In a recent article for Orthodoxy in Dialogue, a writer choosing to remain anonymous for her own safety coins the chilling expression “the American region of the Russkii Mir” to describe the Orthodox Church in America, widely known by its acronym, “the OCA.” She was responding to the Archpastoral Letter of Jan. 28—a letter which reads as if it had been penned at the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations (DECR)—in which the OCA’s Metropolitan Tikhon and Synod of Bishops categorically reject the newly autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine as “schismatics.”
The timing of the Archpastoral Letter seems significant. Two days later, Metropolitan Tikhon and his entourage landed in Moscow to pay homage to Patriarch Kirill on the same weekend as the enthronement of Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kyiv and All Ukraine. As reported here, here, and hereby the aforementioned DECR, Metropolitan Tikhon is spending the weekend performing the OCA’s cozy relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate and saying all the right things to the Russian media.
Patriarch Kirill welcomed the OCA delegation with these words: “I would like to emphasize that our bilateral relations [between the Moscow Patriarchate and the OCA] have withstood the test of time and nothing has overshadowed them for all these years—since the proclamation of your Church’s autocephaly [on April 10,1970] to this day.” In other words, for nearly half a century the OCA has done Moscow’s bidding unfailingly in all things.
Metropolitan Tikhon returned the favor by praising Patriarch Kirill’s leadership “on contemporary moral and social issues, as well as on the ecclesiastical matters that have acquired particular relevance these days [the Ukrainian Church],” and finally his commitment to monastic ideals.
Of no apparent concern to Metropolitan Tikhon are the Russian Church’s direct actions or complicity in the weakening of legal protections for women, children, and LGBTQ people in Russia; the annexation of the Crimea and the ongoing invasion of Ukraine; the invasion of Georgia; “Byzantine symphonia” of the most flagrant kind; support for Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime against his own people; the constant vilification of “the West” as demonic, corrupt, and the home of the Antichrist; the ruthless destabilization of democratic institutions and processes in the United States, Europe, and beyond; contempt for the OCA’s own “autocephaly,” which Moscow itself granted; Breguet watches and trafficking in tobacco; etc. etc. etc.
The OCA traces its roots to the arrival of Russian missionaries in late 18th-century Alaska. A century later, the Russian Church’s North American presence began to grow exponentially with the exodus of disaffected Greek Catholics back to Orthodoxywhen their married priests ran into trouble with Roman Catholic bishops. Moscow’s oversight and funding of Orthodoxy in America unraveled with the Russian Revolution of 1917. The break became definitive after 1927, when the Moscow Patriarchate demanded a written oath of loyalty to the Soviet government from all of its priests everywhere in the world.
In other words, the Russian Orthodox Church in America and elsewhere went into schism from the Moscow Patriarchate for reasons of political expediency and the national security of its new homelands. These reasons, incidentally, sound very similar to those which provoked the 1990-91 Ukrainian schism from Moscow and the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s decisive steps to resolve it at last.
In 1970 one part of the schismatic Russian Church re-established communion with the Soviet-controlled Moscow Patriarchate, received its “autocephaly” in return for this, and renamed itself the Orthodox Church in America—the OCA. From then until now, the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church—first under the Soviets, now under Putin—declares itself entirely satisfied with the OCA’s performance: to repeat, “nothing has overshadowed [the relations between Moscow and the OCA] for all these years.”
I say “autocephaly” in quotation marks because Moscow applies the term—and the OCA is forced to accept it without a murmur—selectively. In principle autocephaly entails not only independence in matters of ecclesiastical administration, but also sole jurisdiction over a given territory. Yet the OCA’s 1970 Tomos of Autocephaly retains Moscow’s control of The Patriarchal Parishes in the USA: Moscow Patriarchate(PPUSA-MP). Thirty-seven years later, in 2007, Moscow received the schismatic Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia(ROCOR) back into its fold, with its substantial North American presence and apparently without a word of consultation with the OCA. By the very definition of autocephaly, however, the PPUSA-MP and ROCOR’s North American dioceses should merge into the OCA.
This creates three separate marionettes in the American region of Russkii mirwhose strings the Moscow Patriarchate—the master puppeteer and ventriloquist—controls on various levels.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian of Ukrainian and Lemko descent on his mother’s side, a PhD student in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and the founding editor of Orthodoxy in Dialogue. He holds a BA in Sexuality Studies from York University and an MA in Theology from Regis College, both in Toronto, and is an alumnus of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Earlier in life he completed the course work for the MDiv at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary near New York City. Orthodoxy in Dialogue has an extensive Ukraine section in its Archives by Author.
