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Further Reflections
1. The "Left Wing" – This group never saw much wrong with the
MP and World Orthodoxy, but admitted that it was imprudent to deal
directly with the MP as long as the old-style, violent communists were
in power, and inarticulately perceived that ecumenism was not in good
taste but certainly not an impediment to concelebrating with the
"Orthodox" involved in it, as long as they were not the non-ROCOR
Russian groups, with whom there was a temporary, purely political
obstacle to concelebration.
2. The "Right Wing" – These men saw clearly that the MP was
no longer an unwilling captive, but rather a new entity substantially
different from the pitiful, captive compromisers of the pre-World War II
era: a sacrilegious, alchemical transmogrification, a surreal caricature
of a Church, combining Orthodox with non-Orthodox, even occult,
elements, and completely subservient to the domestic and foreign
policy goals of whatever demoniacally criminal element was in power
in Moscow - communist, neo-communist, fascist, neo-capitalist, anti-
western, pro-western, nationalist, internationalist, whatever.
This "Right Wing" also saw clearly that the rest of "official" state
church "Orthodoxy" was likewise subservient to apostate, militantly
post-Christian criminal elements, whether on the "Western" or "Eastern"
side of the artificial Cold War dichotomy, and that its leaders were no
longer Christians in any meaningful sense. Apostates, utterly overturned
inwardly in their philosophical foundations and thought processes,
being either cynical criminals (like Patriarch Bartholomew, for example)
or pitiful dupes subject to profound spiritual delusion (like the late
Patriarch Paul of Serbia, for example), these patriarchs and leading
hierarchs saw (and to this day, see) no contradiction between making
public Orthodox and anti-Orthodox statements on a regular, alternating
basis, decrying ecumenism one day and praying with heretics (or, for
that matter, non-Christians) the next, and, like the MP, were (and to
this day, are) in the process of creating an attractive, surreal neo-
Orthodoxy - beautiful services, Byzantine choir conferences,
educational and publishing efforts, excellent iconography, beautiful
coffee-table books, aggressively advertised "holy elders", etc. - an
"Orthodoxy" that is simultaneously beautiful outwardly and empty
inwardly, slavishly content to be one more option on the cafeteria
menu of Traditional World Religions and crafted precisely to fit neatly
into the Department of Legalized Cults in the New World Order.
I propose that the high water mark of the Right Wing's influence
was, therefore, not 1983, but rather the period immediately before the
1974 Sobor. From that point on, it was all downhill, despite the 1983
Anathema, because the 1974 statement denied the authority of a
Local Synod to anathematize anyone, and it was never subsequently
overturned. From 1974 to the repose of Met. Philaret in late 1985,
they were fighting a rearguard action. The 1983 Anathema proclaims
the truth, and its spiritual effect cannot be doubted: Those who fall
under it are in fact anathematized, whether they believe so or not. But
as a disciplinary and didactic tool to prevent the apostasy of most of
the ROCOR, the Anathema failed, because the interpretation put on it
by the 1986 Nativity Encyclical prevented the ROCOR authorities from
applying it to those who actually were guilty of the heresy which the
anathema condemned. This interpretation, however, cannot be blamed
solely on its author, Metropolitan Vitaly, for his approach found a
precedent in the 1974 declaration.
It is not for us to judge the great men of this “Right Wing,” who
number among themselves at least one saint. It behooves us, however,
to recognize that this idea that only an ecumenical council can
declare heretics to be heretics is a strait-jacket that prevented the
ROCOR from defending itself and will do the same to anyone who
adopts it.
B. The Cyprianite Union was part of the KGB operation for the
destruction of the Russian Church Abroad.
Once this new official position was in place, and the only
remaining objections to inter-communion were the complicated,
legalistic, and - to the ordinary person - incomprehensible arguments
put forth in the Cyprianite position papers, it was child's play to move
the Broad Mainstream and a critical mass of the Right Wing from "we
know the ecumenists are in the Church" to "therefore we should be in
communion with them."
D. A proposal to ROCOR-
ROCOR-A
15 August 2010 OS
Feast of the Assumption