Metropolitan Leonty Turkevich (1876-1965) of New York, the First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of North America, the Metropolia… he could’ve said, and rightly so, “Après nous, le déluge“. Shall we see the end of the Schmemanndorf silliness in our time? God willing, yes!
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A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him.
Lao Tzu
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You can’t “turn back the clock”, but if one is on the wrong path, the only way forward is to go back. The apogee of what’s now called the OCA was in 1965, five years BEFORE its formal “autocephaly“.There are no published figures, either official or unofficial, but I think it’s no stretch to conclude that the Metropolia had at least double the number of adherents that the present OCA has. The OCA’s suffered a membership haemorrhage fully as critical as that found in the TEC, but it refuses to ‘fess up to the reality (especially not the juvenile konvertsy “experts” such as the HOOMies and Oliver Herbel, et al). My submission is that the Metropolia had 250,000 members in about 400 parishes. The present OCA has some 120,000 members in about 600 parishes. That is, the Metropolia could afford to give its priests a living, but the OCA finds it impossible to do so. Of course, another reason is that there are too many bishops in the OCA… ten active and ten retired, twenty in total, all on the Church’s payroll.
Let’s give you some perspective… if the RCs in the USA were to have a similar proportion of bishops (1/6,000 believers), they’d have about 11,500 bishops. They actually have 440 bishops and cardinal bishops, active and retired, making their ratio one bishop per 156,000 believers (assuming that the ballpark estimate of 68.5 million RCs in the USA is accurate (I think that it is)). That means that the OCA has 26 times the number of bishops per capita as the RCs do! Or, to look at it another way, the RCs have an episcopate that’s only 4 percent the size of the OCA’s, in percentage terms. In Greece, there are about 10 million Orthodox believers, with 101 bishops and metropolitans (about 100,000 believers per bishop). The MP has 207 bishops for its 150 million believers, if the proportion were the same as in Greece, it’d be 1,500. The MP is working towards a “Greek proportion”, so, its obvious that there are too many “useless eater” bishops in the OCA squandering its resources. The most that the OCA can afford is a bishop in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco in the USA, another in Canada, and one for Alaska. That’s all that we have resources for… the other 15 bishops are taking away needed money from the parishes and priests. We may as well call it the Ruritanian Orthodox Church, Archdiocese of Grand Fenwick.
It’s clear that the path blazed by Schmemann, von Meyendorff, and Royster was a disastrous failure, it brought in a gradual rot, which led directly to the scandal of a priest having the damned gall to sue another priest during the first week of the Great Lent. What is to be done? I’d say it’s clear… go back to the old path. No, we can’t “unlive” the past. No, we can’t regain a lost “innocence”. Yet, we DO have SOMETHING. It IS the “pearl of great price”… we now know what DOESN’T work. Autocephaly’s a bootless and hubristical chimera. It’s time to go back to being a daughter-Church of the Mother Church in the Rodina. Let’s recover the modesty and pragmatism of the Metropolia and put all the asinine and unhinged “missionary vision” of the OCA into the nearest dumpster, where it richly belongs (and defrock all the former Anglican “priests” whilst we’re at it). I doubt that I’m alone in thinking that way…
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Thursday 1 March 2012
Albany NY
Voices from Russia 
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