For 47 years, from 1975 to 2022, I strived to help create unity inside the severely divided Russian Church, which then consisted of three aggressively warring ‘jurisdictions’. From 1975 to 2000 I fought against the Saducees with their ‘anything goes’, swim with the tide secularists, ‘all religions are the same’, ‘we all have the same god’ syncretism. From 2000 to 2022, I fought against the Pharisees, the scribes and the hypocrites, the old words for narcissists, who love only themselves are therefore Anti-Christians.
The division was purely political and went back to 1917. Only once we had achieved unity inside the Russian Church through the non-political, those of goodwill, in each group, could we hope to achieve unity with representatives of the other Local Churches in the Diaspora and so work towards a Local Western European Orthodox Church. To our great joy, we saw intra-Russian Church fully achieved in 2019.
However, the devil also has ears. Three years later, just like Constantinople with its control freak and isolating mentality decades earlier, the Russian Church then suicidally destroyed that unity through more nationalist politics. As a result, in 2022, all of us multinational clergy, parishes and people, some 5,000 in all, crossed, with the approval of Moscow (rather like Fr/St Sophrony (Sakharov) in 1965) to what will be the largest part of the future Local Church, the Romanian. The Russian Church in the Diaspora is now isolated and very small, as it has lost Ukrainians and now many Moldovans, not to mention local people.
In the last three years, the Moscow Church in Moldova has lost nearly half its parishes. According to updated information, Moscow now has 1,200 parishes and the Romanian Bessarabian Metropolia no longer has 200, but 1,100 parishes, with many monasteries. The movement from Moscow to Bucharest is in one direction only, at the rate of 4, 6 and even 10 parishes and mainly young people per week. As Metr Vladimir famously wrote in October 2023, Moscow treats Moldovans like second-class citizens, just as it treats other Non-Russians, including English people. See:
Although Metr Vladimir wonders about contacting Constantinople and asking it for autocephaly, that will not happen. Patriarch Bartholomew does not want to interfere in Moldova (he already made his huge mistake in the Ukraine) and get on the wrong side of Bucharest. He will be going here next October to take part in the consecration of the new Patriarchal Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church in the world. It is too late for Constantinople, just as it is too late for Moscow. Far more likely, given Moscow’s stubborn refusal 30 years ago to grant Moldova autonomy or autocephaly, is that the elderly Moscow jurisdiction in Moldova will disappear, except for the ultra-Russian nationalist Bishop Markel, and Bucharest will grant Moldova autonomy.
This will also mean the end of most of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, as it largely consists of Ukrainians and Moldovans, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal. The nationalist attitude of Moscow is suicidal. God gave Moscow so much, the largest country in the world, and yet it destroyed it twice, in 1917 and then again very recently. The Soviet-style ideology of nationalism has destroyed a once multinational Church.