http://www.dep.church/downloads/Letterf ... entios.pdf
Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee
19 January, 2015 (0ld Style) [Feb. 1 (NS)]
To the Clergy and Faithful of the Newly
Established Diocese of Etna and Portland
Dear Fellow Clergy and Faithful,
Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
… [excerpts from pages 2 and 3]
With regard to our new union, all of us come from different places. His Eminence,
Metropolitan Chrysostomos and I, though while at Princeton both affiliated with the
then independent and ever-memorable Bishop Petros of Astoria, were tonsured
monks, ordained to the Priesthood, and elevated to various ranks with in the
Ekklesia ton G.O.Ch. Hellados at a time when it was united (under Archbishop
Auxentios), before the process of division and splintering occurred. Within the Synod
in Resistance, we and the communities with us in America maintained full communion
with the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (from which our Church, now united again,
received its Episcopacy), from 1994 until 2007 and the tragedy of its reunion—
prematurely and unwisely, in the view of many—with the Moscow Patriarchate, when
we broke communion with it. At that time we received communities directly from the
ROCA, when they decided to join us, a Sister Church, rather than join with Moscow.
Many of you have come to the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece
(i.e., the Ekklesia ton G.O.Ch. Hellados) under Archbishop Chrysostomos
(Kiouses), the predecessor of Archbishop Kallinikos, and others through the Holy
Orthodox Church of North America and various independent traditionalist groups.
Still a handful of others are from the Sister Churches of the Synod in Resistance,
the Old Calendarist Churches of Romania and Bulgaria, which followed us into union
with the Church of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of Greece last year.
Though we come from very different circumstances and backgrounds, almost all of us,
as Metropolitan Demetrios insightfully wrote recently, have our roots in the Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad. We also have our roots in a common distrust of ecumenism
and its scion, the New Calendar innovation, and a desire to preserve the Orthodox
Faith in its purity and as a gift to those Orthodox who have deviated from it and to those
who are seeking it from outside the Church. It is thus obvious that our new union must
look at what unites us and not at what divides us. If this sounds like an ecumenical
formula, it is. It is the ecumenism of those who are united in Truth, where such a
formula is a sine qua non for Christian oneness in love and the avoidance of the
deadly sins of contention and fruitless argumentation against which St. Paul warns. If
the ecumenists have made this formula a path to betrayal and compromise in the Faith,
we must make it a hallmark of Christian reason, charity, and fellowship. What binds us
together in our Orthodox confession, despite our different experiences, in what is
essential in the Faith: that “golden thread” that holds together, if I may borrow an image
expressed by the late Father Georges Florovsky, the fabric of the Orthodox Church
community, where we hold to what our Savior gave, the Apostles preached, and the
Fathers preserved, as a patristic axiom states. In Orthodox union, we can accomplish
love, and in love all differences are reconciled, and what was separate becomes one.
… [two closing paragraphs omitted]
Asking for your prayers and good thoughts, once again, and wishing all of you a
wonderful Lent, I very much look forward to seeing and visiting you in person sometime
following my enthronement after Pascha.
Least among Monks, †Bishop Auxentios
[ for the complete letter see: http://www.dep.church/downloads/Letterf ... entios.pdf ]