Bravo to His Beatitude! This sounds like a “declaration of independence” if I ever heard one! He gets the fact that the fullness of the Church resides in the diocese, not the “archdiocese”. By decamping from NY to DC, which is the diocesan seat of the Metropolitan, +Jonah is putting his money where his mouth is. The worst possible thing that could happen to the local American Church would be for it to mimic many of the Old World patriarchates who have acceded to a papal model of “king-patriarch/diocsan satraps.” We would simply have traded one tyrant 5,000 miles away for another one 500 miles away.
Hopefully the Metropolitan Council and the functionaries at Syosset will get it as well in time.
This could only happen in a local self-headed Orthodox church. I don’t see this happening in a million years in the foreign eparchies.
]]>