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A kindly interlocutor sent me this (it stands on its own… it doesn’t need my two cents):
Yuck, Barbara, did you have to post snaps of Bishop Jerome on your blog without a kindly warning for the sensitive? 😦 According to a ROCOR clergyman, Shaw received the delightful Brother Nathaniel. I wonder if anyone has a photo of them together? I think the best thing about the MP subsuming the ROCOR would be the end of those Western Rite people. Anthony Bondi, the person in charge of it, is “interesting”. He’s only Subdeacon Anthony Bondi. They promised him the priesthood when he and his vagante sect entered, and then (only then?) discovered that he’d been married twice, and his second wife had been the wife of an OCA priest who’d left him to shack up with … get this… “Archbishop” Bondi. Can you believe that they really didn’t know that until after they’d received him? Has any vagante “bishop” not been dodgy in the relationship/marriage department? I suppose it’s a cause for rejoicing when the dodginess is only canoodling with adult women, but come on. Anyway, his “Fraternity of St Gregory” runs the Western Rite in the ROCOR now and they’ve frozen out the original people that Metropolitan Hilarion originally encouraged. They claim on their web page (click here) that they were originally encouraged by Fr Daniil Sysoev to come to Moscow and be received with their Western Rite crapola there. The mind boggles at it, doesn’t it? {What tips off all comers that Bondi’s lying is that he juxtaposes Sysoev and the Blunder, when the two couldn’t stand one another’s presence: editor}
I don’t know how true it is, but I hear Bondi’s liturgy’s more modern Roman than Sarum or anything else they pretend to (from what I’ve personally heard of their version of “Sarum”, its warmed-over BCP) and there was a priceless exchange on the Occidentalis list a while back… Bondi’s people discussed in nauseating detail how much Roman tat they could wear. You should know that those cream/gold vestments Shaw wore in the image are pure silk and were made by a young struggling vestment maker whose original customer, a ROCOR priest sucking up to Shaw, refused to pay up. The boy sent them to Shaw anyway, but no one anywhere gave him a penny, yet he spent his tax refund on food and gas to get them finished as well as buying the fabric. It makes me sick every time I see a snap of him in them.
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There one has it. The perspirin’ minds are talking… and the story that they tell is disturbing. Let’s not lose sight of the prize. What we see in both the OCA and ROCOR apparats is a wholehearted willingness to step on the believers… a haughty contempt that you can feel. Whether it’s Jerome Shaw or JP Fathausen… or Victor Potapov or Alexander Webster, they’re a prize lot, with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. They’re not like Lebedeff, who’s a competent historian and canonist, besides being personally nasty, or like Mel Pleska, who has the right instincts, but who’s outvoted by his bovine colleagues on the OCA Holy Synod (Mel should pull out the Jenga block to topple the whole edifice and embarrass ‘em all in public… it’d cut short the present charade that we’re all suffering through). However… Nathaniel and Jerome Shaw… if like calls unto like… WOW! As for Daniil Sysoev of happy memory having ANYTHING to do with this dodgy nutbag lot, I asked Russian friends, and they said NADA, NO WAY. This is what’s out there… have a care, kids, there be dragons, and some of ‘em are dressed as “sheep” (that is, “pastors” of the flock being devourers of the flock, instead)…
BMD
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