THERE have been so many developments in this process in the past month that it is impossible adequately to report them. We shall try to give readers a brief and fair summary.
On 3rd April, in making an Easter address to His Holiness Patriarch Aleksii II of Moscow, President Putin referred to the signing of the unification document on 17th May as “a really landmark event in the life of the Church and the life of our society.”
Thirteen monastics at Jordanville, NY, were somewhat less enthusiastic. On the previous day (2/4/07), eight members of the brotherhood of the Holy Trinity Monastery, the Synod Abroad’s premier monastic house, and five sisters from the nearby Convent of St Elizabeth, addressed a letter to Metropolitan Lavr, First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad. They spoke very eloquently of their anxiety about the process: “We regret to see the bitter fruits of the unification process: strife, contention at court, dissent, general perplexity; tragic destinies of some believers; loss of trust in our archpastors; disillusionment often bordering on despair; self-willed behavior of certain bishops not aligned with truth and canons; obvious deviation from the traditional patristic path of ROCOR; heading for unification in spite of the fact that many questions of sergianism and ecumenism have yet to be dealt with in the light of the pure patristic teaching of the Church.… we experience deep anxiety when we are told about the forthcoming union of our Church with such as are obviously not prepared to follow her patristic course, are not conscious of the dangers of the apostate ecumenist movement, nor do they readily resist it.… Such resistance is the corner-stone of the faith of the Holy Fathers,…. We have always believed the admonition of our archpastors that there can be no unity except in the Truth, and we wish to be loyal to these words unto the end.”
Two weeks later (16/4/07), the Very Reverend Hegoumen Andronik (Kotlyarov), the Acting Head of the Russian Spiritual Mission (ROCOR) in Jerusalem, sent a similar letter to Metropolitan Lavr. Very meekly but firmly, he implored the Bishops to examine the question of re-union with Moscow again. He writes: “Before drinking from a well it is cleaned thoroughly and only then do people drink water from it: this applies even more to us for we must remove the spiritual impurities of sergianism and ecumenism prior to partaking in union of the Vivifying Moisture from One Chalice.”
