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| (Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina and Vladyka Averky of Jordanville) |
Of the three kinds of documents that give reliable information on the Catacomb Church in the USSR (see THE ORTHODOX WORD, May-June, page 145), the most fundamental comprise those that date from 1927-29, chiefly from leading hierarchs of that time, stating the reasons why the Orthodox Church cannot accept the "Declaration" of Metropolitan Sergius, and breaking off communion with him. The religious and moral authority of these protesting hierarchs was so high, and their arguments so Orthodox and sound, that for the future historian of the Russian Church there can scarcely be any doubt as to the rightness of their position.
As for Metropolitan Sergius and his "Synod" (the present day "Moscow Patriarchate"), most of these documents characterize them as perpetrators of a neo-renovationist schism in the line of the "Living Church" of the early 1920s - to which schism Metropolitan Sergius had himself belonged. Even before the "Declaration" of 1927 the clairvoyant Elder Nektary of Optina Monastery had said: "Metropolitan Sergius is a Renovationist... He has repented but the poison is still in him."
As far as it is known, all of the anti-Sergianist hierarchs of 1927 were either murdered by the Soviets or died in prison or banishment, the sole "crime" of many of them being that they refused to accept Metropolitan Sergius' "Declaration", which was published in the Soviet press and strictly enforced by the Soviet regime and its Political Police.
Many of those who today, for various reasons, accept the Moscow Patriarchate as the legitimate Russian Orthodox Church, would like to believe that with the death of these bishops who founded it, the Catacomb Church itself has ceased to exist, and that therefore there is no opposition within the USSR to the Orthodoxy of the Patriarchate. But quite apart from the testimony of the recent Soviet press concerning the uncovering of Catacomb cells of "Tikhonites" or the "True Orthodox Church", the whole history of the Church of Christ has never heard of an apostate body becoming "Orthodox" simply because its Orthodox opposition has been liquidated!
Therefore, since the present-day Moscow Patriarchate is the direct continuation and indeed the very creation of the Sergianist policy of 1927, the statements of the truly Orthodox bishops and faithful in 1927-29 remain as true and valid today as ever, and they speak with full force to the present Moscow hierarchy. Indeed, the one thing that shines forth from these documents of some four decades ago is the unchanging TRUTH for which their authors died, and which neither the tyranny and lies of the Communist yoke, nor all its seemingly brilliant successes abroad, can ever blot out.
(Texts from the 1964 ST. VLADIMIR RUSSIAN NATIONAL CALENDAR, Jordanville, NY - This text was also printed in "The Orthodox Word", #35, Nov.-Dec. 1970, Platina, CA)