Five articles

In the past week there have been two occasions which have been very telling of the motivations of the bishops and the “new” OCA central administration. The first was the release of the affidavits for the Kondratick suit. Look at all they knew, look at all they thought, look at what they didn’t do to bring it to light and to provide answers earlier. Why is this so? Because before it was only God that was motivating them and guiding them, but when they had to put their hand on a bible and swear an oath to tell the secular authorities the truth, they sang like birds. Does it matter that every liturgy they not only put their hands on the Gospel, read from it, and hold the body and blood of our Lord in their hands? It took not God, it took Uncle Sam to compel these men to come clean. How can they preach to us about truth, how can they have any moral authority as clergy when it takes Uncle Sam and the fear of perjury to tell the truth? Godless, spineless men to the end.

Strikis KNEW that skirting IRS rules was WRONG, but he did nothing. He KNEW what they were doing cashing checks was WRONG, but he did nothing. A couple months back I wrote about how saying that one person cannot be responsible for this entire mess was a wrong idea. Strikis is a glaring example. He KNEW it was wrong, but he let it go. He can be counted as singularly responsible for putting us in the financial hole we are in. Let alone letting Kondratick rob us blind. But, it doesn’t matter if the eyes of God are upon these men day and night. It doesn’t matter if they don the best vestments. It doesn’t matter they act out the piety they want us to believe they have when they are in the vicinity of sacred objects. The only thing that scares these men to their senses is the secular authorities, perhaps a man, in, yes, black robes judging over their actions. In the presence of the body and blood of Christ, in the presence of relics of the saints, the affidavits show us a group that couldn’t have cared less about all that. It was all about what they could profit materially from this themselves and the audacious manner in which it was done. And after them it was, for the new group, how can we keep this from seeing the light of day! Spineless, Godless men, to the end.

The second occasion goes to the heart of what motivates the Metropolitan. In his letter to Nikolai he says “As you now know, this story has caused quite a stir in the media in a number of widely circulated newspapers.” This was listed first as his reasons for writing the letter to Nikolai. Because it made the media, made it to papers that are widely circulated. So what if every liturgy we hold the body of Christ in our hands, when the MEDIA gets ahold of something then we need to act because its going to make us look like shams in the eyes of men. Hey, buddies, what about the eyes of GOD!? Godless, spineless men, to the end. Then the next sentence “This incident has ALSO scandalized many of our Orthodox faithful who have written to us with expressions of disbelief and anger.” The emphasis is mine to point out that, well, as a side note there’s some people making noise about it and probably because they read about it in the media. Lastly he points out that the canons were disregarded and the policies and standards (that’s enough to make you laugh) were contradicted. Never, no where, did the Metropolitan say it was just plain wrong. He danced around calling these actions wrong, he just wanted to say that they’ve been caught and NOW hell has to be paid. The more the Metropolitan and his new administration want to tell us things have changed for the better the more they stay the same.

Let’s not digress, though, from who, in some circles, has been said to be the locus of this entire scandal, Nikolai. A man who’s self destruction is as spectacular as any ever seen. A man who’s going to go down in a blaze of glory! A man with no shame, a man with no regard for God’s creatures, a man who’s insecurities and their soothing are what his service in the church is all about. It has been said that this man drives around, or did, with “VLDYKA” on his license plate. This is so that when you go driving around Anchorage let there be no doubt where the VLADYKA is and let there be no doubt that this man is a VLADYKA! A man who was a “monk” well before his consecration, driving around proudly displaying and letting no one miss that he is the VLADYKA. He never took this bishop thing seriously, it was a way to soothe his need for power. Nikolai, the man who liked to disparage his predecessor in Alaska, Innocent, saying that he (Innocent) took down the seminary to nearly nothing. What do we have now? A seminary taken down to nearly nothing. He liked to remind us that Innocent disregarded the actions of the church when it came to his disciplining. What do we have now? We have a bishop who ignores the orders of suspension of the reader from the Metropolitan. More and more it looks like the man who felt himself the savior of Alaska after Innocent has become a stain so bad on Alaska that it makes Innocent look like a boy scout. While we can compare Innocent and Nikolai, mainly to show us how Nikolai not only went down the same path he disparaged of Innocent, but that he did it with gusto, he did it so no one doubted he was blazing a trail that will forever have only his name on it. While we can compare Nikolai and Innocent closely, there is one thing that differentiates the two men: some people actually liked Innocent.

It’s chilling to read a previous news item on this site, putting “Nikolai” where it says “Innocent”, read Nikolai’s homily at Innocent’s Panikhida (http://www.ocanews.org/news/Innocent72807.html) and see how everything Nikolai said about Innocent is being played out now with him in the lead role. Specifically when it comes to ignoring Duskin’s suspension and the resignations of the MC members from Alaska: “we almost forget that have come here to pray for the soul of a man who chose to separate himself from the Church…”. Later, “As a Hierarch myself, I constantly pray that I don't ever become a disappointment to my clergy or my flock. It is a hard thing to understand how human beings can and do become disappointments to each other.” That is an understatement for him, because he truly cannot understand because he has accomplished being a complete disappointment. In Mark’s commentary in the piece: “+Nikolai and Fr. Isidore paint a vivid picture of a diocese teetering on the verge of ruin upon their arrival in 2001. According to them they inherited a diocese in which "disorganization, factionalism and low moral" reigned; the Seminary had lost its accreditation, legal battles were brewing,” What goes around comes around.

We are coming to the flashpoint now of the Nikolai episode. A gift from Bob Kondratick and his gang that just keeps giving, never failing to surprise. How can man from Montana, Butte to be exact, not call English his native language? What language DO they speak in Butte? Maybe the language is called bull and that’s Nikolai’s real native language! A lot of people have had homes where English is not their first spoken language with parents from the old country, but they nonetheless say that English is the native tongue. But, no, this man, who has to think of ways to fight back and give justifications for his actions is trying to say that he’s suffering too with his rule of English only because English isn’t his native language. There’s a lot of something in Montana that you can call THAT! Why is it that he even said that if he’s never ordered people to avoid speaking their native tongues? Because its true and he just wants to say that he’s suffering too to lessen the pain. Baloney so thick you need a chain saw to cut it.

Nikolai never understood the job. Sure, he loved the vestments (how many times does he wear the same set), he loved the double handed blessings, he liked to walk with a stick to give that façade of being a holy man, he liked being called “vladyka” but there was no substance. He was given an Episcopal rank for a job well done for the administration. People claimed he was a good administrator, but good administrators are rarely good leaders because they deal in the handling of faceless tasks devoid of any emotional or human contact. A bishop, a leader, gets a good administrator for his chancellor to do the paperwork, not his housemate. Fr. Oleksa did nothing wrong other than he was smart, faithful, loved by the people, and did his best for them both directly and in how we see Alaska. He eclipsed Nikolai and so Fr. Michael had to pay. Its another example of why Nikolai was not suited to being a bishop because a bishop is a leader, not a paper pusher. Nikolai’s handling of Alaska can be compared to a sports team in which the coach or manager will not allow any player to be more than himself. A pitcher cannot be more successful or liked than the coach. A quarterback must keep out of view so as not to take attention away from the coach. That team is going to be miserable, the morale low, and its going to lose and lose badly. This is coach Nikolai. On other hand, take a coach who works in the shadows nurturing his players, never taking away from the accomplishments of the field. What happens there? The team wins, people play to their potential, there is morale, there is teamwork, there is a cohesive whole working to reach a shared goal. Compare Fr. Oleksa and Nikolai and you can see the friction, the resentment by Nikolai. Fr. Oleksa took the Alaskan culture, he championed it. A man from Allentown embracing the Alaskan way and helping us to see it. A man who is that coach that nurtures his players. Look at Nikolai, bringing in the arcane rubrics he did, bringing his team from the lower 48 to do the jobs he wanted filled when he went to Alaska. Refusing native tongues. Nikolai doesn’t know how to be a bishop. Nikolai wants to model himself upon St. Innocent, but St. Innocent didn’t teach the Alaskans how to speak Russian, he translated to their language. That’s doing missionary work to bring God and Orthodoxy to a culture, not a culture to your conception of what Orthodoxy is about – arcane rubrics from a time past being foisted upon a culture who cares more about the soul than the dress and movements. Alaska wasn’t out of control, they’re not a bunch of adolescents. That’s coming from a man who didn’t know the mission, who didn’t want to embrace a culture, a man who couldn’t care less about the people as long as his mental state was caressed. A man who didn’t understand and didn’t make any attempt to understand, to be a bridge, to be… a bishop. For him, it was just about the power, nothing more. Because of this we are very much in danger of losing what St. Herman brought and all that others have worked to keep his legacy because of this one misplaced man sent to Anchorage who wasn’t suited for the job.

When this mess is over, the time has come, as we have seen repeatedly when we haven’t done it, that Alaska needs a bishop of their own, not one sent up there to keep an eye on the precious land resources. Souls, not land, is what should be the guiding light when we have to get a successor to clean up Nikolai’s mess. A mess that is going to take a man of rare character and faith to clean up.