The Synod of the Church of Greece issued a directive against Old Calendarists on this day in 1926. Two weekends ago, the students of Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary went from Jordanville to visit the Old Ritualist congregation in Erie, PA. In 1983, this community joined the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. Since the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1654–1666), the members of their persuasion within Russian Orthodoxy refused to recognize the validity of bishops and their clergy involved in innovations, thus receiving the name of bezpopovtsy (“priestless ones”). These Christians who argued against the necessity of liturgical reforms were treated by the state as religious dissidents, similarly to how they were in Byzantium. From their point of view, it was clear that the those who abandoned old Russian liturgical practices in favor of contemporary Greek practices and changed the texts of services (not always felicitously!) were schismatics. From the perspective of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Old Ritualists overreacted in their zeal. After the revolution of 1917, the Russian Church ceased to be the major state-supported confession. In 1971 in Moscow, a Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church lifted katathema (damnation) issued at the Great Moscow Council of 1666–1667 against those who followed Old Rituals, as did the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in 1974. In a meeting with us a couple of weekends ago, the visionary leader of the Erie community and a former priestess minister, Fr. Pimen Simon, admitted that without these acts and apologies, he would not have returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. Now let’s see how this “schism template” squares with the Greek Old Calendarists. In 1918, the Soviet government moved the country from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Because in the same year, by another Bolshevik decree, the church was separated from the atheist state, the discrepancy between church holidays and working days did not bother the state too much. The situation in Greece was different: the Church was back then, and has been, according to the constitution the state religion (“The prevailing religion in Greece is that of the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ”). Therefore, it was harder for the Church to remain on a different calendar than the state. The problem with the calendar reform was that the secular authorities imposed it onto the Church and there was not a consensus in the universal Orthodox Church regarding the reform. A socio-political crisis (the defeat of the Greek military incursion into Ottoman Asia Minor) and poor explanation of the reforms to people (as in 17th-century Russia) were powerful ingredients leading to a new schism. After several belated attempts at clarifying and explaining the reform in 1924, the Synod of the Church of Greece issued Encyclical no. 2398/2203 stating that those who refused to follow their bishops “separated themselves from the Church and cut themselves off from the Body of Christ, drawing upon themselves condemnation and excommunication.” The retired Bosnian Metropolitan Ambrose consecrated hierarchy for the Russian Old Believers in 1846 in Austro-Hungary. No Orthodox Church recognizes this hierarchy as canonical. It is more complicated with the Old Calendarists, since ROCOR bishops, albeit without permission of their then-First Hierarch, Metropolitan Anastassy, consecrated bishops for Greek Old Calendarists in the 1960s. I believe both cases show that it is hard to consider that either the Old Believers became the true Russian Church and Nikonians schismatics, or that the Church of Greece is in heresy. At the same time, it is hard to deny the responsibility of the “official Churches” in “helping” those whose conscience could not accept the innovation to “wall themselves off.”
Sources: A.V.Slesarev, Starostil’nyi raskol v istorii Pravoslvanoi Tserkvi (1924-2008), [Old Calendarist Schism in the History of the Orthodox Church:1924-2008] azbuka.ru. [No author] Struggle Against Ecumenism, (Brookline, MA: 1998). | 
