Drawing on a deeper understanding of the renovationist movement within Orthodoxy in the last century than the journalists quoted above, to this news His Grace Bishop Auxentios of Photiki, of our Synod in Resistance in America has responded:-  “Anxious to imitate Rome, become relevant, and increase its following, so-called “world Orthodoxy” is at last bringing to fruition its plans, which started in the 1920s, to reform Orthodoxy.  In 1920, the modernists produced the calendar change, but did not succeed with the things that this “grand” Pan-Orthodox Synod hopes to do.  If it all sounds familiar, it is because the unaccomplished agenda are the same: common Christian Feasts, second marriages for Priests (if not married Bishops), revamping the fasting rules of the Church, and bringing Orthodoxy into communion with other Christian confessions through the ecumenical movement.  These were also the goals of the Communist-inspired “Living Church” in Russia.  Nothing has changed, except the sad loss of resolve among the clergy and faithful to hold to all that has been passed on to us.  If this false Council takes place, it will do to the institution of Orthodoxy what it [Vatican II] did to the Roman Catholic Church.  To invite such disaster for the hope of worldly recognition is simply incredible.  But it will no doubt come about.  The one difference -- the one hope -- is that Orthodoxy has always been based on the preservation of Holy Tradition and on that inner core of the Church, the ‘Small Flock,’ which resists innovation and deviation from the holy path that has for centuries produced Saints and visionaries within Orthodoxy.  The Faith will survive as Orthodoxy, while so-called “world Orthodoxy” and its Patriarchs and Bishops will produce an anti-Orthodoxy, unless we can somehow awaken the consciences of the People of God to reject such a new and inauthentic confession.  This whole scenario is tragic and sad.…  Like a cheap product, Orthodoxy is going to be repackaged for spiritually lazy people.  Asceticism, ‘indispensable to the practice of Orthodoxy,’ as Father Georges Florovsky often observed, is to be scrapped for ‘comfort religion.’  If God should take a Priest’s wife, he need not see this as the Will of God; instead, on the grounds that he is a ‘man’ and has the right to place passion and family life before spiritual sobriety, he can remarry.  Fat that we are, we can pay for diet plans, but fasting is too difficult for us.  We need our sacred holiday hot dogs and our Thanksgiving turkeys.  To be a peculiar people and to hold to our Traditions as something Divine, if this separates us from family and friends, is too strict.  After all, when Christ speaks of such separation, He does so without an understanding of human needs.  But what beautiful Icons and fine vestments we will have to parade in front of a fashion-conscious religious world!  What a fine cereal box we will provide for the new sugar-coated Orthodoxy of modernism.  My sarcasm aside, though I do not endorse much of the apocalyptic frenzy that some Orthodox have adopted lock, stock, and barrel from fundamentalist Protestantism, there is a place in Orthodoxy for us to heed the warnings of Scripture and the Fathers about spiritual inauthenticity and religion of evil and purely secular dimensions, anti-Christianity, or a human Christianity posing as the Church.  If we should avoid those within Orthodoxy who tell us that they know ‘when the time will come’ for action, we should not, in any manner at all, fail to heed the message that evil misdirection is always present in Christianity, and especially in the sin of conformity to the world and the ascendency of order over prophecy, and are a universal temptation.  How could anyone not tremble at reading what this supposedly pan-Orthodox synod wants to do, its planned reforms constituting, as they did at their formulation a century ago, a total destruction of the Orthodox ethos, its spiritual basis, and its Hesychastic traditions?  Innovators calling themselves Fathers mock the Fathers.  What more need one say?  What a horrible tragedy for the Orthodox world.  The official Orthodox wish to give to the Christian world, not the Bread which Christ, the Apostles, and the Church Fathers gave, but a stone hewn from the desire for recognition, neo-Papal power, territorial rights, and modernism.  And this they call a good thing for Orthodoxy, welcomed by the Orthodox world.  Is it any wonder that Christ pondered whether He would find the Faith on earth?  It will survive, as He promises, but at the cost of ‘official’ apostasy.”

 

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