The following is excerpted from "Russia's Catacomb Saints" and was written by an anonymous author of the Russian Orthodox Catacomb Church in 1962:
"Now, your basic question: What are you to do? If the present days were like the days of the Sergianist disturbance, I would tell you what I said then: Go to churches which do not have communion with Metropolitan Sergius, but do not go to him and his partisans. But the times have changed. We have no churches in the USSR now, and can we, who have gone into our solitary cells and find there everything which the churches gave us, forbid the thousands of believers who do not have such an opportunity from seeking consolation and spiritual food in the churches that do exist, and can we condemn them because they go there? We can not imitate those ignorant ones who stupidly affirm: “Those are not churches, they are demons’ temples, those who attend them defile themselves and are deprived of saving grace,” and other such foolish sayings.
And so I say to you: If you do not have any other way of taking part in Divine services and receiving the Mysteries, if you are languishing with thirst for church unity and prayer, and if attending the churches gives this to you — then go there without disturbance, and do not fear that this will be a sin. The Spirit breathes where It will; and in His unutterable mercy the Lord, even through His most unworthy ministers, even through unbelievers, does not deprive Christians of His heavenly gifts. If you wish a more intimate personal communion, then I advise you, as I also told you before, to choose for this sincere and unhypocritical priests — and such do exist in the churches. Of course, it is difficult for them, but they somehow try to squeeze through the eye of the needle. To seek such people among the bishops is almost a hopeless cause: the over whelming majority of them “know what they are doing,” and now are especially justified the words of St. John Chrysostom, “I fear no one in the world. I fear only bishops.”
And so, here, it seems, is everything that I needed to say to you, children. Yes, one thing more: Do not think that if you begin to attend the churches and even confess and receive communion in them, that I will consider you strangers. My soul is always open for you while you have the desire to be in communion with it.
With love in Christ..."
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In a similar spirit, Fr. Seraphim Rose revealed when writing concerning Fr. Dimitry Dudko:
"The agony of suffering Orthodoxy in our days cannot always be by a change of jurisdictions. Even in the free West the jurisdictional situation is immensely complicated. Some of those who see things in terms of "either/or" think that all new calendarist Greeks, for example, should simply "join the old calendarists." But many new calendarist Greeks have found the situation of the old calendarists in Greece—with their innumerable "jurisdictions" and sometimes extreme and ignorant views—to be exactly the same situation that Fr. Dimitry finds in the Catacomb Church in Russia, and they have rejected this "logical conclusion" ("logical" to outsiders who don’t have to face the actual choices involved) in order to join the Synod of the Russian Church Outside of Russia. But this also is an irregular and abnormal solution which produces its own conflicts and problems, and no one has a right to demand of anyone else that they "join the Synod" as the answer to the ever more open apostasy of the new calendarist Greek bishops. If someone can do this, and find his place in this jurisdiction without falling into the pitfall of criticizing his bishops and spreading the atmosphere of suspicion that prevails among Greek old calendarists, and thus coming into conflict with the clergy and believers of the Synod, well and good; but no one can demand this of anyone.
The situation of Fr. Dimitry in many respects is identical with that of those new calendarist Greek priests who are aware of the false path of their own bishops but are unable to "join the old calendarists" because of the confusion and extremism to be found in their ranks (not, of course, among all old calendarists, but in enough of them to make the situation very confusing and difficult). Fr. Dimitry does not have the third alternative of "joining the Synod"—although it is quite clear from his own statements that this is precisely what he would do if the choice were his (that is, if he were to he exiled to the West)."