Why The "TOC" is Not True Orthodoxy
I agree with Craig Truglia, who wrote: "St optatus wrote to the Donatists, who had rigorist credentials, how do they disagree with the whole world? And so, while there are heretics within the Church, where is the evidence that all the synods are teaching an explicit heresy...not a bad bishop here or there, but a synodical meeting espousing heresy and all the synods doing this? I think we are no where close to how bad things were in the 7th century so I'm not seeing the imminent catastrophe. This is without getting into the fringe and weird things within the entire genuine Ortho movement, which does not mean every single person or bishop is bad but the whole movement has strange things as well. I don't see the appeal of jumping off a supposedly shrinking ship to a capsized one. That's how I personally feel."
A true priest in the real Orthodox Church sent me this response after I shared with him Fr. Maximus Marettas’ (GOC- HOTCA) article where he attempted to justify his schism.
"Greeting in Christ.
I hope you are well. I looked over the article. Just to be clear, its an article criticizing what another priest said criticizing the History of the Old-Calendarists. I don't necessarily agree with every assertion, as for example that the Florinites were abandoned by God because a bishop wasn't ordained in 1955 (but several were later in 1960's). I will give you my understanding/view, which agrees and sometimes disagrees with his. Please understand that I am just giving you my view, not inviting a reply or debate. At the end of this e-mail I direct to others who may answer any further questions you may have.
I know we've been over this ground several times before, so I'm going to refer you back to what I've written you before for anything not addressed here. I'm going to address what I consider the key evidence cited and show briefly that it doesn't mean what they say or its misleadingly cited out of context, which rather supports what I've told you before. I am not going to engage in prolonged rehash of our old debates to re-cover the same old questions. I know I've pointed you to the discussion of these questions of heresy, communion, grace, deposition, trial, etc by the very 7th Oecumenical Synod (specifically St Tarasios who explains, with historical examples, this controversy's solution like I did before and do here), as the Cyprianites also noted he did, though I am not endorsing Cyprian's view of the Calendar and 1589 anathema on the Gregorian Paschalion&Menologian (based on Council of Antioch's anathema on violating Paschal rule of Nicaea) as heresy or schism from the Church, which is where he principally errs.
Before addressing the core of the article, I need to point out that arguing for the Greek Old Calendarists is an exercise in make-believe because they have all violated the canons on conditions of canonical ordinations, on maintaining church unity and submitting to a synodal trial and judgment. This is a glaring ugly fact even if you only look at Old Calendarist intra-synodal relations. If you break communion with other bishops because you accuse them of breaking some canons, but you don't keep unity and bring the evidence to a full synodal trial where the accused explains, defends, or confesses and is acquited or condemned, but just leave&pronounce everyone else graceless non=Church members, then you have made a schism, renouncing the unity of the Church. The 1st&2nd Council asserts this is schism, see the canons immediately preceding the famous end of the 13th cited in the article.
The 13th canon's ending does however say that if the bishop openly and publically to the Church avows himself a follower of a heresy that has already been expressly condemned by holy Councils or Fathers (plural), then the clergy and people are justified in leaving him for refuge with his brother bishops who haven't apostatized even though this precedes the trial and its discovery of the bishop's guilt or innocence, upon which it acquits or deposes him.
The Old Calendarists do not only to new Calendarists&those in communion with them, but also to each other over and over again what the canons they cite condemned and just leave, declare everyone guilty without trial & graceless, rebaptize them, reordain them, and cut themselves off from the Church because the other bishops who haven't confessed any heresy but are the appropriate judges to present evidence of crime or heresy to try him, do not leave off communion without canonically presented, canonically validated evidence, a synodal trial, & conviction. Whether its Matthewites, Kiousites, or any others nowadays, they've all made schisms upon schisms by judging and revolting based on hearsay and before a conviction through the canonical process. You can't trace the canonical Apostolic Succession or find the unity of the Church if you operate that way. Its all subjective and unilateral and arbitrary and all are guilty of it somewhere along the line. You also need multiple bishops with the sanction of their synod to ordain a valid bishop, but they don't honor that either. So in effect they end up embracing Branch Theory&protestant invisible unity in diversity to explain how their own divided &discordant churches and uncanonical successions constitute One Church and hold a consistent apostolic succession. Thus you have to embrace the heresy they profess to repudiate to believe in them.
Yes Demetrius and his Synod endorsed Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira's ecumenist book, but the Synod according the Patriarchal website is the Patriarch and two of his bishops out of the many bishops of the Patriarchate. The Church of Constantinople is many bishops which alone holds final say on the Church of Constantinople's official acts. This is parallel to the ROCOR or Russian MP under St Tikhon where the chief bishop and a select few others hold executive but not legislative power which belongs to the Sobor that meets not every year but as needed, while the Synod handles interim business subject to confirmation or repudiation by the Sobor later.
So the crime of Demetrius and Athenagoras is the private crime of a handful of bishops out of many, just as the 5th Oecumenical Council judged Pope Vigilius to be guilty of accepting the persons of heretics, but kept communion with the Church of Rome while dropping the Pope from communion. So it was appropriate for ROCOR to do as it did (and as the Church of Russia has just done to Bartholomew) and drop the erring bishop from commemoration and communion pre-trial while still maintaining communion with the rest of the Church/Bishops to whom it appeals vs the criminal for a trial and deposition. The Church of Constantinople's Orthodox Confession, which all bishops officially swore to uphold&embraced at ordination, is not overturned by Bartholomew or Demetrius privately or personally dissenting from it.
He's liable to be deposed, people can leave him for other still Orthodox brother bishops, but the parishes he administers administer valid sacraments until deprived of that office by the Church that invested it in him. Assuming he's been reported on accurately, he'll go to hell for his personal crimes exceeding and contradicting his office&oath and anyone agreeing with him but when he baptizes, he
does act in his official capacity for the Church as authorized by Her. So his mysteries are still valid, but who would want to approach him if he has a choice to get mysteries from reliably Orthodox Shepherds? The Council of Elvira/Elibris the run-up to Nicaea dealt with this question about bishops who had been guilty of compromise with paganism to avoid persecution and the validity of their mysteries in the interim between accusation&conviction&deposition. The Acts or Decrees of all Councils I am citing are all online.
The monothelites and the iconoclasts expressly cut themselves off from the Orthodox Catholic Church when they condemned the Oecumenical Councils and their Creeds which they expressly rejected. The monothelites condemned the Tome of Leo(endorsed by Chalcedon) for its dythelitism/dyenergism, the Iconoclast condemned the 6th Oecumenical Synod as introducing idolatry and nestorian or monophysite heresy for approving & ordering the depiction and divine veneration of icons of Christ. So they expressly separated themselves from the communion of the Councils and the Fathers, and the whole church - expressly, openly, definitively.
Nestorius declared that Jesus was not God, or as He put it Virgin ''Mary was the mother of a man, Christ, not of God.'expressly rejecting the Nicene Creed which his followers tried to offer a heretically revised version according to the minute and acts and canons of the 3rd Oecumenical Synod. That Council decrees thaf if any bishop apostatizes or deserts from the Oecumenical Council(s), his clergy should abandon him and take refuge with the Church's faithful bishops until the Council deposes and replaces him. The author of the article allows that a bishop violating the canonical prohibition on praying with a heretics or recognizing their mysteries is liable to canonical penalties but not actually deposed yet.
The ROCOR was correct, the later Greek Old Calendarists embraced the ROCOR which had communion with Jerusalem and Serbia even after the ROCOR had splits with EP&MP. The ROCOR's position laid out repeatedly was that the Calendar and othe ecumenical acts were terrible crimes but did not give anyone less than an Oecumenical or Pan-Orthodox Synod the right to definitively say the other churches had lost grace. The Greek Old-Calendarists received their ordinations from ROCOR and even a Romanian New-Calendar anti-Commmnist Bishop temporarily operating within ROCOR. By OC logic their own ordainers were graceless heretics.
We have to fight the deviations of certain individual bishops or Patriarchs by the means the Oecumenical Synods laid down in the Canons, not by arbitrary and invented methods that they have condemned but Bishop Matthew and the later OC's carelessly embraced.
I know my reply could certainly be improved but what I've said here and before is sufficient if you want to understand.
P.S.
Also, I see I may have not made one point clear. Monothelites&Iconclasts and Nestorius expressly rejected in the face of the Church the authoritative Creed & Her highest tribunal under God, something not even Bartholomew or his predecessors have done. The saying of certain saints that people like Nestoriys were no longer a bishop or were a pseudo-bishop must be read in conjunction with the Oecumenical Councils Actsvwhere they were treated and addressed as accused but still valid bishops/patriarchs until convicted&deposed. The conclusion to be drawn is that these individual saints declared the budding heresiarchs to be fallen from their dignity implicitly, in potential, much as a witness might cry out to a murderer you're a dead man! Or we might say 'you're damned&going to hell' to some evildoer, even though the authority to execute the penalty lies with another Judge or group of judges who certainly learning this evidence will by law be certain to impose this penalty we talk of as accomplished fact. The bishops of today vary greatly in quality but no one has actually, publically, officialy repudiated the Orthodox Church or Nicene Creed or Oecumenical Councils joined the Pope or rejected the Nicene Creed or embraced a different Creed to teach as authoritative to the faithful.
Also relevant to read are the Acts of the 1600's Constantinople&Bethlehem Councils against the so-called Confession of Cyril Lukaris, which councils explained what I am saying, that even if EP Cyril Lukaris had privately believed and written the Calvinist Confession attributed to him, it never became the Church of Constantinoples's Creed nor was it ever endorsed by her bishops, and the whole Church to be her confession as claimed, .... and they exain our Orthodox Church only acts synodically so that individual bishops, even Patriarch's words are not equivalent to a statement by the Church.... See also the Statutes of the Russian Orthodox Church which expressly state that the Patriatch's words are important but he does not have the authority to speak for the Russian Church by himself and his words are his own aline unless backed by the Church Sobor.
So that's a series of conclusions and additional supporting facts to be added to what I wrote before."END
Note by me: Please also consider the fact that the very term "True Orthodox" is redundant. Orthodoxy means "correct belief." So "TOC" people claim to be true correct Orthodox Christians. If they are true, than they are correct; if they are correct, than they are true. They don't need to state it twice. You will find these kind of flaws and fallacies in man-made concepts.
If you are an Old Calendarist schismatic, I recommend you listen to these videos:
Why I Left Old Calendarist “Orthodoxy”
Anathema's and Vladimir Moss