The MP archbishop of Seattle, Kirill issued a "decree" ro commemorate KGB Alexy at all services on his wb site : www.wadiocese.com/wad.php
Our response:
The Decree of the Archbishop of San Francisco was expected as a matter of course. We had previously received words from the Seattle Cathedral about honoraria being paid to Metropolitan Lavr and the bishops who labored to bring the ROCOR acquisition to a successful conclusion. We are still following the details of the movement of funds and token as honoraria. We will continue to respect the confidentiality of this intelligence, since we received the same under strict instructions of non-disclosure. Therefore, for now, publicly or privately, we will provide no further information regarding the matter. Since certain hierarchs in the Moscow Patriarchate are well-known to be individually engaged in revenue generating trades, these compensations, monetary or otherwise, come as no surprise to us.
We had initially assessed the posture of the Archbishop of San Francisco as arising out of heed to warnings or out of fear of reprisal from former Communist officers well experienced in intrigues and machination. These warnings would have been communicated to that Archbishop by Mark, Archbishop of Germany, a man known for his single-handed dialogues with the Moscow regime dating as far back as the eighties or earlier. With this new revelation from Seattle, our initial assessment of the Archbishop, however consonant with his well-known character, proved not to be an all exhaustive evaluation of him.
The recent Moscow affair uncovered a new type of church shepherds: Ones, who instead of no fear for their life for the sake of their sheep, exhibit fear of loss of their temporal interests at the expense of the latter. Instead of leaving the ninety nine sheep for the lost single one, they please the ninety nine at the cost of the one. Hence the flock does not recognize their voice, and to those shepherds the Lord addresses His Warning: "...If the salt looses its flavour...it is good for nothing but to be thrown and trampled under foot."
Michael Alexander
Salinas, CA
mikejalex@gmail.com