A Sorrowful Epistle [1]
To His Holiness and Beatitude the Archbishop of Constantinople–New Rome
and Ecumenical Patriarch, Kyr Kyr Constantine VI
Humble Antony, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galich, President of the Synod of Bishops
of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, Wishes Joy:
Having received the epistle of Your Holiness in reply to the greeting of the aforenamed Russian Synod, in which you — although you yourself do not grant such an appellation to this institution — yet you do convey through me your greeting to my other fellow Russian bishops abroad, I consider it my duty, first of all, to once again remind you that this institution is not one contrary to the canons, but in accord with the Thirty-Ninth Canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and with the official instruction of the Moscow Patriarchal Synod of November, 1, 1920, No. 362; and secondly — which serves as the chief incentive for the writing of this epistle — to report to Your Holiness in filial fashion concerning those wrongs which have been inflicted not so much upon us, or solely upon the bishops abroad, but likewise upon the entire great Russian Orthodox Church, or more precisely, upon the entire Church of Christ, by your predecessors: His Holiness Patriarch Gregory VII, and His Holiness Meletius, who had arbitrarily torn away from the Russian Church the dioceses [2] of Poland and Finland, and who had attempted to also tear away both America and the Russian Churches in Western Europe, having completely distorted the holy canons, in which it is not only impossible to find any justification whatsoever for such actions, but is even easy to point out the strict prohibitions against such things, beginning with the Second Canon of the Second Ecumenical Council.
The reference to the Twenty-Eighth Canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council in justification of similar lawless seizures by the Ecumenical Throne is patently false, for there it is a question only of the Metropolitan sees of Pontus, Asia, and Thrace, which even previously had belonged to the aforenamed Throne. But concerning this we have already written repeatedly to the very same Patriarchal Throne, and therefore we shall not repeat all those arguments here, but rather, let us explain why we are determined to intervene on behalf of those regions which have been torn away from the Russian Church. Behold, for two years now we have been receiving bitter complaints from numerous laymen and clergy in Poland and Finland over the fact that they have been torn away from their beloved Great Pastor — raised up for them by the great Council — the Patriarch of All Russia, [3] and that now they are deprived of even the possibility of praying to God or of performing the Mysteries according to the order established by Holy Tradition and the most strict canons of the First and Fourth Ecumenical Councils, and which is preserved throughout the entire Orthodox world.
But not only these complaints themselves, but also the direct injunction of the Church compels us to intercede on behalf of our brethren who have been deprived of the possibility of properly holding to the saving path of piety, that is, of ecclesiastical prayer and ecclesiastical governance; namely, we mean the decree of the Ecumenical Council that if there should somewhere be noted the disobedience of a bishop to the rules of the Church, then the neighboring bishops ought to address him with a brotherly word of admonition (the Fourth Ecumenical Council, and others); for in that case, i.e., if the rules of the Ecumenical Councils, as inspired by the Divine and Life-creating Spirit, are trampled underfoot by the supreme bearers of His grace, then the offended party already has no one to whom to complain, and thus the responsibility for the purity of ecclesiastical doctrine and piety is laid upon all the bishops of the world. Of course, the most natural thing of all would be for the Patriarch of All Russia to raise his own voice concerning these matters, but his mouth is stopped [4] by the chains of the godless usurpers of authority in what used to be Russia. All the same, no sooner do they allow him — albeit rarely — to open his lips, than he frankly and openly expresses his condemnation of the arbitrary orders of unauthorized Hierarchs, that is, the very same late Patriarch Gregory and his Synod. We are convinced of this by his [Patriarch Tikhon’s] letter to Metropolitan Dionysius of Warsaw (23 May 1924, No. 244), as well as by the fact that to those condemned by the latter and driven from their cathedras, Archbishops Eleutherius, Vladimir, and Panteleimon, he sent distinguished awards, elevating the last two to the aforesaid rank during their exile, while having awarded the first a diamond Cross on his klobuk “for loyal service to the Orthodox Church.” His letter to Metropolitan Dionysius is appended here [5].
However, everyone is aware that Patriarch Tikhon, interned in the Donskoy Monastery, is only rarely given permission — about once or twice a year — to write his archpastoral decisions and openly send them abroad, namely then when the latter chance to correspond with the international interests of his captors; but, of course, the latter case occurs almost never; the Patriarch cannot even leave his confinement in order to serve Liturgy without the permission of the Bolsheviks–Communists. Therefore, most justly your predecessors on the Ecumenical Throne, Their Holiness Meletius and Gregory, refer to him as a Confessor. And so, owing to the physical impossibility of our Russian Patriarch raising his voice, I, the humble Metropolitan of Kiev — being second after him, as recognized by the great All-Russian Council held in Moscow in 1917–18, and also recognized as such by all the thirty-two Russian hierarchs found abroad — have the difficult, but inevitable duty to remind Your Holiness, in a filial manner, of the lawless actions of your predecessors — Kyr Meletius and Kyr Gregory VII.
Hitherto, from the days of my youth, I have ever raised my voice solely to magnify the Eastern Patriarchs, and in particular the Ecumenical Patriarchs, both orally and in print, concerning which Your Holiness is well aware; just as you likewise know that I, in word and deed, and in print, have always declared myself to be a philhellenist and an admirer of the Megali Idea [6]. However, I am not a papist, and I well remember that besides the great bishops of the Church, such as Paul the Confessor, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Proclus, Flavian, Germanus, Tarasius, and Photius, many others were also found there, both internal enemies of the Church, heretics, and even heresiarchs, such as Macedonius, Nestorius, Sergius, Phyrrus, Peter, Paul, as well as many Iconoclasts; concerning these were said those bitter, but truthful words contained in the First Canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and pronounced throughout the whole world, that they are condemned and cut off together with Honorius, the Pope of Rome, and the other heretics. And behold, to this very path of disobedience to the Holy Church and her canons did the last two predecessors of Your Holiness incline.
Thus we know that the establishment of a new metropolitan see, or the apportioning of eparchies into an autonomous metropolitanate, is permitted in no other way than with the consent of their former Metropolitan and his Synod, whereas Patriarchs Meletius and Gregory, without the consent of His Holiness, the Patriarch of All Russia to this, separated the Polish and Finnish eparchies into an autonomous diocese and then took them under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of the Imperial City [Constantinople], citing in justification the fact of Patriarch Tikhon’s curtailed liberty in the former Russian state, while in reality, seeking to please the heterodox governments of Poland and Finland, of which, the first has been striving ever since the fourteenth century to wrench from the Russian ecclesiastical authority the Little Russian and White Russian territories, and would have done so long ago, had not the ancient Ecumenical Patriarchs, for the sake of the good of the Church, defended the unity of the Russian Church, which unity has constituted and does constitute the chief hindrance to the gradual Catholicizing of the Russian communities in Poland, and to the gradual Lutheranizing of the Russian communities in Finland, which attempts by both these governments have aroused the extreme indignation of the Orthodox population, which is totally helpless in the face of this republican despotism, a despotism more severe than any other. In the Twenty-fourth [Seventeenth] Canon of the Council of Carthage [7] it is clearly stated in what circumstances it is possible to establish new metropolitanates, separating them from their previous Kyriarch [ruling hierarch]. Here is how it reads: “It seemed good that Mauretania Sitiphensis, as it asked, should have a Primate of its own, with the consent of the Primate of Numidia from whom it had been separated by a council. And with the consent of all the primates of the African Provinces and of all the bishops, by reason of its great remoteness.”
Almost the exact same requirements are set forth in Canon 111 [98] of this same Council concerning the establishing of an eparchy. Contrary to these canons and to the very concept of the Church, the Roman Catholic government of Poland, not having asked the Patriarch [Tikhon], removed from his jurisdiction a flock of 7,000,000, and five eparchies, and subordinated them to the Ecumenical Throne, although, out of the six bishops, only two — to whom they arbitrarily joined a third, having hastily consecrated him from among the Archimandrites — consented to such a lawless undertaking; while the non-consenters were deprived of their eparchies, and three of them, after a temporary confinement in a monastery, were deported abroad: to the whims of fate.
But yet more lawless and cruel was the treatment shown by the late Patriarch Gregory VII and his Synod to the eparchy and to the person of the Archbishop of Finland. For it was precisely the Ecumenical Patriarch who consecrated as suffragan bishop for him the Priest Aav (without any sort of tonsure into monasticism, not even rassophore), and not only without his, the Archbishop’s, consent, but even despite his protest; thus the late Patriarch trampled underfoot a basic canon of the Church: the Sixth Canon of the First Ecumenical Council (and many others), which says: “if anyone be made bishop without the consent of the Metropolitan, the great Synod had declared that such a man ought not to be a bishop.” Even within his own diocese the Patriarch cannot create a bishop without the consent of the local Metropolitan, concerning which the Twenty-eighth Canon of the Fourth Council clearly speaks — precisely that very canon upon which, absolutely in vain, the predecessors of Your Holiness seek to base their lawless pretensions. And this lawless “bishop” Aav, having received the hierarchical rank, presumed to don the monastic klobuk, and, thus masquerading, appeared in the Finnish eparchy, one not his own, while her lawful Archpastor, Archbishop Seraphim, respected by all the people, was subjected to the persecutions of the Lutheran government, which besides this had already submitted to the late Patriarch Gregory for his approval a most lawless law by which the secular government of Finland would receive the right to forcibly retire the Archbishop; and thus did she act, under the false pretense that Archbishop Seraphim had not succeed in sufficiently mastering the Finnish language within the allotted time.
Earth and heaven were horror struck, as much at such lawlessness on the part of a despotic heterodox government, as (and even more so) at the lawlessness of an Orthodox Patriarch who granted his consent to the introduction of such an indecency. And thus, this dubious bishop Herman [Aav], in lay attire, clean shaven and close cropped, strolls around the streets of the town, to the scandal of the Orthodox, and to the malevolent joy of the heterodox, while the most-honorable Archbishop, rudely insulted by his very own false fellow-hierarch, drags out his wretched days in exile in the cramped quarters of a monastery on a desert island in stormy Lake Ladoga. The very same such practice did the late Patriarch permit in regards to the Estonian Church, having removed her from submission to the Patriarch of All Russia, and adulterously having subordinated her to his own authority, contrary to the holy canons, which we will not cite again here, and the violation of which was condemned in the letter of Patriarch Tikhon to Metropolitan Dionysius, wherein he declares the subordination of the Polish Orthodox Church to someone else’s throne and its separation from the Patriarchate of All Russia to be openly unlawful.
The history of the Church in general, and the history of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in particular, has scarcely known previously such gross violations by the Patriarchs of the Ecumenical canons and laws, and of common human justice, to the joy of the heretics, who even before had not hesitated to express in official documents the utmost haughty contempt for the Eastern Hierarchy, and who now find it possible to not even take it into consideration. We, of course, are far from suspecting anyone at all from among the four ancient Patriarchates of the East of that which the Roman Catholic hierarchs consider indisputable, as, for example, the notorious Uniate Metropolitan Andre Sheptitsky, who submitted a plan to the Austrian Emperor Franz-Joseph concerning the conversion to the heretical Unia of all of Little Russia, “with the consent”, as he wrote in his report of August 14, 1914 to the Emperor (see the newspaper Kievlyanin, of October 14, 1919), “of the Eastern Patriarchs, who can be bribed with money” — a thing concerning which the Polish politicians are now boasting. No! We are forever saying that the four Patriarchs of the East would rather die of starvation than permit “one jot or one tittle of the law” (Matt. 5:18) of the Orthodox Faith and Church to be altered.
And it is only since the time of the dismal Pan-Orthodox Congress during the reign of Patriarch Meletius (who gave such an arbitrary appellation to this gathering of four to six hierarchs, and several priests and laymen, without the participation of three of the Eastern Patriarchs) — only since the time of the aforementioned un-Orthodox congress has there begun that anti-Church vandalism, which included in its plans much that the Church has prohibited with frightful imprecations, as, for example, married hierarchs, the second marriage of clergy, and the abolition of the fasts. True, that un-Orthodox congress did not dare to officially promulgate all these impious violations of the ecclesiastical regulations, but confined itself to the proposal that the New Style be introduced, and that all the immovable feasts be advanced thirteen days, having left the Paschalion untouched. But even such a foolish and pointless concession to masonry and to papism — which for a long time has been striving to obtain just such a change of the calendar in order to accomplish the final assimilation of the Unia by Latinism (for the chief, everyday distinction between the Uniates and the Latins is the Old Style of the former) — of itself violates the very Apostolic institution of the Fast of SS. Peter and Paul, for with the introduction of the New Style, with them the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul will occur before the Sunday of All Saints, if Holy Pascha falls on April 21 Old Style or later, and then the fast will prove to be abolished altogether.
Comments