The grave of Archbishop Job Osacky of Happy Memory (1946-2009)… Moriak is going against the “institutional culture” of the Diocese of the Midwest… he’s gonna find out that “you don’t play games with Mother Nature…”
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Moriak’s propaganda agenda is here. Here’s some buzz I received:
I’ll bet that priests who had been thinking of retirement might stay on to protect their parishes. Moriak doesn’t want any discussion over the internet. Hell, he even shows disdain for priests having discussed the changes within their parishes. It’s one thing to keep Church Tradition, but keeping things off the internet just isn’t going to happen nowadays.
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I’m also hearing that delegates to the Diocesan Assembly that elected Moriak are PO’d at having been “had”. Truly, the shit is going to righteously hit the fan. If anything happens to the priests who discussed this online, that’ll provoke an explosion. After all, the last bishop in the Midwest was Job Osacky (the “last honest bishop in the OCA”, a friend of mine noted), who was a stand-up guy, not a gibbering poseur like Nikolai Soraich (and his pal Izzy Brittain), Benjamin Peterson (of DUI arrest fame), or Tikhon Fitzgerald (the grapevine tells me that Love BT’s refusing to help pay the bills at the LA rectory, even though the cathedral parish is on hard times). To speak frankly, Moriak started with a crook action. People who were favourably disposed to Moriak at first were taken aback when he gave his son a plum parish, ahead of far-more-deserving local candidates. No matter how much he rants about “Tradition”, Moriak’s first action was to feather the nest of a family member. That’s nepotism… a species of corruption, if I remember rightly. In any case, the way he’s bulling forward is wrong on two counts.
Firstly, you do NOT change long-standing practises by merely issuing a ukase “from on high”. That’s how Schmemann and Meyendorff operated, and everyone knows the amount of heartbreak and suffering they caused ordinary priests and people in the Church. Boris Geeza put in Vesperal Feastday Liturgies many moons ago, long before the time of Job Osacky. The correct way of going about disseminating changes in existing practise is how HH does things… he invites bishops to serve with him, and they observe what His Nibs does. In most cases, “they get the message”. Only rarely does HH have to “speak with the voice of the crane” (as the Japanese say of a decree from the Emperor personally)… mostly, he’s wise enough to let changes happen organically and naturally. Of course, this means that there’s little (if any) discontent or dissent towards his ideas.
Secondly, the OCA Diocese of the Midwest doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This is a two-pronged observation. On the one hand, outside events and people affect the diocese… such as Dickie Wood being ordered to go to Manton, but going to live with his sister in the Chicago area, instead. That makes him a natural locus of opposition to Moriak, as Moriak’s JP’s man, and Dickie has no love lost for JP. He’d strike at JP by striking at JP’s lickspittle Moriak. That’s one prong, quite bad enough. The other’s more serious. The general situation of the OCA is going to “go South” very quickly in the near future. The grapevine says that a legal matter’s going to rip everything in the OCA wide open (can’t be more specific than that… it concerns clergy). In that case, the undertow may very well sweep Moriak away… making all of his pronouncements null quod inritus (null and void).
I’d say to the people in the Midwest:
All that you have to do is delay the SOB. Events are happening that will shake Syosset to its foundations. Start by making a stink about his son… demand that he move his son immediately to another diocese, to avoid the appearance of nepotism and cronyism. He’ll put his back up, and that’ll bollix him long enough for outside events to kick in… and, then, move in for the kill.
The Midwest had a good bishop… so, it knows what a good bishop is like… which means that they know the opposite, too. Moriak’s forgotten that… and he’ll pay the price. It bids fair to be “interesting”…
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
3 June 2012
Albany NY
