The very fact that the above statement is sometimes made displays either ignorance of the rudiments of our Faith, or else a pathological state. The latter by definition quenches the Holy Spirit, Who is the source of grace. And yet the statement is widespread among the tiny numbers of pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who are not and do not wish to be in communion with the Orthodox Church, known as ‘old calendarists’, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian and Russian. The Russians are from the Russian Old Calendarists Outside Russia, who are now struggling to overcome their latest pedophile scandal.

Such old calendarists, perhaps 75% of them in the USA, number some 10,000 individuals and are divided into some 20 different tiny sects, which are constantly warring with each other. In this they resemble the various warring Protestant sects, which comes as no surprise as most old calendarists are ex-Protestants. They enjoy telling each other and others, that they ‘will go to hell’, as they are possessed by the spirit of pharisaic condemnation. This is the darkness of every Spiritless and so Loveless human ideology, which stems from demonic pride. Such pride is founded on praise of self by condemning others.

In this way they feel superior to others, their hearts swollen with self-loving pride, as they have deprived themselves of the Holy Spirit and so of humility. They fail to understand the basic theological truth that we are saved only by Divine Mercy, never by any narrow human ideologies, which are always founded on the absence of love, that is, on hatred. The pharisees ignore the words of Christ, that ‘the wind (Spirit) blows where it wishes’ (Jn. 3, 8) and of the Creed: ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit…Who spoke by the Prophets’. These words clearly disprove the human ideology that there is no grace outside the Church.

Denying these words, the human ideologists of exclusive grace, that grace belongs to them only, declare that Christ was lying, that the Prophets were not saved, including the Forerunner John, the last Old Testament and first New Testament Prophet, was not saved, and nor was the Mother of God, at least for the first 33 years of her life. They deny that the Spirit can blow and call people into the Church, like the Jews before Christ spoke to them, like the Archangel-visited Inuits before St Innocent came to them. And such is their anti-historical sense and hatred that they condemn generations even of their own ancestors.

St Sophrony the Athonite explained Orthodox theology to us nearly fifty years ago, in 1978, before many of the saint-denying, ‘Orthodox’ sectarians were even born. This followed a scandal on Mt Athos. Orthodox sacramental theology is clear, he said. The sacramental forms outside the Orthodox Church are not sacraments, but rites. The sacramental potential of those rites is only activated by the grace that comes from contact with the Church. Thus, there is no need to repeat the rite. Anything that is ritually deficient (single immersion or splashing instead of triple immersion, for example) is covered by the grace of the Church.

The fact that people come to the Church is proof that the Church transmits (non-sacramental) grace outside of Herself, the free and direct grace of the Holy Spirit. However, that grace cannot be maintained in the world without the support of the grace from the sacraments, that is, sacramental grace. This explains the age-old and universal (except among the new, US, pseudo-Russian old calendarists) practice of the canonical Russian Church of receiving Catholics by confession and communion. Certainly, when I was in the old ROCOR, I received Catholics thus, in faithfulness to the practices of the old, Russian ROCOR.

As an Orthodox prison chaplain, I am in constant contact with Orthodox thieves, fraudsters, rapists and even murderers. They are all baptised Orthodox Christians. Do these then have grace, whereas my fellow-chaplains, Catholic or Protestant and other good, but Non-Orthodox, people, have no grace? This is absurd and reveals only that the old calendarists have no knowledge and experience of life in their gloomy and negative ghettoes, where apparently the Sun does not shine. They are victims of their own ideology of censorious, accusatory and sectarian judgementalism, so self-isolated from the Church.

Those who deny the presence of any grace outside the Church, deny that the Church is like the Sun – it shines on all, the righteous and the wicked alike. Those who deny this, limit God, taking over His role as the Only Giver of grace of the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father, and not from old calendarist schismatics. No ‘infallible’ Pope, of Rome or of any other Western Capital, can dispose of the Holy Spirit. All such bishops are literally ‘disGraceful’. In the homelands of Orthodoxy, ancient homelands as in Western Europe, or modern homelands as in Eastern Europe and West Asia, we know this from experience.