This is a brief section of a much larger work by the community of the Old Orthodox Church in Yaroslavl. It was written in the early part of this decade. I have translated some of the more interesting parts--MRJ.

. . . .During 1666-1667, the ancient piety was rejected by Nikon and his cohorts, and many were forced to sign oaths upholding this new faith. Bishop Pavel, the only remaining bishop who refused to sign, was burnt at the stake. The Old Faith was then forced to run to the wilderness, all the while canonically upholding the ancient Orthodox traditions. We accepted priests who had fled from the Nikonians, so at least some of our communities had the sacraments. Only in 1846 was it possible to restore the hierarchy through Metropolitan +AMBROSE (1791-1863). Those occurred in Ukraine, and was at the time part of the Austrian Empire. Hence, the True Orthodox Church of Christ was preserved in the Slavic lands.

In 1847 the Austrians forced the metropolitan to return to Constantinople. He refused, ready to suffer a martyrs death if need be. The Austrians then tried to limit his authority solely to the territory controlled by Austria, and that he could not communicate with Old Ritualists in Russia.

By this time, the Old Faith had several more bishops other than Ambrose, and these were ARKADY and KYRILL. After Ambrose, Cyril was chosen metropolitan of the Old Faith. After a short while, the church counted almost 20 bishops.

The church had by the 1850s a solid, large and prosperous hierarchy, and set up its organization in Moscow itself under Archbishop ANTONY. Despite many arrests, the hierarchy in Russia was continually strengthened. In the second half of the 19th century, the Archbishop ANTONY ordained over 100 priests and deacons, and assisted in the consecration of six bishops. Twelve Old Faith diocese were established at this time. Under Antony, the center of the Old Faith became, even to the present day, the Rogozhskoy Cemetery in Moscow. Nevertheless, it was only in 1905 where Tsar Nikola II provided for religious freedom.

In 1863 the Archdiocese in Moscow created the Spiritual Sobor. Of Antony’s successors were SAVATI (1881-1898), JOHN (1898-1915), MELTEII (1915-1934), and after him, VINKENTII was arrested by the Soviets and was murdered in the Butyrskoy prison in 1938.

By 1927, however, this hierarchy counted 18 bishops altogether in 28 diocese. Only one elderly bishop, SAVA, remained until 1940, and after him, IRINEY and GERONTII were permitted relative freedom.

Not long prior to Sava’s death IRENY was freed from prison and governed the church until 1952. Afterwards, bishops FLAVIAN (d. 1960) and JOSEPH (d. 1970), followed by NICODEMUS (d. 1986), ANASTASSY (d. 1986), then ALIMPY. In 1988, the 1000 year anneversary of Orthodoxy in Russia, the Old Faith Church, in freedom, was reincorporated as the Blessed Sobor of the Old Rite Orthodox Church of Russia.

Of course, it is impossible to speak of this without also dealing with the schisms that the faith suffered. Many of these have been healed, but there still exists the famed division bewteen priestless and priested.

In 1862, several encyclicals were published in order to attempt to unify the Old Faith and present a united front against the world. Many of the Old Faith were demoralized through rumors and false ideas spreading around Russia at the time. It was Metropolitan ANTONY that was th emost active in reconverting many of the priestless, who had developed some strange customs at variance with Orthodoxy.

Most of the priestless accepted his message. And, as always, a few did not. As many of the priestless accepted clergy from Antony, this acceptance also created further schisms among the priestless.

In 1869 Archbishop CYRIL condemned this latest schism and clearly condemned the priestless. Nevertheless, the Sobor of 1906 assisted in the bringing of many back into the proper channels of the Old Rites with clergy. Unfortunately, some retained their schism. . .

It remains that there were many good Christians who rejected the existence of the priesthood after Nikon with the notion that the antiChrist was now ruling, and , in punishment of the Russian land in accepting him, the priesthood had been withdrawn. In their opinion, the terrestrial element of the church had been largely destroyed, yet, it remains that those with priests countered this with Christ’s famous statement to Peter that “the gates of Hell will never overcome the church.”

The priestless were wrong from a biblical point of view because Christ’s words are plain: without water and the sprit one cannot be a Christian. The same can be said of the Eucharist, where Christ, equally clearly, stated that without consuming His body and blood, one can have no life in yourself (cf. John 6:53). Nothing can be clearer here. Hence, on this authority, the True Hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church condemned the later priestless as schismatics and sectarians.

This movement of the priested, founded in 1800 by the Emperor Paul, sought a reconciliation with the Old Faith by permitting its functioning within the official church. This view was considered something akin to a uniatism by the stricter priested Old Faith, since most of the Old Faith viewed Peter’s synod as schismatic and hence graceless, and thus, this group, though well intentioned, needed to receive their orders from this sobor. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of the Old Faith refused this option. Afterwards, the repressions against the Old Faith intensified. This particular movement lost steam after 1905, once religious freedom was restored. Few of the Edinoverye remained after 1905.

The two bishops of this movement, ANDREI and STEPAN, sought reunion with the Old Faith church, once they realized that the uniat movement was bankrupt. Andrei was consecrate according to the Old Rites in 1932 and died a martyrs death by the NKVD.

In this section, the author(s) deal with the errors of the thousands of “Christian” sects in the world. Since many of these are well known, I will not bother translating them

Russians have a special mission in defending the True Faith. Once the rites were changed by Nikon, curses were placed on all who follow the Old Rites, making any kind of a reunion impossible. [These were repealed by the Moscow Patriarchy in the early 1980s, and by the ROCOR in 1951–MRJ]. However, it needs to be remembered that, as we repeat so often, the true Church of Christ is “not that which persecutes, but those who are persecuted.” Christ never demanded that his apostles and disciples convert by the sword, but He did say that his people will be treated with the whip and fire.

Therefore, even if Nikon’s changes were legitimate, he would still have been a false hierarch, since his methods, including an apparent obsession with killing his opponents, were illegitimate. Many of the defenders of Nikon will say that such methods were common of the time, and hence legitimate. Some even say that had the Old Believers won, they would have put their former persecutors to the sword. Nevertheless, history states otherwise. Within the large and prosperous villages of the Old Faith, Nikonian visitors were never harassed or tortured. The methods of the Old Faith in dealing with Nikonians were accepting the persecution of the state, and praying for it, and the Nikonian schismatics.

But, allow us to return to the content of the Reforms. Our people rejected the new rites on the basis that they different substantially from the rites accepted in Kievan-Rus by our ancestors. It was a violation of the canon of the Ecumenical Synods which clearly state, “anyone who rejects the traditions of the Holy Orthodox church, including the unwritten laws of the church, anathema.” [This is a loose translation from the Russian. The original is from the 7th ecumenical synod–MRJ]

At the beginning of the 18th century, the patriarchate was abolished by Pater I. The sobor replaced the permanent Sobor of the Patriarchate, headed by a worldly official answerable solely to the tsar and his staff. There is no Christian precedent for this in history. It is a radical reformation. At the same time,. The Tsar, completely outside the church and its rules, decreed that Protestant and Catholic baptisms were valid. There, also, is no precedent for such a view. It is also true that, contrary to all the canons, the Petrine church engaged in ecumenical prayer with the Protestants, a fact few of the “true Orthodox” Nikonians will admit. The official Tsarist printing house published books that said that the “Protestants have the fulness of the faith.” It was this nonsense that led the later “patriarchate” of Moscow to enter into the WCC and other ecumenical bodies.

It became common in the New Rite church, even before the revolution, that the sacraments of Orthodoxy were dishonored. In some places, mass confessions were heard. Communion was given out to all and sundry, and the requirement of fasting and the attendance at Vespers was regularly ignored.

The text then goes into a long condemnation of ecumenism, which, again, is too widely known to demand the painful process of my poor translation skills–MRJ

. . . .We hold that, during these last times,. The faith will be given only to a few, and the rest will fall into heresy. The Church of Jesus Christ came into existence at Pentecost, and existed then in its fulness. Only by diligent study of this faith and history can be “build our house on rock”, rather on the “sand” of the constant shifting of the sects, and the never ending wrangling of the heretics and politicians.

On the evening before Christ’s death, He prayed for unity, the unity in the faith and love. Here and only here is peace found. Unity does not exist without the faith, and the faith is the basis of unity. The sacrifice on the Cross saves all of us from sin, but only so long as Christ’s prayer is fulfilled, that is, only though unity of faith and love.

The church is free from all spot. She has no sin save that of her human members., But the church is larger than its human membership. The church is infallible while her human membership is fallible. St. Paul says as much. The power of Christ to heal individual sins had been transferred to the priesthood and the sacramental life of the Orthodox faith. The church calls not the righteous, but sinners to penance.(cf. Matthew 9:13).. . .

The Chruch is One. It forms one body, as Paul says in Romans. Where many are assembled in unity, one bread is formed, one body, as St. Cyprian says [a very loose translation here–MRJ]. The church is the body of believers united in One Faith. This includes the living, as also the righteous dead. The earthly church is only part of the Church of Christ. Hence, it is important to realize that Christ’s church is not reducible to its earthly component, and its earthly component, looking often very small and persecuted, does not comprise the church in its full unity.

There cannot be two churches, two bodies of Christ. Since there is only One Lord, One Faith and One Baptism, as the Scriptures state. To the church belong the full unanimous sense of the faithful, the true understanding of unity and faith.

There is one united body of the faith that is not sundered by the various offices. Bishops, deacons, laymen, etc., exist all as part of the holy church, and equal as such, though differing in terms of function. The sobor, properly considered is not just bishops, but the entire body of faithful. Laymen without clergy do not form a church, just as clergy without laity do not. The church is created by the will of all the faithful. The “Catholic” nature of the church tells us that it is in the conscience of all that true doctrine is kept, and is not a secret code known only to the hierarchs.