One of the major figures in the Ukrainian based Synod of Bishop of the Western Rite was the Metropolitan +Joseph McCormack. A shy and retiring figure, little has been written on him in the 19 years since his death at the young age of 49. But the leading future in the Synod was the friend of St. John Maximovitch and Metropolitan Anastassy, metropolitan +William (+1979), one of the leaders of the western rite movement in America, formerly under the Moscow Patriarchate, but soon came under Palladios in 1967 when it was clear that he was being used by the KGB to promote Moscow in America. With the loss of William, the KGB made up its losses in 1970 with the erection of the fraudulent “Orthodox Church in America,” which, needless to say, has always been hostile to +William and the western rite that he represented. It was +William that brought Joseph into Orthodoxy and into the western rite, and Joseph lived with William in New York City as an apprentice of Orthodox doctrine, as befits a young monk.

The head of the Synod, Metropolitan +Palladios, was in the hospital on Long Island when William came to visit him, bringing his new young convert with him. Palladios, impressed with the young man, increased his Orthodox training and his knowledge of the western rite. By 1966, Joseph had become a priest, and a bishop by the next year. Given the tremendous ascetic impression that he made on both +Palladios and William, at William’s death in 1979, he was chosen to be the new head of the Synod with the title of metropolitan. Joseph refused Williams’s offer, claiming he was too young and too inexperienced.

William, just before his death, insisted that Joseph take the position before his death. He did so. However, this was common for the young priest, since he had also refused William’s offer much earlier to become a bishop, which he did at the insistence of +Palladios (+1969), who told the young man that this is the “will of God,” and the experience of the two elderly bishops was sufficient to make a correct choice, including a choice over and above several other more experienced candidates. Hence, Joseph had refused first to become a bishop, then second, to become a metropolitan. Both refusals were overruled by bishops more experienced than himself, and out of humility, he deferred to them.

Joseph was a retiring man. He was not an activist like St. John Maximovitch, who had is orphans and educational duties, but he was a man of solitude and monastic prayer. He refused the spotlight (whereas Archbishop St. John was a substantial presence wherever he went), and refused to make his episcopal position something that would interfere with his prayer rule, something also said by St. John of San Francisco. The rule of the hermitage was his primary struggle, and the administration of a diocese was for him (and for this writer), something unimportant to a hermit. Ultimately, his administrator became the current Archbishop of New Jersey for the Western Rite, +John (LoBue), who was, to some extent, a student of Joseph. Therefore, during Joseph’s tenure, it was John who ran the diocese from an administrative angle. Like archbishop John Maximovitch, prayer came first, everything else second. Joseph was only happy as a hermit.

So long as Metropolitan William was alive, Joseph was his faithful student and acolyte. When William retired to the beautiful western church as Woodstock, NJ, Joseph followed him there, maintain his rule of prayer with the master of the western rite in America. Eventually, Joseph was, in turn, given positions in California and even became the bishop to Great Britain, though he only rarely visited his see, as he was not fond of traveling. After William’s death, Joseph lived most of the time at the Monastery of the Holy Name in New Jersey, the present residence of the primary western rite bishop in America, +John.

It was really the spiritual life of Theodore of Pskov, William and Palladios that Joseph owed his religious training. In was in their tradition that he was raised and in which he lived. Joseph was not originally interested in the western rite, but it was Palladios who wanted him to take such a position and assist Metropolitan William in spreading the western rite in America under the protection of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Exile. But Joseph was marked as a man who did not trust in his own abilities and sought privacy and solitude rather than the activism that marked a truly diocesan bishop. His method was to delegate to all around him, maintaining himself really a priest that is available for his priests to come for confession and spiritual advice. For Joseph, that was the real purpose of a bishop, the life of prayer and the support of his clergy, not social activism or administration. Spiritual fatherhood was his true calling, and this is what he stressed in his years as bishop and then metropolitan.

For Joseph, the world was saturated with evil, and work within it was basically fruitless. He encouraged his priests in whatever kind of calling they had, but he himself remained a-political, and only the ecumenical movement got him angry and this was the only struggle he engaged in outside of his personal rule of prayer and his guidance of the clergy. The Jesus Prayer was his constant companion. When William and the synod of bishops split from Constantinople in 1972 over the acceptance of the grace in Roman Catholic sacraments, Joseph made himself clearly an anti-ecumenical activist (so to speak), but this never became a “crusade” for him, but a strongly held opinion. It should be noted that this synod remained under Constantinople–to the chagrin of the exarch Iakovos–until communion with Rome was restored by the fallen patriarch Demetrius in 1972.

It may be the case that Joseph inherited some of +William’s basic pacificism, but this is speculation. Joseph remained a hesychast whether he lived in a monastery or in New York City. He cared little for immediate surroundings but constantly stressed the importance for interior life. Joseph insisted that the intensity of prayer was far more important than the rule itself, and was somewhat of a relativist on the rule of prayer for each person: he accepted whatever worked and brought someone closer to God. Hence, he believed strongly in the tolerance of the different rites and rules within the Orthodox faith whether eastern or western. Ultimately, the church was an organism dedicated to prayer and ascetic labors, not an organization or an administration. The bishop was not a “ruler,” to so speak, but an example of the monastic life and its struggles, continually bringing his clergy to higher and higher levels of spiritual intensity.

Ultimately, Joseph’s legacy was just that: the church is a hospital, and the main medicine for fallen man in this evil world was that of prayer and fasting. Activism was to be encouraged, but never outside of the spiritual realm, never outside the struggles and sufferings which he considered to be intrinsic to the Orthodox life. The bishop was to be an icon of the monastic life, not a ruler in a political or administrative sense, that he left to those more capable than himself. Thus, it is the spiritual qualities, not administrative ones, that made a bishop. According to those who were close to him, including Archbishop +John himself, Joseph’s real strength, his real calling was to bring his clergy and people through difficult times, to guide them though the sufferings of life that are inherent to life in this world. He is remembered for this more than anything else.

The metropolitan died of lung cancer in 1990, at 49. As a child, he contracted ringworm, a skin rash that, at the time, was treated experimentally with x-rays. At age 12, there was an experimental program for children with ringworm to treat them with x-rays which Joseph’s mother enrolled him in. Every single child who was exposed to this barbaric treatment died at a young age, Joseph was the last, and was considered “old” to have died at 49. Joseph, in a manner of speaking, died a martyr to the mentality of the modern world and its false promises.