interwiki, renameuser, Administrators
13,552
edits
Changes
m
→Disintegration
:...on the 29th of April 1933 Abp Aftimios, in defiance of all Orthodox Tradition and Canon Law... married in a civil ceremony to a young Evangelical Syrian girl born in America—and despite all the efforts of responsible parties, he refused to resign as Archbishop of the new Church (p. 41).
Three days after Aftimios's wedding, the two new bishops of the church, Ignatius and Joseph, held a "synod meeting" by themselves, and believing that Aftimios had resigned, elected Joseph as the new "President Archbishop of the Church" with Ignatius being his designated successor. They further voiced their support of Aftimios's marriage, stating that "'inasmuch as it is merely a Canon of the European and Asiatic branches of the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church, that a Bishop should not be married, such has no valid weight on the American Church where conditions are dramatically opposite' and 'therefore the Holy North American Synod congratulates His Eminence on the moral courage in the step he has taken'" (ibid.). Fr. Serafim then observes: "This new thunderbolt was sufficient to effectively eliminate any authority the new Church might still claim to have—particularly when there were only six parishes by the summer of 1933 still adhering to the new Church" (ibid.).
Joseph later denied making the agreement with Ignatius, "but he was already a sick man (and died on the 23rd of February 1934)" (ibid.). Ignatius then got married himself in June of 1933 and began entering into relations with the representatives of the [[Living Church]] in America (the Soviet-sponsored pseudo-church), which had been competing (especially legally) with the jurisdiction of the Metropolia and the ROCOR. He eventually broke relations even with the Living Church and returned to being an ''episcopus vagans'', dying as the pastor of a small Community Church in Middle Springs, Vermont, but not before starting multiple small religious bodies, many of whom claim [[apostolic succession]] from him.
