Before the British were Replaced by the Americans
An extract translated from a letter of His Beatitude Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev to his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow, written on 28 April 1921:
All of us members of the Supreme Church Administration (1) considered and consider ourselves fully obedient to Your Holiness and deem that you have every right to annul or confirm its decisions...
A few words about Church life in the Middle East. Germanos, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had already retired about three months before, died in December 1920. But the Synod still has not chosen a new Patriarch and has stirred up an unrealisable hope for the provisional political union of Thrace with Greece. The locum tenens, Metropolitan Dorotheos, died in London in the spring and the new locum tenens, Nicholas, Metropolitan of Caesarea, promised to organise the election of the Patriarch this spring, but summer is coming and still nothing has happened. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, who was about to be deposed by the bishops of the Holy Sepulchre, overcame them with British help (2) and now, apparently, there is peace. Meletios, Metropolitan of Athens (3), has been deposed together with Venizelos (4) and now Metropolitan Theoclitos has returned...Anglophilia, which is dangerous for Orthodoxy, has appeared among the Serbs, the Phanariots and some Greeks in Athens, some priests have demanded the right to remarry and married bishops, many dress in secular clothing and shave. The Synod in Constantinople has put out an absurd decree about the rapprochement of the Churches, in which Western heretics are viewed as children of a divided Church and need reunion. This view is purely Protestant, especially considering France, where only ten years ago they used to receive Westerners into Orthodoxy through baptism by triple immersion, like Jews or Turks (5). The Greeks are now speaking and writing completely against their own conviction, hoping to get the British to hand over Constantinople and Hagia Sophia to them...When the need has passed, the Greeks will turn their backs on the British...(6).
Translator’s Notes:
1. Soon to be reformed and renamed as ‘The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia’.
2. Sic.
3. Meletios Metaksakis, a British freemason, who later brought in the Roman Catholic/Protestant (called ‘new’, although it was nearly 350 years old even then) calendar and supported the Communist-backed renovationists in Russia against Patriarch Tikhon.
4. The anti-monarchist freemason and Prime Minister of Greece, by whom Metr Meletios rose and fall. See: orthodoxinfo.com
5. Note how extreme practices meet.
6. The impression given is a complete lack of principle, that the policy changes according to political advantage.
(Source: Hierarch Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia 1918-1921, Vol II, Archim. Tikhon Zatiokin, Nizhny Novgorod, 2011, 328pp)
