to punishment”.[58] In
other words, Sergius, though only Metropolitan Peter’s deputy as locum
tenens for as long as the latter recognized him as such, was not only
usurping the rights of the full (and not simply deputy) locum tenens,
but was also threatening to bring to trial, on the charge of attempting to
usurp the locum tenancy, two out of the only three men who could canonically
lay claim to the post! [59]
At this point, while consolidating his relationship with the
authorities, the wolf cunningly decided to put on sheep’s clothing, pretending
to defend the spiritual independence of the Church in a way that lulled the suspicions
of the other bishops. On June 10, he petitioned the NKVD for legalisation of
the patriarchate. Then he distributed an “Address to the all-Russian flock”: “…
On receiving the right to a legal existence, we clearly take account of the
fact that, together with rights, obligations are also laid upon us in relation
to those authorities that give us these rights. And I have now taken upon
myself, in the name of the whole of our Orthodox Old-Church hierarchy and
flock, to witness before Soviet power to our sincere readiness to be completely
law-abiding citizens of the
This epistle was close in spirit to another written at about the same
time (on June 7) by several bishops imprisoned on Solovki, the main
concentration camp for clergy in the early Soviet period, in which the relationship of the
Church to the State and Communism was expressed as follows:-
“In spite of the fundamental law of the Soviet constitution guaranteeing
believers full freedom of conscience, religious assemblies and preaching, the
“Their lack of success and sincere desire to put an end to the grievous misunderstandings
between the Church and Soviet power, which is burdensome for the Church and
needlessly complicates the State’s execution of its tasks, arouses the
governing organ of the Orthodox Church, once more and with complete
justification, to lay before the government the principles defining Her
relationship to the State.
“The signatories of the present declaration are fully aware of how
difficult the establishment of mutually reliable relations between the Church
and the State in the conditions of present-day actuality are, and they do not
consider it possible to be silent about it. It would not be right, it would not
correspond to the dignity of the Church, and would therefore be pointless and
unpersuasive, if they began to assert that between the Orthodox Church and the
State power of the Soviet republics there were no discrepancies of any kind.
But this discrepancy does not consist in what political suspicion wishes to see
or the slander of the enemies of the Church points to. The Church is not
concerned with the redistribution of wealth or in its collectivization, since
She has always recognized that to be the right of the State, for whose actions
She is not responsible. The Church is not concerned, either, with the political
organization of power, for She is loyal with regard to the government of all
the countries within whose frontiers She has members. She gets on with all
forms of State structure from the eastern despotism of old
“The Church recognizes spiritual principles of existence; Communism
rejects them. The Church believes in the living God, the Creator of the world,
the Leader of Her life and destinies; Communism denies His existence, believing
in the spontaneity of the world’s existence and in the absence of rational,
ultimate causes of its history. The Church assumes that the purpose of human
life is in the heavenly fatherland, even if She lives in conditions of the
highest development of material culture and general well-being; Communism
refuses to recognize any other purpose of mankind’s existence than terrestrial
welfare. The ideological differences between the Church and the State descend
from the apex of philosophical observations to the region of immediately
practical significance, the sphere of ethics, justice and law, which Communism
considers the conditional result of class struggle, assessing phenomena in the
moral sphere exclusively in terms of utility. The Church preaches love and
mercy; Communism – camaraderie and merciless struggle. The Church instils
in believers humility, which elevates the person; Communism debases man by
pride. The Church preserves chastity of the body and the sacredness of
reproduction; Communism sees nothing else in marital relations than the
satisfaction of the instincts. The Church sees in religion a life-bearing force
which does not only guarantee for men his eternal, foreordained destiny, but
also serves as the source of all the greatness of man’s creativity, as the
basis of his earthly happiness, sanity and welfare; Communism sees religion as
opium, inebriating the people and relaxing their energies, as the source of
their suffering and poverty. The Church wants to see religion flourish;
Communism wants its death. Such a deep contradiction in the very basis of their
Weltanschauungen precludes any intrinsic approximation or reconciliation
between the Church and the State, as there cannot be any between affirmation
and negation, between yes and no, because the very soul of the Church, the
condition of Her existence and the sense of Her being, is that which is
categorically denied by Communism.
“The Church cannot attain such an approximation by any compromises or
concessions, by any partial changes in Her teaching or reinterpretation of it
in the spirit of Communism. Pitiful attempts of this kind were made by the
renovationists: one of them declared it his task to instil into the
consciousness of believers the idea that Communism is in its essence
indistinguishable from Christianity, and that the Communist State strives for
the attainment of the same aims as the Gospel, but by its own means, that is,
not by the power of religious conviction, but by the path of compulsion. Others
recommended a review of Christian dogmatics in such a way that its teaching
about the relationship of God to the world would not remind one of the
relationship of a monarch to his subjects and would rather correspond to
republican conceptions. Yet others demanded the exclusion from the calendar of
saints ‘of bourgeois origin’ and their removal from church veneration. These
attempts, which were obviously insincere, produced a profound feeling of
indignation among believing people.
“The Orthodox Church will never stand upon this unworthy path and will
never, either in whole or in part, renounce her teaching of the Faith that has
been winnowed through the holiness of past centuries, for one of the eternally
shifting moods of society…”[61]
“The Dogma of Redemption”
In 1926, sharp differences of opinion
began to emerge between the first two members of the ROCOR Synod, Metropolitan
Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of
In 1926 there was published in Sremski Karlovtsy in Serbia the second
edition of Metropolitan Anthony’s Dogma of Redemption, an attempt to
conceptualise the mystery of Christ’s redemption of mankind by means of a sharp
contrast between redemption understood as an act of supremely compassionate
love, on the one hand, and redemption understood as the satisfaction of God’s justice,
the so-called “juridical theory”, on the other. The “juridical theory” was
rejected by Metropolitan Anthony as “scholastic”, although it was expressed by
many of the Holy Fathers. According to him, the justice of God in our
redemption as a “secondary, incidental aspect” of it, and sought, in a
rationalist and pietistic manner, to disengage it, as it were, from His love,
assigning to love the primary role in the work of redemption. In fact, our
salvation, according to Metropolitan Anthony, was not accomplished by a
restoration of justice between God and man, but by an outpouring of Christ’s
compassionate love for man, as shown particularly in the
Archbishop Theophanes of
The issue first came to a head in a
session of the Synod held in
Metropolitan Anthony’s views were also condemned by
an official representative of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Protopriest Milosh
Parenta, who wrote in that Church’s official organ: “When Metropolitan Anthony
approaches a scientific-theological review and explanation of the dogmas, then
either he insufficiently comprehends them, or he cannot avoid the temptation
of, and enthusiasm for, modernism. The explanation of the dogma of Redemption
offered by the author in his work openly destroys the teaching on this truth
faithfully preserved by the Orthodox Church, and with it the Christian Religion
itself, because the truth of the redemption together with the truth of Christ’s
incarnation is its base and essence”. To which the editor added: “However, it is necessary to recognize that it is very difficult to analyse this work of the author, because in it there are often no definite and clear concepts, although there are many extended speeches which hide the concepts or say nothing, and because in part there are no logical connections in it, nor any strictly scientific exposition, nor systematic unity”[63]
The dispute rumbled on. Thus in letters to
Hieroschemamonk Theodosius of Mount Athos, who took the side of Archbishop
Theophanes, Metropolitan Anthony expressed the suspicion that Archbishop Theophanes
was in “spiritual delusion” and continued to show himself in fundamental
disagreement “with the juridical theory of Anselm and Aquinas, completely
accepted by P[eter] Moghila and Metropolitan Philaret”. And again he wrote: “We
must not quickly return to Peter Moghila, Philaret and Macarius: they will
remain subjects for historians”.
For his part, Archbishop Theophanes was
unhappy that Metropolitan Anthony did not abandon what he considered to be his
heretical views on redemption, but only refrained from pressing for their
official acceptance by the Synod. As he wrote on February 16/29, 1932: “Under
the influence of the objections made [against his work], Metropolitan Anthony
was about to take back his Catechism, which had been introduced by him into
use in the schools in place of Metropolitan Philaret’s Catechism. But,
as became clear later, he did this insincerely, and with exceptional
persistence continued to spread his incorrect teaching On Redemption and
many other incorrect teachings contained in his Catechism.”
In the course of later decades several
ROCOR hierarchs expressed their disagreement with Metropolitan Anthony’s Dogma of Redemption. However, the
general approach was not to dispute it openly, and in any case not to call it a
heresy.[64] An
attempt to have it published again in
The Eulogian Schism
Another dogmatic issue on which Archbishop
Theophanes and Bishop Seraphim cooperated fruitfully was their attack on the
masonically inspired and financed YMCA, with which the West European diocese of
ROCOR under Metropolitan Eulogius and the St. Sergius Theological Institute in
“In V.S. Soloviev Sophia is the feminine
principle of God, His ‘other’. Florensky tries to prove that Sophia, as the
feminine principle of God, is a special substance. He tries to find this teaching
in St. Athanasius the Great and in Russian iconography. Protopriest Bulgakov
accepts on faith the basic conclusions of Florensky, but partly changes the
form of this teaching, and partly gives it a new foundation. In Bulgakov this
teaching has two variants: a) originally it is a special Hypostasis, although
not of one essence with the Holy Trinity (in the book The Unwaning Light),
b) later it is not a Hypostasis but ‘hypostasisness’. In this latter form it is
an energy of God coming from the essence of God through the Hypostases of the
Divinity into the world and finding for itself its highest ‘created union’ in
the Mother of God. Consequently, according to this variant, Sophia is not a
special substance, but the Mother of God.
“According to the Church teaching, which
is especially clearly revealed in St. Athanasius the Great, the Sophia-Wisdom
of God is the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Here, in the most general terms, is the
essence of Protopriest Bulgakov’s teaching on Sophia! To expound any philosophical
teaching shortly is very difficult, and so it is difficult to expound shortly
the teaching of the ‘sophianists’ on Sophia. This teaching of theirs becomes
clear only in connection the whole of their philosophical system. But to
expound the latter shortly is also impossible. One can say only: their
philosophy is the philosophy of ‘panentheism’, that is, a moderate form of
‘pantheism’. The originator of this ‘panentheism’ in
Bulgakov was only one of a series of
heretical teachers who were teaching in the 1920s and 30s in the Theological
Institute of St. Sergius in
The beginning of the schism was
discernible in the session of ROCOR’s Hierarchical Council of
Archbishop Averky writes: “Archbishop
Theophanes was the first to expose and document the anti-Christian nature of
certain so-called Christian organizations, some of which were eager to extend
their influence to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and even to
subjugate it to themselves somewhat by rendering financial assistance much
needed by our refugees who had no stable sources of their own to draw from in
exile. Vladyka Theophanes himself categorically refused to accept the monthly
allowance offered to him by these organizations, and did not approve of those
who did, for he believed that this caused them to lose their spiritual freedom,
and that in one way or another they would consequently be forced to do the will
of their sponsors. Vladyka Theophanes guarded his independence and spiritual
freedom, preferring a beggarly existence to a secure situation. This discloses
the most characteristic trait of our great pastor, a trait that he shared with
the great Fathers of Christian antiquity: any compromise of conscience, no
matter how small, was for him altogether inconceivable. In all of his actions
and conduct, in his private life as well as in his service to the Church and
society, he was utterly constant, never departing in any way from what his
convictions dictated. Absolute incorruptibility, uncompromising honesty and
straightforwardness, demand for unconditional loyalty to the true Church, to
the Word of God, and to Patristic tradition – these were his hallmarks, ideals
which guided his life and which he liked to see in other servants of the Church
as well.”
In August, 1926, Archbishop Theophanes
wrote: “The real causes of the division are deeper than it seems at first
glance. Two of them are especially significant. ‘They’ consider the Soviet
authorities as ‘ordained by God’, but we consider them antichristian. On the
basis of overwhelming documentary evidence, we recognized that the YMCA is a
masonic organization. They consider it a Christian organization.”
And he predicted: “Metropolitan Eulogius
will not give in. Those around him are pushing him toward schism. We could let
him have his way, but we cannot entrust the fate of Orthodoxy to him. He is
ensnared in the nets of the YMCA. The YMCA in turn is having a demoralizing
effect on student groups. In the magazine The Way ¹ 5, Professor Berdyaev stated openly that the schism
in the church is unavoidable and necessary. Metropolitan Eulogius is the only
hierarch who ‘has raised his consciousness to the realization that it is
necessary to reform Orthodoxy’, and he is therefore ‘a tool of God’s
However,
Archbishop Theophanes was not finding the support that he might have expected
from Metropolitan Anthony. Archbishop Theophanes
protested against the publication of the following epistle of Metropolitan
Anthony dated
On February 29, Archbishop Theophanes
wrote a report to the ROCOR Synod to which he attached two reports of the
“Russian Patriotic Society” and a report of four laymen protesting against the
letter of Metropolitan Anthony published in Vozrozhdenie: “The clear and
categorical resolution of the Council of 1926 on the YMCA was violated soon
after the end of this Council not only by Metropolitan Eulogius together with
the bishops subject to him (Archbishop Vladimir, Archbishop Seraphim and Bishop
Benjamin), but also by the president of the Council himself, Metropolitan
Anthony, as also by Archbishop Anastasius who followed his example. Believing
Orthodox people were particularly disturbed by the written declarations on this
question by the president of the Council Metropolitan Anthony which were
published in the newspaper Vozrozhdenie (22 July, 1926 and 10 September,
1926) and in ¹ 10 of the Vestnik Russkogo Studencheskogo Khristianskogo
Dvizhenia, in which he calls the resolution of the Council of 1926 with
regard to the YMCA a simple ‘repetition of the response of the Council of 1921’
and based on the Council member’s ‘small knowledge’ of this question (letter of
June 22, 1926 printed in the newspaper Vozrozhdenie. According to the
witness of the composers of the Paris report, this kind of declaration of the
president of the Council with regard to the resolution of the Council of 1926
on the question of the YMCA ‘is now interpreted by everyone as nothing other
than a juridical annulment of their meaning and significance’ (pp. 9-10). On
their side, the composers of the reports find that the president of the Council
does not have the right to make declarations in the press annulling the meaning
and significance of conciliar resolutions, both in general and in particular
with regard to this question, and ask the Synod to confirm and, if possible,
clarify the true meaning of the conciliar resolutions on the given question.
Moreover, they declare that if they find no support in their struggle for the
purity of Orthodoxy in the Synod, they will be forced ‘to seek, with the
pastors faithful to Orthodoxy, ways of saving the Russian Church without the
Synod and even in spite of it (Paris report, p. 16), following the example of
the brotherhoods of the South-West of Russia in the 16th and 17th
centuries…”[69]
Archbishop Averky says that Vladyka
Theophanes “warned and admonished, but his warnings were not heeded in time and
the subsequent reproach of those who broke away [Eulogius of Paris and Plato of
America] not only had no positive results, but even deepened the division, as
Vladyka had also foreseen. Such ecclesiastical schisms and divisions caused
Vladyka to sorrow in his heart, to suffer in his soul and to grieve. Although
he had at the very beginning identified the root of the problem, he did not
always approve of the measures taken to stop the schisms and establish unity in
the Church, and he indicated the errors sometimes made in so doing.”[70]
Archbishop Seraphim of
On
At this time some bishops of ROCOR asked Metropolitan Sergius to mediate
in the dispute between their Synod and Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris, who
refused to recognize the Synod’s authority. In his reply of
This same position was stated both earlier
and later by Sergius. Thus on
This letter is important as it constitutes a de facto recognition
of ROCOR by the Moscow Patriarchate. That recognition was withdrawn only when
ROCOR refused to accept Sergius’ demand, in 1927, that her hierarchs swear
loyalty to the
At this point, however, Sergius committed a serious blunder. On the
initiative of Archbishop Cornelius (Sobolev) and Bishop Paulinus (Kroshechkin),
Metropolitan Sergius and other bishops close to him wrote a secret letter to
the other bishops concerning the election of a Patriarch by means of a
collection of signatures. By November, 1926, seventy-two signatures had been
obtained for Metropolitan Cyril of Kazan, the first patriarchal locum tenens
mentioned in Patriarch Tikhon’s list. Somehow the GPU learned about this,
Bishop Paulinus’ messengers were arrested, and there were immediate massive
arrests of the bishops who had signed – including Metropolitans Cyril and
Sergius.[75]
However, according to the author of an anonymous work, the initiative
for the election of Metropolitan Cyril came from Archbishop Hilarion
(Troitsky), who was at that time in prison on Solovki. And, according to this
version, it was Metropolitan Sergius who informed the authorities. [76]
On December 8 Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd took over as Peter’s
deputy, in accordance with the latter’s will of one year before.[77] But
Joseph was prevented from leaving
In the same month of December, 1926, Tuchkov proposed to Metropolitan Peter,
who was in prison in Suzdal, that he renounce his locum tenancy. Peter refused,
and then sent a message to everyone through a fellow prisoner that he would
“never under any circumstances leave his post and would remain faithful to the
Orthodox Church to death itself”.[79]
Then, on
At the beginning of March, Archbishop Seraphim was summoned from Uglich
to
“But he’s in prison,” they said.
“Then free him,” said the archbishop.
The GPU then presented him with the familiar conditions for
legalization.
Gustavson writes: “He refused outrightly without entering into
discussions, pointing out that he was not entitled to decide such questions
without the advice of his imprisoned superiors. When he was asked whom he would
appoint as his executive deputy he is said to have answered that he would turn
over the Church to the Lord Himself. The examining magistrate was said to have
looked at him full of wonder and to have replied:
“’All the others have appointed deputies…’
“To this Seraphim countered: ‘But I lay the Church in the hands of God,
our Lord. I am doing this, so that the whole world may know what freedom Orthodox
Christianity is enjoying in our
Another
account of this important dialogue was given by Archbishop Seraphim’s senior
subdeacon, Michael Nikolaevich Yaroslavsky: “For 100 days Vladyka Seraphim
happened to rule the whole of the Russian Orthodox Church. This was in 1926.
Metropolitan Sergius was in prison, everybody was in prison…
“And so, as he had been put in charge, Vladyka told me that at that time
the authorities offered him, as the Primate of the Church, a Synod of bishops.
He did not agree and immediately received three years in Solovki camp. He did
not betray the Church, but… declared the autocephaly of each diocese, since the
Primate of the Church was another candidate for prison… Soon after,
Metropolitan Sergius was released. He created the Synod out of all those
members which the authorities suggested to Vladyka Seraphim.”[82]
This was a decisive moment, for the central hierarch of the Church was
effectively declaring the Church’s decentralization. And not before time. For
with the imprisonment of the last of the three possible locum tenentes
there was really no canonical basis for establishing a central administration
for the Church before the convocation of a Local Council, which was prevented
by the communists. The system of deputies of the deputy of the locum tenens
had no basis in Canon Law or precedent in the history of the Church. And if it
was really the case that the Church could not exist without a first hierarch
and central administration, then the awful possibility existed that with the
fall of the first hierarch the whole Church would fall, too…[83]
The
communists also wanted a centralized administration; so Tuchkov now turned to
Metropolitan Agathangelus with the proposal that he lead the Church. He refused.
Then he turned to Metropolitan Cyril with the same proposal. He, too, refused.
The conversation between Tuchkov and Metropolitan Cyril is reported to have
gone something like this:-
“If we have to remove some hierarch, will you help us in this?”
“Yes, if the hierarch appears to be guilty of some ecclesiastical
transgression… In the contrary case, I shall tell him directly, ‘The
authorities are demanding this of me, but I have nothing against you.’”
“No!” replied Tuchkov. “You must try to find an appropriate reason and
remove him as if on your own initiative.”
To this the hierarch replied: “Eugene Nikolayevich! You are not the
cannon, and I am not the shot, with which you want to blow up our Church from
within!”[84]
The Fall of Metropolitan Sergius
The battle between the Church and the State had now reached a complete impasse.
On the one hand, 117 bishops were in prison or in exile, and the administration
of the Church was in ruins. On the other hand, the spiritual authority of the
Church had never been higher, church attendance was up, and church activities
of all kinds were on the increase.
In the words of
On
We have seen Sergius’ leading role in the first Church revolution in
1917. In the second Church revolution of 1922 he played a hardly less important
role, officially declaring the renovationists’ Higher Church Authority to be
“the only canonical, lawful supreme ecclesiastical authority, and we consider
all the decrees issuing from it to be completely lawful and binding”[87].
In 1923 Metropolitan Sergius had supported the renovationists’
defrocking of Patriarch Tikhon as “a traitor to Orthodoxy”. True, on
According to the Catholic writer Deinber, “the fact of the liberation of
Metropolitan Sergius at this moment, when the repressions against the Church
throughout Russia were all the time increasing, when his participation in the
affair of the election of Metropolitan Cyril (Smirnov), for which a whole
series of bishops had paid with exile, was undoubted, immediately aroused
anxiety, which was strengthened when, on April 9/22, 1927, Bishop Paulinus
[Kroshechkin] was freed, and when, on April 25 / May 8, a Synod was
unexpectedly convoked in Moscow. It became certain that between Metropolitan
Sergius, during his imprisonment, and the Soviet government, i.e. the GPU, some
sort of agreement had been established, which placed both him and the bishops
close to him in a quite exceptional position relative to the others.
Metropolitan Sergius received the right to live in
On May 20, the OGPU officially recognized this Synod[89], which
suggested that Metropolitan Sergius had agreed to the terms of legalization
which Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Peter had rejected. One of Sergius’
closest supporters, Bishop Metrophanes of Aksaisk, had once declared that “the
legalisation of the church administration is a sign of heterodoxy.” If so, then
Metropolitan Sergius fell away from Orthodoxy at this point.
In any case, Metropolitan Sergius and his
“Patriarchal Holy Synod” now wrote to the bishops enclosing the OGPU document
and telling them that their diocesan councils should now seek registration from
the local organs of Soviet power. Then, in June, Sergius wrote to Metropolitan
Eulogius of Paris directing him to sign a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet
power. He agreed…
On July 14, in ukaz ¹ 93, Sergius demanded that all clergy abroad
should sign a formal pledge to cease criticizing the Soviet government. It also
stated that any clergyman abroad who refused to sign such would no longer be
considered to be a part of the Moscow Patriarchate. This ukaz, which
completely contradicted his previous ukaz of September 12, 1926, which
blessed the hierarchs abroad to form their own independent administration, even
included the actual text of the pledge that was to be signed: “I, the
undersigned, promise that because of my actual dependence upon the Moscow
Patriarchate, I will not permit myself in either my social activities nor
especially in my Church work, any expression that could in the least way be
considered as being disloyal with regard to the Soviet government.”[90]
The clergy abroad were given until October 15 to sign this pledge. The ROCOR Council of Bishops, in their encyclical
dated August 26, 1927, refused this demand and declared: "The free portion
of the Church of Russia must terminate relations with the ecclesiastical
administration in Moscow [i.e., with Metropolitan Sergius and his synod], in
view of the fact that normal relations with it are impossible and because of
its enslavement by the atheist regime, which is depriving it of freedom to act
according to its own will and of freedom to govern the Church in accordance
with the canons."[91]
However,
Metropolitan
Eulogius of Paris, who had by this time separated from the Russian Church in
exile, agreed to sign, “but on condition that the term ‘loyalty’ means for us
the apoliticisation of the émigré Church, that is, we are obliged
not to make the ambon a political arena, if this will relieve the
difficult situation of our native Mother Church; but we cannot be ‘loyal’ to
Soviet power: we are not citizens of the USSR, and the USSR does not recognise
us as such, and therefore the political demand is from the canonical point of
view non-obligatory for us…”[92]
On
The refusal of ROCOR was supported by the Solovki bishops: “The epistle
threatens those church-servers who have emigrated with exclusion from the
Moscow Patriarchate on the grounds of their political activity, that is, it
lays an ecclesiastical punishment upon them for political statements, which
contradicts the resolution of the All-Russian Council of 1917-18 of August
3/16, 1918, which made clear the canonical impermissibility of such
punishments, and rehabilitated all those people who were deprived of their
orders for political crimes in the past.”[94]
Meanwhile, ominous events were taking place in
During a synodal session under the presidency of the new Catholicos, it
was decided to introduce the new style into the
All this, according to Boris Sokolov, took place under the influence of
the head of the Georgian KGB, Laurence Pavlovich Beria, who wrote in 1929: “By
our lengthy labours we succeeded in creating an opposition to Catholicos
Ambrose and the then leading group in the Georgian Church, and… in January,
1927 we succeeded in completely wresting the reins of the government of the
Georgian Church from the hands of Ambrose, and in removing him and his
supporters from a leading role in the Georgian Church. In April, after the
death of Catholicos Ambrose, Metropolitan Christopher was elected Catholicos.
He is completely loyal to Soviet power, and already the Council that elected
Christopher has declared its loyalty to the power and has condemned the
politics and activity of Ambrose, and in particular, the Georgian emigration.”[96]
There followed, as Fr. Samson Zateishvili writes, “the persecution of
clergy and believers, the dissolution of monasteries, the destruction of
churches and their transformation into warehouses and cattle-sheds… The
situation of the Church in
In October, 1930, the future Archbishop Leontius of
As if taking his cue from the Georgians, on July 16/29, Metropolitan
Sergius issued the infamous Declaration that has been the basis of the
existence of the Sovietized Moscow Patriarchate ever since, and which was to
cause the greatest and most destructive schism in the history of the Orthodox
Church since the fall of the Papacy in the eleventh century.
First he pretended that Patriarch Tikhon had always been aiming to have
the Church legalized by the State, but had been frustrated by the
émigré hierarchs and by his own death. Then he went on: “At my
proposal and with permission from the State, a blessed Patriarchal Synod has
been formed by those whose signatures are affixed to this document at its
conclusion. Missing are the Metropolitan of Novgorod, Arsenius, who has not
arrived yet, and Archbishop Sebastian of
“In undertaking
now, with the blessings of the Lord, the work of this Synod, we clearly realize
the greatness of our task and that of all the representatives of the Church. We
must show not only with words but with deeds, that not only people indifferent
to the Orthodox Faith or traitors to the Orthodox Church can be loyal citizens
of the Soviet Union and loyal subjects of the Soviet power, but also the most
zealous supporters of the Orthodox Church, to whom the Church with all her
dogmas and traditions, with all her laws and prescriptions, is as dear as Truth
and Life.
“We want to be Orthodox, and at the same time to see the
“We can be hindered only by that which hindered the construction of
Church life on the bases of loyalty in the first years of Soviet power. This is
an inadequate consciousness of the whole seriousness of what has happened in
our country. The establishment of Soviet power has seemed to many like some kind
of misunderstanding, something coincidental and therefore not long lasting.
People have forgotten that there are no coincidences for the Christian and that
in what has happened with us, as in all places and at all times, the same right
hand of God is acting, that hand which inexorably leads every nation to the end
predetermined for it. To such people who do not want to understand ‘the signs
of the times’, it may also seem that it is wrong to break with the former
regime and even with the monarchy, without breaking with Orthodoxy… Only
ivory-tower dreamers can think that such an enormous society as our Orthodox
Church, with the whole of its organisation, can have a peaceful existence in
the State while hiding itself from the authorities. Now, when our Patriarchate,
fulfilling the will of the reposed Patriarch, has decisively and without
turning back stepped on the path of loyalty, the people who think like this
have to either break themselves and, leaving their political sympathies at
home, offer to the Church only their faith and work with us only in the name of
faith, or (if they cannot immediately break themselves) at least not hinder us,
and temporarily leave the scene. We are sure that they will again, and very
soon, return to work with us, being convinced that only the relationship to the
authorities has changed, while faith and Orthodox Christian life remain
unshaken… ”[100]
The radical error that lay at the root of this declaration lay in the
last sentence quoted, in the idea that, in an antichristian state whose aim was
the extirpation of all religion, it was possible to preserve loyalty to the
State while “faith and Orthodox Christian life remained unshaken”. This
attitude presupposed that it was possible, in the
For the Bolsheviks, there was no such dividing line; for them, everything
was ideological, everything had to be in accordance with their ideology, there
could be no room for disagreement, no private spheres into which the state and
its ideology did not pry. Unlike most of the Roman emperors, who allowed the
Christians to order their own lives in their own way so long as they showed
loyalty to the state, the Bolsheviks insisted in imposing their own ways upon
the Christians in every sphere: in family life (civil marriage only, divorce on
demand, children spying on parents), in education (compulsory Marxism), in
economics (dekulakization, collectivization), in military service (the oath of
allegiance to Lenin), in science (Darwinism, Lysenkoism), in art (socialist
realism), and in religion (the requisitioning of valuables, registration,
commemoration of the authorities at the Liturgy, reporting of confessions by
the priests). Resistance to any one of these demands was counted as
"anti-Soviet behaviour", i.e. political disloyalty. Therefore
it was no use protesting one's political loyalty to the regime if one refused
to accept just one of these demands. According to the Soviet interpretation of
the word: "Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one has become guilty
of all of it" (James 2.10), such a person was an enemy of the
people.
On July 28, 1927,
one day before Sergius signed the Declaration, an earthquake shook the city of
Jerusalem, the church of the Holy Sepulchre was damaged and the church of St.
John the Forerunner at the Jordan was destroyed. Many were killed or injured.
This may have been a sign specifically for Patriarch Damian of Jerusalem, who
on March 29 had sent paschal greetings to the heretical renovationist synod in
The next day, July
29, a solar eclipse was observed above the European part of the
Led by
the Athonite confessors, the Old Calendarists continued to defy the innovators
on the mainland and islands of
On
In 1926, in the
At Christmas in the year 1926, Chrysostom Papadopoulos ordered the
closing of the True Orthodox
In Thessalonica on the Sunday of the Samaritan woman, 1927, Fr. Stergius
Liouras, the married priest of the True Orthodox Church of the Three Hierarchs,
was arrested after the Liturgy on the orders of the new calendarist
metropolitan. In 1935 he was again seized on the order of the same metropolitan
and beaten by the police. He died a few days later.[105]
On
On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, 1928, on the orders of Chrysostom
Papadopoulos, police came to seize the priest of the True Orthodox
On
On
In 1929, on the feast of St. George according to the new calendar, Fr.
Nicholas, the new calendarist priest of the church of the Forerunner, Mesoropi,
Pangaion was struck by the incongruity of celebrating the feast of St. George
during the period of the Great Fast (something that never happens according to
the Orthodox Calendar). He went to his local bishop and asked him for
permission to celebrate the feast of St. George according to the Orthodox Calendar.
The bishop gave permission.
However, when Fr. Nicholas continued to celebrate according to the old
calendar, a persecution was stirred up against him. And as he felt the approach
of death, he told his parishioners: “When I die and they stop you from burying
me in the cemetery, bury me in my garden. But if they come and take my body
away by force, I adjure you not to follow my funeral procession!”
The new calendarists set the date of Fr. Nicholas’ trial for November,
but he died on October 19. The new calendarists came to bury him, but his widow
refused to hand over his body. Then the new calendarist bishop came to the
town, and sent a priest to the widow. He, too, was rebuffed.
Then the True Orthodox laypeople began to bury their pastor in his
garden, as he had ordered. But then the bishop came with police and forbade the
burial, ordering the police to seize the body. The parishioners at first
resisted, but then, not wanting bloodshed, they kissed the body, threw some
earth on it and then allowed it to be taken away.[110]
Meanwhile, the Eastern Patriarchs were entering into communion with
Metropolitan Sergius in
The Birth of
the
The publication of Metropolitan Sergius’ declaration was greeted with a
storm of criticism, for which he must have been prepared. The opponents of the
declaration saw in it a more subtle version of renovationism. Even its
supporters and neutral commentators from the West have recognized that it
marked a radical change in the relationship of the Church to the State.
Thus the American scholar Professor William Fletcher comments: “This was
a profound and important change in the position of the Russian Orthodox Church,
one which evoked a storm of protest.”[112]
According to the Soviet scholar Titov, “after the Patriarchal church changed
its relationship to the
Vladimir Rusak writes: “The Church was divided. The majority of clergy
and laymen, preserving the purity of ecclesiological consciousness, did not
recognize the Declaration… On this soil fresh arrests were made. All those who
did not recognize the Declaration were arrested and exiled to distant regions
or confined in prisons and camps. [In 1929] about 15 hierarchs who did not
share the position of Metropolitan Sergius were arrested. Metropolitan Cyril,
the main ‘opponent’ of Metropolitan Sergius, was exiled to Turukhansk in
June-July. The arrest procedure looked something like this: an agent of the GPU
appeared before a bishop and put him a direct question: what is your attitude
to the Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius? If the bishop replied that he did
not recognize it, the agent drew the conclusion: that means that you are a
counter-revolutionary. The bishop was arrested.”[116]
The first recorded verbal reaction of the anti-sergianists (or, as they
now came to be called, the “True Orthodox Christians”) came from the bishops
imprisoned on Solovki. On the initiative of Bishop Basil of Priluki, in a
letter dated September 14/27, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, they wrote:
“The subjection of the Church to the State’s decrees is expressed [in Sergius’
declaration] in such a categorical and sweeping form that it could easily be
understood in the sense of a complete entanglement of Church and State… The
Church cannot declare all the triumphs and successes of the State to be Her own
triumphs and successes. Every government can occasionally make unwarranted,
unjust and cruel decisions which become obligatory to the Church by way of
coercion, but which the Church cannot rejoice in or approve of. One of the
tasks of the present government is the elimination of all religion. The
government’s successes in this direction cannot be recognized by the Church as
Her own successes… The epistle renders to the government ‘thanks before the
whole people to the Soviet government for its understanding of the religious
needs of the Orthodox population’. An expression of gratitude of such a kind on
the lips of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church cannot be sincere and
therefore does not correspond to the dignity of the Church… The epistle of the
patriarchate sweepingly accepts the official version and lays all the blame for
the grievous clashes between the Church and the State on the Church… In 1926
Metropolitan Sergius said that he saw himself only as a temporary deputy of the
patriarchal locum tenens and in this capacity as not empowered to
address pastoral messages to the entire
According to different sources, 17 or 20 or 26 bishops signed this
epistle. However, the majority of the bishops on Solovki did not consider
Sergius’ declaration a reason for immediately breaking communion with him.
Metropolitan Cyril of Kazan wrote to an unknown person that the Solovki bishops
wanted to wait for the repentance of Sergius “until the convening of a
canonical Council… in the assurance that the Council could not fail to demand
that of him”.[118]
On October 21, Sergius directed all the clergy in
On October 25, Bishop Nicholas (Yarushevich) proclaimed in the cathedral
of the Resurrection of Christ in
Joseph himself refused to obey Sergius, regarding his transfer as
“anti-canonical, ill-advised and pleasing to an evil intrigue in which I will
have no part”.[119] He saw
in it the hand of the OGPU. Certainly, the fact that more than 40 bishops were
transferred by Sergius in this period was one of the main complaints of the
confessing bishops against him.
On October 30 Metropolitan Joseph wrote to Sergius: “You made me
metropolitan of
However, Metropolitan Sergius paid no attention to the disturbances in
Meanwhile, antisergianist groups were forming in different parts of the
country. Thus between October 3 and 6 an antisergianist diocesan assembly took
place in Ufa, and on November 8 Archbishop Andrew of Ufa issued an encyclical
from Kzyl-Orda in which he said that “even if the lying Sergius repents, as he
repented three times before of renovationism, under no circumstances must he be
received into communion”. This encyclical quickly circulated throughout
In November, Bishop Victor of Glazov departed. He had especially noted
the phrase in the declaration that “only ivory-tower dreamers can think that
such an enormous society as our Orthodox Church, with the whole of its
organisation, can have a peaceful existence in the State while hiding itself
from the authorities.” To Sergius himself Bishop Victor wrote: “The enemy has
lured and seduced you a second time with the idea of an organization of the
Church. But if this organization is bought for the price of the Church of
Christ Herself no longer remaining the house of Grace-giving salvation for men,
and he who received the organization ceases to be what he was – for it is
written, ‘Let his habitation be made desolate, and his bishopric let another
take’ (Acts 1.20) – then it were better for us never to have any kind of
organization. What is the benefit if we, having become by God’s Grace temples
of the Holy Spirit, become ourselves suddenly worthless, while at the same time
receiving an organization for ourselves? No. Let the whole visible material
world perish; let there be more important in our eyes the certain perdition of
the soul to which he who presents such pretexts for sin will be subjected.” And
he concluded that Sergius’ pact with the atheists was “not less than any heresy
or schism, but is rather incomparably greater, for it plunges a man immediately
into the abyss of destruction, according to the unlying word: ‘Whosoever shall
deny Me before men…’ (Matthew 10.33).”[122]
At the same time antisergianism began to develop in the
In
Here the conversation centred, not on Sergius’ canonical transgressions,
but on the central issue of his relationship to Soviet power. At one point Sergius
said: “By my new church policy I am saving the Church.” To which Archpriest
Victorinus Dobronravov replied: “The Church does not have need of salvation;
the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. You, yourself, Vladyka, have
need of salvation through the Church.”[125]
On December 15 Tuchkov, having received a secret report from
After further delegations and dialogues in this vein, Bishops Demetrius
of Gdov and Sergius of Narva separated from Sergius on December 26: “for the
sake of the peace of our conscience we reject the person and the works of our
former leader [predstoiatelia – Sergius was meant], who has unlawfully
and beyond measure exceeded his rights”. This was approved by Metropolitan
Joseph (who had been prevented from coming to
In a letter to a Soviet archimandrite, Metropolitan Joseph rejected the
charge of being a schismatic and accused Sergius of being a schismatic. He went
on: “The defenders of Sergius say that the canons allow one to separate oneself
from a bishop only for heresy which has been condemned by a Council. Against this
one may reply that the deeds of Metropolitan Sergius may be sufficiently placed
in this category as well, if one has in mind such an open violation by him of
the freedom and dignity of the Church, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. But
beyond this, the canons themselves could not foresee many things, and can one
dispute that it is even worse and more harmful than any heresy when one plunges
a knife into the Church’s very heart – Her freedom and dignity?… ‘Lest
imperceptibly and little by little we lose the freedom which our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Liberator of all men, has given us as a free gift by His Own Blood’
(8th Canon of the Third Ecumenical Council)… Perhaps I do not
dispute that ‘there are more of you at present than of us’. And let it be said
that ‘the great mass is not for me’, as you say. But I will never consider
myself a schismatic, even if I were to remain absolutely alone, as one of the
holy confessors once was. The matter is not at all one of quantity, do not
forget that for a minute: ‘The Son of God when He cometh shall He find faith on
the earth?’ (Luke 18.8). And perhaps the last ‘rebels’ against the
betrayers of the Church and the accomplices of Her ruin will be not only
bishops and not protopriests, but the simplest mortals, just as at the Cross of
Christ His last gasp of suffering was heard by a few simple souls who were
close to Him…”[127]
It remained now to unite these scattered groups under a common
leadership, or, at any rate, under a common confession, through the convening
of a Council of the
Now we can infer from a remark of Hieromartyr Maximus, Bishop of
Serpukhov, that there was some
Catacomb Council in 1928 that anathematized the Sergianists.[128]
Another source has described a so-called “Nomadic Council” attended at
different times by over 70 bishops in 1928 which likewise anathematized the
Sergianists. But hard evidence for the existence of this council has proved
hard to obtain,[129] and
there are some reasons for suspecting the authenticity of the description of
the proceedings.[130]
If we can believe the meagre source material, the “Nomadic Council” was
so called because it did not convene in a single place, but in four – Syzran,
Yeltz, Vyshny Volochok and one other, from March 9 to August 8, 1928 (new
style). Almost all the antisergianist bishops took part in one or more of its
sessions, although, for reasons of conspiracy, probably no more than 15 people
took part in any one session. Its president was the Moscow “Danilovite” Bishop
Mark (Novoselov), who maintained contacts with almost all the leading
antisergianists, and the other members of the working group were: Bishop Job
(Grechischkin), representing Archbishop Andrew of Ufa and the “Andrewites”;
Bishop Alexis (Buj), representing Bishop Demetrius (Lyubimov) and the
“Josephites”; Bishop Basil (Preobrazhensky), representing, probably, the
“Yaroslavlites” and some other “non-commemorators”; Protopriest Peter
Pervushin, representing Archbishop Theodore (Pozdeyevsky) and the “Danilovites”;
Hieromonk George (Terekhov?), representing the followers of Bishop Victor; and
Hieromonk Obadiah (Ovsyannikov?), who probably represented the yedinovertsy.
The Council passed 22 canons, of which the most important, and the most
obligatory on its participants, were the first six:
“1. The sergianists are heretics, equal in dishonour to the
renovationists, but exceed the latter in the savagery of their bestial
behaviour.
“2. The sergianists have no grace, sacraments are not performed amongst
them, and instead of performing sacred things, they perform profanities.
“3. The reception of renovationists and sergianists by repentance [only]
is to cease. From now on laity and clergy are to be received through
chrismation (if baptism has not been by immersion, but by pouring or
sprinkling, then they must be baptized).
“4. The clergy ordained by the renovationists and sergianists are simple
peasants, and not performers of the mysteries.
“5. The anathema of
“6. To the sergianists and their teacher Sergius Stragorodsky, who teach
that the blasphemous, godless and lawless ‘authorities’ are authorities given
by God, according to the word of the Apostle, and who cut up the body of Christ
through this impious teaching: Anathema.”
This completely uncompromising attitude towards the sergianists appears
to have been adopted by the majority of the antisergianist bishops. However,
there were two important exceptions: Metropolitan Peter and Metropolitan Cyril.
Metropolitan Peter’s reply to the first six canons (through a certain
layman Popov) was: “Categorically – no. I do not agree. Metropolitan Peter does
not consider the sergianist Synod to be heretical.”
Several
leading participants in the Council expressed distrust of Metropolitan Peter,
considering that he was protecting Metropolitan Sergius. However, Peter did
later harden in his attitude towards Sergius.
Before leaving the Nomadic Council, it is worth noting the position of
Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd. He supposedly signed the decisions of the
Council, but he did not share its distrust of Metropolitan Peter, and remained
subject to Peter to his last day. Moreover, in a reply to a pre-conciliar
question given to him by Fr. Nicholas Prozorov on February 9/22, 1928, he
commented as follows on a draft of canon 3: “The renovationists – yes, they
must be chrismated with Holy Chrism, but the sergianists – no, for the time being!, for they are
‘sergianists’ through misunderstanding.”[131]
A
“Little Council” of Catacomb bishops took place in Archangelsk in 1935. They
met in order to approve an epistle issued in the previous year by Archbishop
Seraphim of Uglich placing Metropolitan Sergius under ban for the anti-church
actions he had committed since 1927. One of those participating in this Council
was Archbishop Theodore of Volokolamsk.[132]
Whether or not the
And yet, as the sergianist Bishop Manuel (Lemeshevsky) testified, these
“schismatics” were among the finest hierarchs of the
In 1929, the Bolsheviks began to imprison the
True Orthodox on the basis of membership of a “church monarchist organization”
called “True Orthodoxy”. Osipov notes that the numbers of True Orthodox
Christians arrested between 1929 and 1933 exceeded by seven times the numbers
of clergy repressed from 1924 to 1928.[134] It is
hardly a coincidence that this took place against the background of the
collectivisation of agriculture and a general attack on religion[135]
spearheaded by Yaroslavsky’s League of Militant Godless (who numbered 17
million by 1933).
Vladimir Rusak writes: “1928, the beginning of collectivisation. Stalin
could no longer ‘leave the Church in the countryside’. In one interview he gave
at that time he directly complained against ‘the reactionary clergy’ who were
poisoning the souls of the masses.
“’The only thing I can complain about is that the clergy was not
liquidated root and branch,’ he said.
“At the 15th Congress of the party he demanded that all
weariness in the anti-religious struggle be overcome.”[136]
Also in 1928, economic cooperatives and all philanthropic organizations
were banned.[137]
But this was only the beginning: the real killer was collectivization, which,
together with the artificial famine that followed, claimed as many as 14
million lives. Collectivization can be seen as an attempt to destroy religion
in its stronghold, the countryside, by destroying the economic base of village
life and forcing all the villagers into communes completely dependent on the
State.
Husband writes: “On 8 April 1929, the VtsIK and Sovnarkom declaration
‘On Religious Associations’ largely superseded the 1918 separation of church
and state and redefined freedom of conscience. Though reiterating central
aspects of the 1918 separation decree, the new law introduced important
limitations. Religious associations of twenty or more adults were allowed, but
only if registered and approved in advance by government authorities. They
retained their previous right to the free use of buildings for worship but
still could not exist as a judicial person. Most important, the new regulations
rescinded the previously guaranteed [!] right to conduct religious propaganda,
and it reaffirmed the ban on religious instructions in state educational institutions.
In effect, proselytising and instruction outside the home were illegal except
in officially sanctioned classes, and religious rights of assembly and property
were now more circumscribed.”[138]
“Henceforth,” writes Nicholas Werth, “any activity ‘going beyond the
limits of the simple satisfaction of religious aspirations’ fell under the law.
Notably, section 10 of the much-feared Article 58 of the penal code stipulated
that ‘any use of the religious prejudices of the masses… for destabilizing the
state’ was punishable ‘by anything from a minimum three-year sentence up to and
including the death penalty’. On
“These
decrees were no more than a prelude to a second, much larger phase of the
antireligious campaign. In October 1929 the seizure of all church bells was
ordered because ‘the sound of bells disturbs the right to peace of the vast
majority of atheists in the towns and the countryside’. Anyone closely
associated with the church was treated like a kulak and forced to pay special
taxes. The taxes paid by religious leaders increased tenfold from 1928 to 1930,
and the leaders were stripped of their civil rights, which meant that they lost
their ration cards and their right to medical care. Many were arrested, exiled,
or deported. According to the incomplete records, more than 13,000 priests were
‘dekulakised’ in 1930. In many villages and towns, collectivisation began
symbolically with the closure of the church, and dekulakization began with the
removal of the local religious leaders. Significantly, nearly 14 percent of
riots and peasant uprisings in 1930 were sparked by the closure of a church or
the removal of its bells. The antireligious campaign reached its height in the
winter of 1929-30; by
“Over the next few years these great offensives against the church were
replaced by daily administrative harassment of priests and religious
organizations. Freely interpreting the sixty-eight articles of the government
decree of 8 April 1929, and going considerably beyond their mandate when it
came to the closure of churches, local authorities continued their guerrilla
war with a series of justifications: ‘unsanitary condition or extreme age’ of
the buildings in question, ‘unpaid insurance’, and non-payment of taxes or
other of the innumerable contributions imposed on the members of religious communities.
Stripped of their civil rights and their right to teach, and without the
possibility of taking up other paid employment – a status that left them
arbitrarily classified as ‘parasitic elements living on unearned wages’ – a
number of priests had no option but to become peripatetic and to lead a secret
life on the edges of society. Hence, despite Metropolitan Sergi’s pledge of
allegiance to the Soviet regime, schisms developed within the church,
particularly in the provinces of
“The followers of [Hieromartyr] Aleksei Bui, a bishop of
This persecution did not prevent Sergius and four other bishops from
saying, in an interview with TASS on February 15, 1930, that “in the Soviet
Union there was not and is not now any religious persecution”, that “churches
are closed not on the orders of the authorities, but at the wish of the population,
and in many cases even at the request of the believers”, that “the priests
themselves are to blame, because they do not use the opportunities presented to
them by the freedom to preach” and that “the Church herself does not want to
have any theological-educational institutions”.[140]
This interview, writes Fr. Stefan Krasovitsky, “was especially absurd
and scandalous in the eyes of the simple people in that the universally
venerated chapel of the Iveron Icon of the Mother of God had just been destroyed.
As N. Talberg writes, ‘the Russian people, fearing not even the chekists,
demonstrated their attitude to him (Metropolitan Sergius)… When Metropolitan
Sergius went to serve in one of the large churches of
Commenting on the interview, Archbishop Andrew of
How many bishops supported Sergius? In 1930 Sergius claimed that he had
70% of the Orthodox bishops (not including the renovationists and Gregorians),
which implies that about 30% of the Russian episcopate joined the
Religious life did not cease but rather intensified in the underground.
Wandering bishops and priests served the faithful in secret locations around
the country. Particular areas buzzed with underground activity. Thus Professor
Ivan Andreyevsky testified that during the war he personally knew some 200
places of worship of the
In the birth of the
However, these acts did not cross the line separating compromise from
apostasy. That line was passed by Metropolitan Sergius when he recognized the God-cursed power to be God-established,
and ordered it to be commemorated while banning the commemoration of the
confessing bishops. At this point the spirit of the Council flared up again in
all its original strength. For, as a “Letter from
Probably late in 1927, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) wrote:
"Now everywhere two epistles are being published in the newspapers and are
being read in many churches which until recently were Orthodox – epistles of
two, alas, former beloved pupils of mine with whom I was once in agreement,
Metropolitans Sergius and Eulogius, who have now fallen away from the saving
unity of the Church and have bound themselves to the enemies of Christ and the
Holy Church – the disgusting blaspheming Bolsheviks, who have submitted
themselves in everything to the representatives of the Jewish false teaching
which everywhere goes under the name of communism or materialism… Let these new
deceivers not justify themselves by declaring that they are not the friends of
the Bolsheviks and Jews who stand at the head of the Bolshevik kingdom: in
their souls they may not be their friends, but they have submitted, albeit unwillingly,
to these enemies of Christ, and they are trying to increase their power not
only over the hapless inhabitants of Holy Russia, but also over all Russian
people."
On
“’Therefore we are right to say that the thing in itself, I mean power,
that is, authority and royal power, have been established by God. But if a
lawless evildoer seizes this power, we do not affirm that he has been sent by
God, but we say that he, like Pharaoh, has been permitted to spew out
this cunning and thereby inflict extreme punishment on and bring to their
senses those for whom cruelty was necessary, just as the King of Babylon
brought the Jews to their senses.’ (Works, part II, letter 6).
“Bolshevik power in its essence is an
antichristian power and there is no way that it can recognized as
God-established.”[147]
On
On
Metropolitan Anthony secretly distributed this encyclical with an appeal
to all the faithful archpastors to join the ROCOR; it was widely read among the
Josephites.[151]
Early in 1930, just after Metropolitan Sergius had given his interview
denying that there had ever been persecutions against the faith in Soviet
Russia, the archbishop of Cantebury invited Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris to
go to London for one day of prayers for the suffering Church of Russia. “I
decided to go,” he wrote. “The whole of
“I spent about a week in
On June 10, Metropolitan Sergius and his synod retired Metropoligan
Eulogius from his post administering the Russian parishes in
On
“What divides you from us is the fact that you, in your desire to
guarantee a secure existence for your ecclesiastical centre, have tried to
unite light with darkness. You have fallen into the temptation whose essence
was revealed in the holy Gospel. Once the spirit of evil tried to draw even the
Son of God Himself by a picture of external easy success, placing as a
condition His worship of him, the son of destruction. You have not followed the
example of Christ, the holy martyrs and confessors, who rejected such a
compromise, but have bowed down to the age-old enemy of our salvation, when,
for the sake of an illusory success, for the sake of the preservation of an
external organization, you declared that the joys of the godless authorities
are your joys and its enemies your enemies. You even tried to remove the crowns
from the recent martyrs and confessors (including yourself, for I know that
once you showed firmness and were in prison), affirming that they are suffering
imprisonment, exile and torments not for the name of Christ, but as
counter-revolutionaries. In this way you blasphemed against them. You
denigrated their exploit, and dampened the enthusiasm of those who could have
been numbered to the ranks of the martyrs for the faith. You excommunicated
them from the flower and adornment of the Russian church. In this neither I nor
my brothers abroad will ever follow you… We have no intercourse with the
Orthodox archpastors, pastors and laymen who are imprisoned in
On July 8, 1933 the Hierarchical Council of ROCOR issued an encyclical
to the Russian Orthodox flock with regard to Sergius’ epistle of March 23: “His
appeal in its essence remains the same as it was in 1927 and can be formulated
in the words: he who is with Soviet power is with the Russian Church; he who is
against the former cannot be with the latter. In this way the link with the
At the same time, this encyclical, - penned, according to Archbishop
Nicon of Washington, by Metropolitan Anastasy, - declared: “As regards
relations toward the Mother Church, the Russian ecclesial organization abroad
has considered itself no more than a branch of the latter, bound organically to
the whole body of the Church of Russia, even though temporarily deprived only
of outward unity with the latter in ecclesiastical administration.”
“To the present day the entire Church
organization abroad has considered and still considers itself an extraordinary
and temporary institution, which must be abolished without delay after the
restoration of normal social and ecclesiastical life in
“We are taking fully into account
the extraordinary difficulties of the position of Metropolitan Sergius, who is
now the de facto head of the Church of Russia, and are aware of the
heavy burden of responsibility for the fate of the latter, which lies upon him.
No one, therefore, has the audacity to accuse him for the mere attempt to enter
into dialogue with the Soviet regime so as to obtain legal standing for the
However, in his 1934 Paschal encyclical Metropolitan Anthony was
stricter: “The present age is rich not in ascetical feats of piety and
confession of faith, but in cheating, lies, and deceits. It is noteworthy that
several hierarchs and their flocks, for the most part Russians, have already
fallen away from Ecumenical unity, and to the question: ‘What do you believe?’,
reply with references to self-proclaimed heads of all sorts of schisms in
On
As we have seen, Archbishop Andrew was a
thorn in the side both of Metropolitan Peter and of Metropolitan Sergius. In
1922 he had made his
Just after the February revolution, Archbishop Andrew presided over the
All-Russian Congress of Yedinovertsy (that is, converts to Orthodoxy
from the Old Ritualists who were allowed to retain the Old Rite) in
Nizhni-Novgorod. In May, 1917, together with the future hieromartyr-bishop
Joseph (Petrovykh) and the yedinoverets Protopriest (later bishop and
hieromartyr) Simon (Sheev), he visited the Rogozhskoe cemetery in Moscow, the
spiritual centre of the Belokrinitsky Old Ritualist hierarchy, and handed over
a letter from the Congress expressing a desire for union. However, the reply of
the Old Ritualist bishops was negative.
But Vladyka’s sympathy for the Old Ritualists went further than these
early actions would suggest, and further than the opinion, which was generally
accepted in his time, that the anathemas on the Old Rite were unjust and should
be removed. Influenced by one of his teachers at the Academy, Professor N.
Kapterev, he adopted a still more “liberal” attitude towards the Old Ritualists
that has been a subject of controversy to this day. While continuing to
recognize the pre-revolutionary Church, he considered that it had fallen into
caesaropapism, or the “Niconian heresy” as he called it, and that it was
“Niconianism” that had led to the Russian revolution and to the renovationist
and sergianist submission of the Church to Soviet power. He often referred to
the Orthodox as “Niconians”, while calling the Old Ritualists “Ancient
Orthodox”, whose schism was not a schism, but precisely a protest against this
unlawful encroachment on the freedom of the Church. Therefore Vladyka Andrew's
attempted rapprochement with the Old Believers must be seen in the
context of the main struggle of the times - the struggle of the Church against
Soviet power and renovationist and sergianist caesaropapism.
Let us turn to Archbishop Andrew’s own account of his dealings with the
Old Believers:- “In September, 1917 the so-called beglopopovtsi [i.e.
those Old Ritualists who accepted runaway priests from the official Russian
Church, but had no hierarchy of their own] approached me with the request that
I become their bishop. At this time I was in
“My spiritual father, Archbishop Anthony of
“Thus from both sides everything was measured, calculated, thought out
and humanly speaking worked out in a manner completely acceptable for all.
After this I went to
“But then the events of 1918 and 1919 took place. The beglopopovtsi
lost me for a long time. I was in
“I agreed to do everything that I had promised to
“Clement
accepted all my conditions and on August 28, 1925 we for the first time prayed
together with him to God in a truly Orthodox, that is, not caesaropapist church
[!]; I on my side had fulfilled everything that I had been blessed to do by
Patriarch Tikhon. On
“After this we parted on the same day of September 3.
“But soon I received news from Bishop Clement that the beglopopovtsi
recognised neither me nor him as their bishops and that he, Clement, had been
received in his existing rank into the number of the bishops of the
Belokrinitsky hierarchy.”
The renovationist Vestnik Sviashchennago Sinoda (Herald of the Holy
Synod) reported: "According to the report of Archimandrite Clement,
Bishop Andrew did not agree to the second rite (i.e. chrismation) for a long
time, and agreed only after sustained discussions with, or demands from
Clement, based on the 95th canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council (which orders
that heretics should be united to Orthodoxy only through chrismation).
"Archbishop Andrew said the following to Clement before the
chrismation: 'It is not your hand that is being lain upon me, but the hand of
that patriarch who consecrated your ancient chrism: when you read the
proclamation, and when I recite the heresies and confession of faith before
chrismation, then I immediately become your bishop and can commune with you.
But since I am your bishop, that means that a priest cannot anoint a bishop.'
"After this, Archbishop Andrew anointed himself with the Old
Ritualist chrism [more exactly: the chrism consecrated by the Orthodox
Patriarch Joseph] and read out the following confession of faith: 'I, Bishop
Andrew, of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, who was consecrated to
the rank of bishop on October 4, 1907 in front of the holy relics of the Kazan
hierarchs Gurias and Barsanuphius and on the day of their commemoration, and
who am now suffering persecution from the ruling hierarchy for the freedom of
the Church of Christ, confess before the Holy Church that Patriarch Nicon in
his wisdom disrupted the life and love of the Catholic Church, thereby laying
the beginnings of the schism in the Russian Church. On the basis of Patriarch
Nicon's mistake was established that caesaropapism which has, since the time of
Patriarch Nicon, undermined all the roots of
Hearing about the events in Askhabad, Metropolitan Peter, the
patriarchal locum tenens, banned Archbishop Andrew from serving,
although a later search in the Synodal offices revealed no such decree, as witnessed
by a Spravka by the Chancellor of the Patriarchal Synod, Archbishop
Pitirim of Dmitrov on
However, Archbishop Andrew was not
inclined to obey such a decree, whether genuine or not; for he considered
Metropolitan Peter to be “an autocrat in clerical guise” who had ascended the
ecclesiastical ladder by means of an intrigue, and the whole system of the
succession of power in the Church by means of secret wills to be uncanonical.
Thus he continued to “ascribe myself to no ruling hierarchy”, and to rule the
Ufa diocese on an autonomous basis until the convening of a Council of the
whole Russian Church, consecrating no less than 40 bishops for the Catacomb
Church – about 30 already by the beginning of 1927.
As regards the supposed ban on Archbishop Andrew by Metropolitan Peter,
we must conclude either, if we are to believe Metropolitan Sergius, that
"it may have been lost on the road", or, much more likely, that it
never existed.
Unfortunately, this supposed ban by Metropolitan Peter caused him to be
distrusted for a time by Archbishop Andrew. Fortunately, however, this distrust
did not last, as we shall see…
Archbishop Andrew returned from exile to
One of his parishioners wrote in her diary: "The people search him
out and revere him, and all the parishioners of various churches invite him to
them, while the clergy does not accept him. There are many rumours, and no one
knows what to believe... Bishop Andrew took up his residence in the workers'
quarter on
In July,
1926, Metropolitan Peter’s deputy, Metropolitan Sergius, renewed the attack on
Archbishop Andrew, and banned him from serving. However, even if we assume that the charges
against him were justified, this ban was invalid, since it transgressed the
74th Apostolic canon. According to this, a bishop must be first be summoned to
trial by bishops, and if he does not obey, he must be summoned again through
two bishops who are sent to bring him, and then a third time through two
bishops, and only when he does not appear the third time will the Council
pronounce its decisions about him. In the case of Archbishop Andrew, he was not
only not invited to a trial, but the sentence against him was passed, not by a
Council, but by a single bishop like himself. From this it follows that his ban
was invalid.
Archbishop Andrew wrote: “This Sergius, knowing that I was in
“And so Metropolitan Sergius slandered me,
traveling along this well-trodden path of slander and lies. But in
“At
that time I had two vicar-bishops with me – Anthony [Milovidov, of
Ust-Katavsky] and Pitirim [of Nizhegorod, later Schema-Bishop Peter (Ladygin)].
Both of them wanted to check out everything that related to me in the matter of
the reunion with Old Ritualism. Anthony set off to check things out in
“You can imagine his surprise when in the
spring of 1927 he became convinced that there were absolutely no documents
about me in the Synodal archives, neither about my ‘departure into schism’, nor
about my ‘ban’, etc. He asked in the Synod what this meant, and received the
exceptionally characteristic reply: ‘Metropolitan Peter was probably only
wanting to frighten Bishop Andrew’!…
“Bishop Pitirim, a 70-year-old monk who
used to be on Old Athos, a clever man, although unlettered, went not to the
sergianist Synod, which he did not recognize, but to Yaroslavl to Metropolitan
Agathangelus, so as to tell him everything concerning Church life in Ufa in
detail and to hear his opinion. Metropolitan Agathangel heard Bishop Pitirim
out very attentively for several hours (two days) and told my vicar-bishop
Pitirim (whom I had consecrated to the episcopate during my first exile in
Tedzhent in June, 1925), that he should not be upset, that my ecclesiastical
behaviour was irreproachable and that only in the interests of ecclesiastical
peace he, Metropolitan Agathangel, advised me not to carry out any hierarchical
consecrations but in the interests of the enlightenment of the flock in Ufa and
other faithful sons of the Church, he, Metropolitan Agathangel, advised me to
present my whole ‘case’ before the judgement of the nearest – at least three –
bishops.
“’But this is only my advice, and it will
be clearer how to act on the spot,” said Metropolitan Agathangel to Bishop
Pitirim.
“Bishop Pitirim, on returning to
“On February 3, 1927 these three bishops
issued under their signatures an ‘Act with regard to the Affair of Archbishop
Andrew’, in which they laid out the circumstances of the affair and came to the
conclusion that I had not ‘departed’ anywhere, and that Metropolitan Sergius’
slander was in essence a light-minded and shameful intrusion into a holy
affair.”
From
However, Archbishop Andrew’s relations
with the Old Ritualists did not end there. When Vladyka was released from prison in
1931, he began to visit the Rogozhskoe cemetery again, reasoning “that I am for
them not a stranger, but their own, and I am for them not a hostile and harmful
‘Niconian’, but a true bishop of the One, Holy, Catholic and
Soon, however, he was again exiled. During this period, on
Archbishop Andrew now considered himself to be in full communion with
Archbishop Meletius “in the holy ecclesiastical dogmas, and in prayer, and in
ecclesiastical discipline (that is, in the holy rites)”. At the same time, he
rejected the idea that he had “transferred” to the Belokrinitsky hierarchy, and
insisted on remaining Bishop of Ufa, retaining “full freedom of Church action,
arousing the suspicions of nobody”. Archbishop Meletius appears to have
accepted this condition.
In reviewing the relations between Archbishop Andrew and the Old
Ritualists, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the latter used the
good intentions and missionary zeal of the Orthodox bishop to deceive him into
making errors that have cast a shadow over his reputation ever since. He
considered that, as a result of his actions, “the schism, as a schism, has
ideologically speaking come to an end”. But he was tricked by the beglopopovtsi,
who rejected both him and the bishop he had consecrated for them, Clement. There was not then, and has not
been since then, any union between the Orthodox Church and the Old Ritualists
of the Belokrinitsky hierarchy. Nor can there be without the repentance of the
latter, because, apart from the fact that the Belokrinitsky hierarchy has no
apostolic succession, it, as the “Andrewites” themselves admit, followed the
sergianists in becoming a tool of Soviet propaganda.
In striving, like the Apostle Paul, to be "all things to all
men", Archbishop Andrew sometimes expressed extreme statements concerning
the pre-revolutionary Church and the Romanov dynasty which were accepted
neither by the Church nor by his spiritual father, Metropolitan Anthony. This
gave the opportunity to lesser, evil-intentioned men, such as Metropolitan
Sergius, to cast doubt on Archbishop Andrew's Orthodoxy, whereas in fact
Vladyka maintained his good confession to the extent of giving his blood for
Christ...[159]
Although the True Orthodox laity of the Church of Greece with their few
priests were essentially alone in openly opposing the calendar change, there
were still some who had not “bowed the knee to Baal” in “the king’s palace” –
the hierarchy headed by Chrysostom Papadopoulos. Thus Metropolitan Germanus of
Demetrias protested against the introduction of the new calendar and held it in
abeyance in his diocese until
Indeed, it was the hope that the State Church would eventually return to
the Julian Calendar, that persuaded those bishops who later joined the True
Orthodox to stay where they were for the time being.
Bishop Ephraim writes that at a “Pre-Council” held at the monastery of
Vatopedi on Mount Athos in 1930, “the representatives of the Serbian and Polish
Churches (the Churches of Russia, Georgia, and Bulgaria were not represented at
the council; Russia and Georgia were not present because, at the time, they
were weathering the third wave of persecutions under Stalin, Bulgaria was not
present because the ‘Bulgarian schism’ was still in effect) asked for a
separate chapel. When the Greeks insisted that they all celebrate together the
Slavs refused, excusing themselves by saying that the language was different,
as well as the typicon, and that there would be confusion. The Greeks kept
insisting and the Slavs kept refusing, and in fact, to the end of the council,
the two did not concelebrate, and it became clear that the Slavs considered the
calendar issue important enough at the time to separate themselves from the
Greeks. When they said that their typicon was different, the calendar obviously
weighed heavily as a part of that difference…
“In fact the
During this council the Serbian Bishop Nicholas (Velimirovich) of Ochrid
vehemently defended the Orthodox Calendar, declaring that the 1923 Congress
which approved the new calendar had created a schism. “Does the present
assembly,” he said, “have any relation to the Pan-Orthodox Congress of
Constantinople, from which the anomalies known to us all proceeded? The
Again, in 1929 the Russian Metropolitan Innocent of Peking wrote an open
letter on the calendar question in which he said: “In the
But these were foreign bishops; in
However, the number of True Orthodox parishes in Greece had multiplied
(800 were founded in the years 1926-30 alone), and, helped by a parliamentary
decree of 1931 granting freedom of worship to the Old Calendarists, the numbers
of the faithful had swelled to over 200,000 by October, 1934. Moreover, by that
time it was becoming clear even to many new calendarist hierarchs and
theologians that the introduction of the new calendar had been an unmitigated
disaster.
The disastrous consequences of the innovation have been summarized by
Nicetas Anagnostopoulos as follows: “The Greek Church infringed on the dogma of
the spiritual unity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, for which
the Divine Founder had prayed, because it separated itself in the simultaneous
celebration of the feasts and observance of the fasts from the other Orthodox
Churches and the Orthodox world, 8/10ths of which follows the Old Calendar (the
Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Holy Mountain, Russia, Serbia and others).
“In Divine worship it has divided the pious Greek people into two
worshipping camps, and has divided families and introduced the simultaneous
feasts of Orthodox and heretics (Catholics, Protestants and others) as well as
confusion and disorder into the divine Orthodox Worship handed down by the
Fathers.
“It has transferred the immovable religious feasts and the great fasts,
handed down from ages past, of Christmas, the Mother of God and the Holy
Apostles, reducing the fast of the Apostles until it disappears when it
coincides with the feast of All Saints; and has removed the readings from the
Gospel and Apostle from the Sunday cycle.
“From this it becomes evident that the Calendar is not an astronomical
question, as the innovators of the Church of Greece claim in their defence, but
quite clearly a religious question, given that it is indissolubly bound up with
the worshipping, and in general with the religious life of the Orthodox
Christian.
“Through the calendar innovation the new calendarist Church has
transgressed, not only the perennial Ecclesiastical Tradition of the Patristic
and Orthodox Calendar, and not only the above-mentioned Apostolic command [II
Thessalonians 2.15; Galatians 1.8-9] and the decision of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council concerning the anathematisation of those who violate the
Sacred Tradition [“If anyone violates any ecclesiastical tradition, written or
unwritten, let him be anathema”], but also the decisions of the Pan-Orthodox
Patriarchal Councils of the years 1583, 1587 and 1593 under the Ecumenical
Patriarch Jeremiah II and of 1848 under the Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimus,
which condemned and anathematized the Gregorian calendar.
“It has also transgressed the Sacred Canons which order the keeping and
observance of the Sacred Traditions, which are: a) the Third of the Council of
Carthage, b) the Twenty-First of the Council of Gangra, and c) the Ninety-First
and Ninety-Second of St. Basil the Great, as well as the Forty-Seventh canon of
the Council of Laodicea, which forbids the concelebration with heretics, which
is what the Latins and the Protestants are, and the First of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council concerning the steadfast observance of the complete array of
the divine Canons.”[165]
Nor did the new calendarists lack direct warnings from the
One such warning was given to the new calendarist Bishop Arsenius of
Larissa on December 12/25, 1934, the feast of St. Spyridon according to the Old
Calendar, but Christmas according to the new calendar.
“In the morning the bishop went by car to celebrate the Liturgy in his
holy church. When he arrived there, he saw a humble, aged, gracious Bishop with
a panagia on his breast. Arsenius said to him: ‘Brother, come, let’s
proclaim the joyful letters of Christmas and then I will give you hospitality.’
“The humble Bishop replied: ‘You must not proclaim those letters but
mine, St. Spyridon’s!’ Then Arsenius got angry and said: ‘I’m inviting you and
you’re despising me. Go away then.’
“Arsenius went into the church, venerated the icons and sat in his
throne. When the time for the katavasias came, he sang the first katavasia, and
then told the choir to sing the second. Arsenius began to say the third, but
suddenly felt anxious and unwell. He motioned to the choir to continue and went
into the altar, where they asked him: ‘What’s the matter, master?’ He replied:
‘I don’t feel well.’
“When Arsenius’ indisposition increased, they carried him to his house,
where his condition worsened, and the next day he died. He had been punished by
God for his impious disobedience to St. Spyridon. This miracle is known by the
older Orthodox faithful of Larissa.”[166]
During this early period of the struggle
against the new calendar, many people sympathized with the True Orthodox but
did not join them because they did not yet have bishops. Others continued to
worship according to the Orthodox Calendar without openly breaking communion
with the new calendarists.
Among
the latter was Fr. Nicholas Planas of
Once “he
wanted to serve according to the traditional Calendar on the feast of the
Prophet Elisseus [Elisha]. But since he feared that obstacles might arise, he
agreed with his assistant priest the night before to go and serve at Saint
Spyridon’s in Mantouka. In the morning his chantress went to Saint Spyridon’s
and waited for him. Time passed and it looked as though the priest was not
going to come to serve. She despaired. She supposed that something serious had
happened to him, and that was why he hadn’t come. She left and went to Prophet
Elisseus’ (because the ‘information center’ was there), to ask what had
happened to the priest, and there, she saw him in the church preparing to
celebrate the Liturgy! She chided him for breaking the agreement which they had
made, and asked furthermore why he was not afraid, but came there in the
center, right in the midst of the seething persecution. He said to her, ‘Don’t
scold me, because this morning I saw the Prophet and he told me to come here to
serve and not to fear anything, because he will watch over me.’ His helper was
left with her argument unfinished! ‘But, how did you see him?’ she asked him.
He told her, ‘I got up this morning and got ready for Saint Spyridon’s. I was
sitting in an armchair while they brought me a carriage. At that moment I saw
Prophet Elisseus before me, and he told me to go to his church to celebrate the
Liturgy!’…
“Another example similar to that of Papa-Nicholas is that of the
priestmonk Jerome of Aegina, who followed the same path. Shortly after his
ordination to the priesthood, a year or so before the calendar change, Fr.
Jerome ceased from serving because of a vision that was granted him during the
Liturgy. According to some accounts this occurred within forty days of his
ordination. He continued to preach, however, at a hospital chapel where he
lived, and which he himself had built there on the
“Although he himself did not serve as a priest, nevertheless, because of
his saintliness and his popularity among the people and because of the obvious
gifts of the Holy Spirit which he possessed, he had great influence among the
faithful who looked to him for direction and guidance. This came to the ears of
Procopius, the Bishop of Hydra and
An especially active role in the struggle was played by Hieromonk
Matthew (Karpathakis), who in 1927, in response to a Divine vision, founded the
women’s Monastery of the Mother of God at Keratea, Attica, which soon became
the largest monastery in Greece.[168]
In 1934 he wrote: “For every Christian there is nothing more honourable
in this fleeting life than devout faith in the Master of all things, our Lord
Jesus Christ. For what else can save the soul from death, that is, from the
condemnation of eternal punishment, than this faultless Orthodox Christian
Faith of ours, about which the Lord speaks clearly, saying: ‘He who believes
and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned’ (Mark
16.16). This Faith was compared by the Lord to a valuable treasure which a man
found hidden in a field and to buy which he sold all his possessions (Matthew
13.13).
“Therefore the blessed Apostle Jude exhorts everyone ‘to contend for the
Faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Catholic epistle, v. 3).
And the divine Apostle made such an exhortation because there were appearing at
that time men of deceit, the vessels of Satan, guileful workers, who sow tares
in the field of the Lord, and who attempt to overturn the holy Faith in Christ.
Concerning the men of impiety and perdition, the holy Apostle went on to write:
‘For admission has been secretly gained by some who long ago were designated
for this condemnation, ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into
licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.’ Because of these
innovators and despisers of the Faith in the Holy Church of God which has been
handed down to us, the Apostle of the Gentiles and Walker in heavenly places
Paul hurled a terrible anathema, saying: ‘If any one preaches to you a gospel
contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed’ (Galatians
1.9).
“Therefore our Lord in the Holy Gospel cries to all His faithful
servants: ‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but
inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits… Take
heed that no one leads you astray… And many false prophets will arise and lead
many astray.’ (Matthew 7.15,16, 24.4,11)
“Against these innovating false-bishops and their followers the
synodical decrees of the Church through the Most Holy Patriarchs declare that
‘whoever has wished to add or take away one iota – let him be seven times
anathema’…
“Thus with what great attention should every Orthodox Christian care for
the valuable treasures of the Faith, so as to keep it undefiled, as the divine
Apostles and Godbearing Fathers handed it down to us, and that he should
struggle to preserve the state which is fitting for Christians of penitence,
the fear of God, good works; for we live in an age in which, as the Evangelist John
says, so many antichrists have appeared. He writes: ‘Children, it is the last
hour; and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists
have come; therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us,
but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued
with us.’ (I John 2.18-19)
“… Those who govern the
“… What great wealth of the grace of God is brought into the soul of the
Christian by a little patience in afflictions! Although the holy martyrs,
confessors and righteous ones passed their lives in persecutions and
afflictions, nevertheless they endured and triumphed over this world which
‘lies in evil’ and found the unfading glory of the Kingdom of the Heavens,
because they hoped in the Lord. Our Fathers hoped and were not ashamed, for the
unlying mouth of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ confirmed: ‘Behold,
I am with you all the days of your life until the end of the age.’ (Matthew
28.20) That is why the
“St. Basil the Great once wrote: ‘The one crime that is severely avenged
is the strict keeping of the patristic traditions… No white hair is venerable
to the judges of injustice, no pious asceticism, no state according to the
Gospel from youth to old age… To our grief we see our feasts upturned, our
houses of prayer closed, our altars of spiritual worship unused.’ All this has
now come upon us. Many and clearly to be seen by all are the great evils that
the anticanonical renovationists introduced into the menologion and calendar of
the Orthodox Church. Schisms, divisions, the overthrow of good order and
complete confusion, violation of the most ancient laws of the Church, a great
scandal for the conscience of the faithful were the consequences, though
anathemas on those who violate ‘any ecclesiastical tradition, whether written
or unwritten’ had been sounded by the Holy Ecumenical Councils. On the basis of
the apostolic maxim, ‘Obey those who have the rule over you and submit to them’
(Hebrews. 13.7), the Shepherds of the Church who support this anticanonical
innovation expect absolute obedience from the fullness of the Church. But how
can the true children of the Church obey those who at the same moment disobey
the holy Fathers, of whom the prophet says: ‘The Lord chose them to love them’,
and do not venerate the Church’s established order that has been handed down
and sanctified by the Holy Spirit, while the Lord says concerning them: ‘He who
hears you hears Me, and he who despises you despises Me. And he who despises Me
despises Him Who sent Me’? How can pious Christians shut their ears to the
voices and work of such great Saints of God, and so be deprived of the praise
and blessing of the Holy Trinity, which we hear in the mouth of the Apostle
Paul himself: ‘I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain
the traditions even as I have delivered them to you’ (I Corinthians
11.2); thereby receiving diverse and strange teachings ‘according to the
elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ’ (Colossians
2.8), inventions of men in which there lurks a special danger for the soul? The
faithful children of the Church, with fear of God in regard to the commandment
of the Holy Spirit: ‘Stand firm and hold to the traditions’ (II
Thessalonians 2.15), and in conformity with the other commandment:
‘Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom
you learned it’ (II Timothy. 3.14), have a reverent and Godpleasing
answer to give to the unproved claims of today’s innovating shepherds with
regard to obedience: ‘We must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5.29).[169]
Now the True Orthodox Christians both in
On
But
pressure for a return to the Julian Calendar continued to build up within the
This left three: Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias, the retired
Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina (who had already distinguished himself in
the early 1920s by refusing to recognize the election of Meletius Metaxakis)
and Metropolitan Chrysostom of Zakynthos, who, according to one source, was accepted
by the first two by the laying-on of hands, since he had been consecrated after
the calendar change.[173]
On
The
three metropolitans then issued a Confession of Faith in which they declared,
among other things: “Those who now administer the
“That this is so was confirmed by the Commission made up of the best
jurists and theologian-professors of the National University which was
appointed to study the calendar question, and one of whose members happened to
be his Blessedness the Archbishop of Athens in his then capacity as professor
of Church History in the National University.
“Let us
see what was the opinion given by this Commission on the new calendar:
‘Although all the Orthodox Churches are autocephalous in their internal
administration, nevertheless, in that they are united to each other through the
Dogmas and the Synodical decrees and Canons, none of them can separate itself
off as an individual Orthodox Church and accept the new Church calendar without
being considered Schismatic in relation to the others.’
“Since his Beatitude the Archbishop of Athens has by his own signature
declared himself to be a Schismatic, what need do we have of witnesses to
demonstrate that he and the hierarchs who think like him have become
Schismatics, in that they have split the unity of Orthodoxy through the
calendar innovation and divided the Ecclesiastical and ethnic soul of the Greek
Orthodox People?”[174]
This very important document was confirmed as expressing the Faith of
the Church in several subsequent Confessions (notably the “Florinite”
Confessions of 1950, 1974 and 1991). It declares that the new calendarists are
not only schismatics but also, by clear implication, heretics in that they
“touched the Dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and
But by “schismatic”, did the three metropolitans mean “deprived of the
grace of sacraments”? The answer to this question is to be found in their
encyclical issued on June 8/21, 1935: “We recommend to all those who follow the
Orthodox Calendar that they have no spiritual communion with the schismatic
church of the schismatic ministers, from whom the grace of the All-Holy Spirit
has fled, because they have violated the decisions of the Fathers of the
Seventh Ecumenical Council and the Pan-Orthodox Councils which condemned the
Gregorian calendar. That the schismatic Church does not have Grace and the Holy
Spirit is affirmed by St. Basil the Great, who says the following: ‘Even if the
Schismatics have erred about things which are not Dogmas, since the head of the
Church is Christ, according to the divine Apostle, from Whom all the members
live and receive spiritual increase, they have torn themselves away from the
harmony of the members of the Body and no longer are members [of that Body] or
have the grace of the Holy Spirit. Therefore he who does not have it cannot
transfer it to others.’”[175]
By a “coincidence” rich in symbolical meaning, it was precisely at this
time – June, 1935 – that the Turkish law banning Orthodox clergy from wearing
cassocks came into effect. Although this regulation was strongly resented by
Patriarch Photius, the lower clergy greeted it with delight, shouting: “Long
live Ataturk!” And indeed, deprived now of the inner vestment of grace, and
governed by “human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the
universe, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2.8), it was only fitting
that the Patriarchate should lose even the outer sign of its former glory.[176]
On May 23, 24, 25 and 26, 1935, the three metropolitans consecrated four
new bishops: Germanus (Varykopoulos) of the
In December, Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina set off for
This miracle was recounted by Chrysostom himself as follows: “I was
depressed by my captivity since I had no information about how the Sacred
Struggle was going and did not know what would be the outcome of my arbitrary
detention in
“With this serious problem weighing on me, I went, the next day, which
was April 23, to the Divine Liturgy. With pain and faith I called on St. George
to help me: