Bishop Jacob (Akkersdijk) was consecrated Bishop of the Hague in 1965. St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco was made Archbishop of Western Europe in 1950. There, he collected materials about venerated Western saints from the first millennium of Christianity before the Great Schism and supported missionary work in France and the Low Countries. In 1954, the Monk Jacob (of the Moscow Patriarchate) joined the ROCOR together with the Dutch Parish of St. John the Baptist in The Hague. In 1954, St. John ordained him a priestmonk and four years later elevated him to the rank of hegumen. In 1962, St. John was transferred to San Francisco. Three years later, Fr. Jacob was consecrated as a bishop to look after the European missionary communities. In 1966, St. John passed away, and no one among the ROCOR bishops was willing to support either the Western liturgical rite or the new calendar. A contemporary of these events, Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware; +2022), who also joined the Russian Church Abroad under the influence of St. John, described the change in the direction of the ROCOR after Metropolitan Anastasy’s death in 1965 as follows: “I returned in 1964 to England. There was a new Archbishop of Thyateira, the Greek Archdiocese: Athenagoras (not to be confused with Patriarch Athenagoras). I had met him earlier, when I was in Princeton in 1960. He offered me the opportunity to come and work for him as his English secretary, and he said he wished to ordain me as deacon. It was then, after I had visited [Archbishop] Vitaly [of Montreal], that Fr. George [Sheremtieff, a ROCOR priest in London], as my spiritual father said: ‘I do not bless you to be ordained priest in the Russian Church in Exile.’ He said, ‘Our clergy are becoming very narrow.’ He wasn’t very explicit about this, but I think he foresaw the attitude that would be taken by Metropolitan Philaret when he was head of the Exile Сhurch, when he (more or less) condemned the Ecumenical Patriarchate as having fallen away from the Orthodox Faith. He didn’t say that absolutely explicitly, but I think Fr. George was aware of the attitude by some people at that date in the Exile Church who were inclined to say, ‘We are the only true Orthodox Church (with, perhaps the Old Calendarists in Greece)’.” (Quoted from my interview “ROCOR’s Emphasis On Ascetic and Liturgical Tradition is Very Much Needed Today,” Historical Studies of the Russian Church Abroad, March 7, 2014.) In 1971, Bishop Jacob left the ROCOR for the Moscow Patriarchate with his parish and two monasteries. The ROCOR Synod defrocked Bishop Jacob in 1972. He died, on July 26, 1991 as a bishop of the Moscow Patriarchate. Source: I am thanking Nicholas A. Ohotin for supplying me the Synodal decision on Bishop Jacob. A Relevant Link: ROCOR's Documents On the Western Liturgical Traditions, Historical Studies of the Russian Church Abroad. |
