In December 2020 the New York-based ROCOR (those initials used to stand for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) consciously engineered a schism by forbidding communion with its sister Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, based in Paris. Thus, ROCOR cut itself off from communion with canonical Orthodoxy, from the catholicity of the Church.

ROCOR lost everything because of its crazy converts. This single act of folly resulted almost immediately in ROCOR in England losing well over half its Diocese, 5,000 people in six parishes, with twelve clergy. They included the senior priest of the Diocese, with 36 years of faithful service to the Russian Orthodox Tradition and the Russian Tsar, who had played a role in the crucial and long-awaited canonical reconciliation of ROCOR with Moscow in 2007.

Although the Moscow Patriarchate itself declared that ROCOR’s act was insanity, it did nothing to counter it and a senior Metropolitan in Moscow instructed all who had quit ROCOR to join another Local Orthodox Church. This was a suicidal act of support by the MP for the ROCOR schism and a stab in the back for its decades-long missionary work in Western Europe. Thus, in obedience, we all fled the new, uncanonical ROCOR and joined another Local Orthodox Church, of which many were only too happy to take us.

Since then, the new sectarian ROCOR (apparently now standing for the Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia) has refused to repent. As a result, it has now lost another subdeacon (and future priest) in Northern Ireland, a priest in Canada and a priest in the USA. All were converts, who had recently come into the new American ROCOR. Without any sense of history, they had never known the old canonical ROCOR, which was an integral part of the Orthodox Church and Tradition.

All of this is a replay of ROCOR’s Boston schism of 1986, exactly as the late Fr Seraphim Rose had time and again warned would happen back in the 1970s. Then some sixty small parishes of rootless people left ROCOR for old calendarist sects, just as other smaller groups would later leave in 2000 and in 2007.  The Protestant-style 1986 schism was a clear consequence of sectarianism among ungrounded ROCOR clergy and converts. Those who took part in it had no knowledge of the Tradition and so fell away from the Church into old calendarism.

These schisms are what happens when you abandon communion and concelebration with the Canonical Local Orthodox Churches, that is, with the mainstream of the Church. Now the chickens are coming home to roost again, for when ROCOR bishops claim that no other Orthodox bishops apart from themselves are Orthodox, what can their uninformed converts conclude? Only that, if there is ‘One True Church’, it must be schismatic, not one which is in communion with others, even if only on paper, like ROCOR.

The viewpoint of the schismatics is the only logical one for their sectarian mentality, which makes even the calendar into a dogma of the Faith. When their ROCOR bishop – although on paper in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church – publicly declares that the Greek Patriarch is possessed by demons and that he personally hates Romanians and half-hates Moldovans, what can you expect from his followers? His converts demand logical behaviour of him, that he abandon communion with all others formally, not just in words. Otherwise, they see him as a hypocrite, as they publicly say.

These schisms are the clear result of the new ROCOR’s rejection of the Orthodox Tradition, the Tradition confessed by St John of Shanghai and his successor as the ROCOR Archbishop of Western Europe, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. They quite naturally concelebrated with everyone. Here today is the result of the crazy convert policy of the very ignorant bishops of the new American ROCOR. With no love for others, they fall out of communion with all, like judgemental pharisees.

Little wonder that in despair at the behaviour of the new ROCOR, Moscow has now gone ahead and at last consecrated its first local bishop in Britain. Bishop Augustine MacBeth is for its Archdiocese of Western Europe (the former Rue Daru jurisdiction) of the MP. Given the ROCOR schism from Moscow’s Archdiocese of Western Europe and its refusal to accept and respect local people and local languages, relying on convert Americanisms with their theological and historical ignorance and google translate to communicate, Moscow had no choice but to consecrate a canonical Russian Orthodox bishop from the local population for the local population.

Of course, it is all too little and much too late, as the Orthodox left for another Local Church four years ago, as advised by the MP Metropolitan Antony (Sevryuk)! Then the Moscow Patriarchate refused to receive those who had quit the schismatic ROCOR even in the face of the sectarian and hate-filled actions of the new ROCOR episcopate.

Since then, the former members of ROCOR, zealous for canonical communion and the catholicity of the Church, forced to join another Local Church by the new ROCOR fanaticism and ignorance of the Tradition, have gone from strength to strength. Now we live in canonicity, in the mainstream of the Orthodox Church and concelebrate with all (though not with the schismatics), far from the tiny ghettoes of crazy convert bishops, their clergy and their incessant scandals.