Council (Sobor) in May

This coming May 6th will see a new event in the United States, the 4th All-Diaspora Council (Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile (most often referred to as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad). The official sobor press releases use terms that imply that the Church in Exile remains part of the official Moscow Patriarchate, which we know is not true at all. Nor does the All-Diaspora Sobor include Russian-diaspora delegates from the "Orthodox Church in America" or the Russian Federation’s Exarchate in America (also called the Patriarchal Parishes).  The Sobor will take place in irony at the San Francisco Cathedral of the Holy Virgin, which His Eminence, the miracle-working St. John of Shanghai, established more than 40 years ago, and who reposes in a special cathedral crypt, and who was recognized and elevated to sainthood by the Church in 1995.  The Sobor is a vicarious suicide.

Unification

This 4th Sobor will call for Russian Orthodox unification of the Church in Exile and the Moscow Patriarchate. Advocates are claiming that the church inside the Russian Federation is wholesome now because one can observe much greater freedom of political speech in the RF.  This assumption is not realized in fact. The practice of religion is not much liberalized and persecution of individual Christians occurs at the hands of their own senior Russian Orthodox Church administration.  Few people in the free world and fewer in the United States (where the Constitution allows no establishment of religion) recognize that no rule against government-church establishment and political manipulation is known in the so-called Russian Federation.  The current Moscow Patriarchate is really a part of the established Soviet order started in 1920’s, when hierarchs and other clergy were ordered to sign a pledge of allegiance to the Communist regime (and if they refused they were executed or died in the Gulags). Most churches were blown up, closed and boarded up. In 1943 Stalin brought back what was left of the scattered Church and arranged it as an "appendage" of his communist government, something utterly different from the Church in 1917, and used it in WWII. This spiritual injustice is now the Moscow Patriarchate, which is calling for unification and for whatever political advantages can accrue to the Putin administration.

Imminent Ruin

There can be little room for individual conscience or impartial writing of history when supervised by Putin and the patriarch in America.  What may be foreseen now, with the likely decisions by sycophants at the 4th All Diaspora Council, is the abolition of the Church "Abroad" and its integration into Moscow’s "mother church."  No one in his right mind, who fought communists all his life and who hoped to see his Church very well established in the United States of America and other countries of the free world, could want to be overrun and "integrated" into the Moscow Patriarchate by clergy who had their training and education under the old communist totalitarian Soviet state.

Backward Glance

The Russian Orthodox Church in Exile was part of the mother church in Russia, but its titular head, Patriarch Tikhon Belavin was sequestered during the Revolution and was eventually murdered in 1925. Notwithstanding His precarious state while under house arrest, He was able to issue a decree and resolution #362 on November 20th, 1920, allowing the churches outside the Soviet borders to exist without any pressure from the barbaric government that was complicit in murdering at least 50 million people before the Second World War.
In 1927, one of the remaining hierarchs, Sergey Stragorodsky, was forced to issue an edict pledging loyal support to the new atheist dictatorial regime, which made as its goal the total eradication of the free practice of religion. As once stated by Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the criminal state, religion was the "opium of the masses."  When they failed to fully subvert the love of God in the simple Russian peasantry, they subverted love from within and countered church regulations with heretical teachings and practices.

During World War II, Joseph Stalin needed the church’s influence with the masses to help him defeat the German onslaught started by the other dictator, Adolf Hitler.  After a genocidal war which saw another 50 million die and disappear into the Gulags-–or concentration camps 10 times worse than those run by Germans, a totally subjugated church became a tool of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union.

Suffice to say that, even with fall of explicit communism in 1991, nothing really changed in the governmental structure of the Russian Federation, even after a pseudo democratic process of elections emerged. The first president, Boris Yeltsin, spent half his time inebriated and ruled by decree.  These decrees were shuffled in front of him for his signature as Russia saw a few robber barons grab state property for themselves.  When one of the editors of Forbes magazine, an American citizen named Paul Khlebnikov decided to report it in a book, he was gunned down in broad daylight in Moscow. To this day, and after pressure by his employer, the lackadaisical government of the Russian Federation has not solved the Khlebnikov murder case.

Delusion vs. Our Protest

With all this in mind, the organizers of the 4th Sobor (or 4th Council) saw fit to insist that life had changed for the better and that the church, including President Vladimir Putin himself, were totally changed entities, deserving praise and respect. The 2d president of the so-called Russian Federation, a neo-Leninist himself, had made it his task to fully immerse himself in the process of unifying the Moscow Patriarchate with the Free Russian Church "abroad" and proposed that all remembered and bad feelings should be set aside for a new beginning in unity.  But Americans and Europeans and all others will certainly find it - strange when bishops and other clergy will start arriving in droves from the "mother country" and the "mother church" expecting certain respect and "information" to be shared back home.

We, the laity and parishioners of a viable part of the Orthodox Church of pre-revolutionary Russia all over the world, wish to express our total dissatisfaction with the hierarchs of the Russian Church "Abroad".  We protest this death wish Sobor drive towards "union" with a criminal organization, with a false church establishment in Moscow.

And all Orthodox people, not just ROCOR members, should be concerned by reports of violations in the "election of delegates" to the Sobor, thus affecting the legitimacy of this upcoming Sobor. It has been reported that many delegates were appointed, not elected in parish meetings. And it was also reported that names of proposed delegates in some cases have been kept secret from those they represent. Not only does the delegate selection process go against the way in which things are traditionally done in the Orthodox Church, but also the process by which delegates were "elected" violates ROCOR’s bylaws and statutes as well as U.S., Canadian and other laws governing nonprofit corporations.  Should therefore anything decided by this Sobor be legitimate?  Will the process leave the Sobor open to a legal challenge in U.S. and world courts? Moreover, it is illegal and unfair not to have representatives from the many Church-Abroad parishes in the Russian Federation, in the Ukraine, Belorus, Moldova and the remaining territories of the former U.S.S.R. parishes, whose existence the Russian Federations has tried to hide.

We request that anyone in any ROCOR parish or diocese with direct personal knowledge of any irregularities in the selection of delegates to the Sobor or irregularities in anything else involving the Sobor to write their account, sign it and have it notarized and send it to this Society.

Board of Directors of The Blessed Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) Memorial Society

Prof. G.M. Soldatow - President