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| According to the ROCOR website, the Bulgarian Patriarchate’s 3 year emigrant to the USA, Bishop Daniil, declared at the September 2013 Episcopal Assembly in Chicago that: “We strongly believe that a plan, which is entirely in the spirit of the Orthodox ecclesiology and the canonical tradition and practice of the Orthodox Church, and which preserves the rights of the Sister Churches [from the ‘old countries'] to administer their flocks in the Diaspora, is feasible and applicable…” [here]. Incredibly, a foreign auxiliary Bishop from the “Old Country” with only 3 years in America, has the audacity to tell us Orthodox here how our Church is to be organized (all under the tutelage of Old Country Mother Churches and consequently their Foreign Governments which fund and thus control them). This declaration is the second shot across the bow of the most recent attempt at a united North & Central American Orthodox Church arc.
In a letter to Archbishop Demetrios, Chairman of the “Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America” from ROCOR posted in January 2014 on their website and quoting the Bulgarian Bishop Daniil’s above declaration, ROCOR states: “This, too represents our view as the assembled hierarchs of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and we call upon the One Lord … to strengthen the unity of our witness in these lands upon this model.” They also said: “… God has delivered unto this Synod a sacred charge to look after and care for, with special intensity, those of Russian heritage and descent, who find themselves ‘scattered abroad’… We cannot accept that the Orthodox community in North and Central America requires or is under canonical mandate to restructure its organization in a manner that severs active ties with its various Mother Churches …” So ROCOR (which wanted us to believe that it had become “maximally autonomous” from Moscow even though they recently went under the Russian Patriarchate) has now become a tool of the Moscow Patriarchate in their battle for supremacy with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Does this surprise anyone? Surely not. Our ROEA would have been in the same position had we accepted to go under the Romanian Patriarchate. In any event, the ROCOR action now becomes the third shot across the bow of a unified Orthodox presence here, in North & Central America. In spite of this, with the creation of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in North & Central America a few years ago (whose mandate is to unite all Orthodox churches in this territory into one jurisdiction), after almost three years of inactivity regarding the ROEA (OCA) and ROAA (BOR) unity/merger issue, and because these 20 year old discussions have now become obsolete, talks on this issue seem to be over. Therefore, the May 2012 Administrator article remains valid. |
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March 26, 2014
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