Scandalous
Days in the OCA
by
Andrew Walsh
Euphoria in
remarkable degree greeted the November 12 election of Bishop Jonah
Paffhausen as the leader of the Orthodox Church in America at a church
conclave in Pittsburgh.
“Hundreds of
clergy and laity of the Orthodox Church in America wept for joy yesterday,”
Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette opened her story on the
event. “This is a miraculous occurrence,” the Rev. John Reeves, an OCA
pastor in State College, Pennsylvania, told her. We hear stories like this
in the lives of the saints.”
Press critic
Terry Mattingly called it a “stunning, amazing” story in his blog Get
Religion on November 13. For Mattingly and others, part of the news value of
the event involved the election of the first non-“cradle Orthodox,” or
convert, to lead one of the nation’s major Orthodox jurisdictions. Part had
to do with an electrifying, impromptu speech Paffhausen had given a few days
earlier at the Pittsburgh All-American Council, which had been called to
elect a new metropolitan, or primate, for the church.
But most of
the giddiness bubbled up from an unanticipated outbreak of hope that the OCA
might finally escape a grinding decade of squalid scandal that has
discredited virtually all of the church’s leadership on charges of financial
corruption or collusion to cover it up. It is hard to think of a church
scandal that has involved so large a proportion of a significant church’s
leadership—not that many American journalists have noticed.
Paffhausen’s
predecessor, Metro-politan Herman Swaiko, a 75-year-old who ruled with an
iron first, had been chased out of office in September after the publication
of an internal investigation that, in the words of the October 21
Christian Century, “confirmed accusations that church leaders had either
‘squandered’ millions of dollars or participated in covering up the
diversion of funds for personal expenses and to cover shortfalls.”
Some of the
diversions were little short of humiliating for a church—including the
pocketing of funds raised for the relief of 9/11 survivors and an attempt to
do the same with funds raised for the families of the children killed in the
2004 school massacre in Beslan, North Ossetia.
The scandal
began in the mid-1990s with the transfer of several million dollars in grant
funding from the Archer Daniels Midland Foundation to unaudited
discretionary accounts controlled by the OCA’s then-Metropolitan Theodosius
Lazor and its chancellor, the Rev. Robert Kondratick. Denials, cover-ups,
and efforts to suppress dissent began in the late 1990s.
The cover-up
finally began to unravel in late 2005, when a former church treasurer made
public charges and a lay organization crystallized “to inform members of the
Orthodox Church in America (OCA) of the origins, nature and scope of
allegations concerning financial misconduct at the highest levels of the
central church administration,” mostly by launching a web operation called
Orthodox Christians for Accountability,
www.ocanews.org.
When the
49-year-old Paffhausen was elected Archbishop of Washington and New York and
Metropolitan of All America and Canada, he was the only OCA hierarch
untouched by the scandal (among nine sitting and three retired bishops).
Nonetheless, his election was unexpected because he had only 12 days before
been consecrated as an auxiliary bishop, serving until then as abbot of a
small monastery in Manton, California.
“We have to
work together with one mind and one heart and one soul, striving with all
our might to bear witness to Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God,”
Paffhausen said after his election. “Nothing else matters.”
Rodgers
reported that support for Paffhausen was galvanized by his responses to
questions at a public forum that included “forthright admission of
wrongdoing at headquarters” and words that clergy and lay delegates
accustomed to episcopal claims of unilateral authority longed to hear from
one of their bishops: “Authority is responsibility. Authority is
accountability. It’s not power.”
Paffhausen’s
speech “changed the equation,” said Mark Stokoe, the Dayton, Ohio, layman
who edited the ocanews.org operation and was the most visible leaders of a
long campaign for reform and accountability. “He spoke intelligently,
forthrightly, and directly.”
Until that
point, reformers had been hoping to elect Archbishop Job Osacky of Chicago,
a longtime bishop who was involved in the initial cover- ups but who had
become a lonely voice for change on the church’s governing Holy Synod. In
late 2005, Osacky wrote a letter, later made public on ocanews.org, asking
his colleagues whether the former OCA treasurer’s allegations “are true, or
are they false?” After that, his Diocese of the Midwest became the only OCA
jurisdiction where clergy and laity could speak and organize publicly to
demand information about the scandal, without fear of hierarchical
retribution.
Despite
dragging on for years and offering numerous juicy examples of clerical greed
and malfeasance, the scandal attracted relatively little news coverage. Some
of this is just business as usual—the Orthodox don’t cut much of a figure on
the American religious scene, divided as they are into a cluster of small
ethnically derived jurisdictions and scattered thinly across the landscape.
The
Post-Gazette’s Rodgers produced several stories after the scandal
exploded, as did the Washington Post’s Alan Cooperman when he was on
the religion beat in 2006 and 2007. The Washington Times also
produced serious coverage, especially of the most recent phase of the
scandal.
Finally, the Anchorage Daily News
provided what was probably
the best and most enterprising coverage of a related scandal, or perhaps
sub-scandal, involving the local OCA bishop, Nickolai Soraich of Sitka and
Alaska, who was active in the synod’s attempts to suppress investigation of
the national scandal. Nickolai also had complex conflicts with his own
flock, especially the Aleuts, Eskimos, and Native Americans who make up the
bulk of the OCA’s Alaska members. In 2008, Nickolai was relieved of his post
by the synod in the wake of a public rebellion of most of the priests in his
diocese and scandals involving public drunkenness and alleged sexual
harassment by his chancellor, and the bishop’s decision to ordain a
convicted sex offender to a minor clerical office.
If
professional journalism played a minor role in the OCA story (much smaller
than in the widely covered controversy in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of
America in the late 1990s), cyberspace glowed. The ocanews.org website
developed into a huge agglomeration of documents, reports on developments,
and commentary from a cadre of anguished laity and priests, many of whom
were reluctant (especially priests fearful of hierarchical retribution) to
sign their contributions. As editor, Stokoe, who has a long record of OCA
activism and served intermittently on its metropolitan council, strove for a
trenchant but even-handed tone, while pushing an agenda of vigorous
investigation and transparency.
The scandal,
as laid out in a special investigative committee report published on
September 3, began as early as the late 1980s, when the central
administration of the perennially cash-starved jurisdiction, based in
Syosset, New York, on the north shore of Long Island, began cutting
financial corners, moving cash around, and “borrowing” from restricted funds
and special charitable appeals and bequests.
During the
1990s, the bulk of $3.575 million in grants from the Archers Daniels Midland
Foundation and the Dwayne Andreas Foundation, were siphoned off into three
unaudited, undocumented, discretionary accounts controlled by Theodosius and
his chancellor, Father Robert Kondratick. At least another million
disappeared from OCA accounts in the 2000s, but record-keeping has been so
poor that the full extent of the misappropriations and fraud will never be
known.
“The
overwhelming evidence shows that the OCA’s leadership at its highest levels
have been complicit since as early as 1989 and has squandered millions of
dollars,” the report, prepared by a committee of five members appointed by
the church in the fall of 2007. “Some placed their personal gain above their
Christian duties. Others failed in their fiduciary responsibility to bring
these matters to light and correct them.”
“The
preponderance of evidence clearly shows Metropolitan Theodosius,
Metropolitan Herman, the Holy Synod, the Metropolitan Council, the
Administrative Committee, the former Chancellor, the part-time Treasurers,
and the Comptroller had varying and sometimes multiple roles in this
tragedy.”
By most
accounts, the central figure in the scandal was Kondratick, the church’s
chief administrative officer from the late 1980s until 2006. Along with
diverting large sums for unauthorized personal and family use, pressing for
reimbursement for undocumented credit card expenses, creating a chancery
culture of “deception, deceit and covertness,” Kondratick “used OCA
resources to develop personal loyalty, dependence and silence on the part of
the hierarchy, clergy, and laity through gifts, which included cash,
jewelry, meals, travel, lodging, and incidentals,” according to the report.
After
describing Metropolitan Theodosius as a lazy, hands-off manager who shied
away from tough problems, the report argued that “given Metropolitan
Theodosius’ style, there was a leadership vacuum, which Kondratick filled as
Chancellor. Metropolitan Theodosius’ weaknesses and disinterest allowed the
former Chancellor to take almost complete control of Chancery operations, to
include staffing, budgeting, and spending decisions. Ultimately, the
Chancellor was able to control the Holy Synod, Metropolitan Council, and
Administrative Committee.”
By the late
1990s, it was becoming difficult to keep the lid on the central
administration’s cash diversions, because independent accountants were
refusing to audit books to which they had only partial access. The church’s
audit committee had began to complain as early as 1993, but was thwarted by
Theodosius and Kondratick.
The church’s
treasurer, Deacon Eric Wheeler, who initially collaborated with the pair,
began trying to block and reverse their practices. In the fall of 1999, he
was fired as treasurer and given a severance package that required him to
remain silent. Jonathan Kozey, the lay chair of the audit committee, was
also removed.
Archbishop
Herman Swaiko, then of the Diocese Eastern Pennsylvania, was appointed
Temporary Treasurer and had already been fully briefed by Wheeler about the
improprieties in the central administration. Rather than investigating the
charges and raising the alarm, Swaiko began a steady campaign to suppress
investigation and even discussion of the problems that would last until
things began to unravel in 2006. When Herman became metropolitan in 2002, he
reappointed Kondratick as chancellor and reappointed him in 2005.
As for the
other bishops sitting on the Holy Synod, the report concluded that, “in this
unprecedented scandal of the OCA, none of the hierarchs, when confronted
with information from whistleblowers and others about the financial abuses,
took immediate action.
It was over
the “Beslan matter” that the synod’s unity began to unravel. During the fall
of 2004, OCA parishes had raised about $90,000 on behalf of the survivors of
the Beslan hostage disaster, when several hundred Russian schoolchildren
died after being taken hostage by Chechen terrorists. The money was
transferred to the OCA’s “representation church ” in Moscow, a kind of
embassy operation for liaison with the Russian Orthodox Church.
The SIC report
noted that Kondratick had instructed Archimandrite Zacchaeus Wood, pastor of
St. Catherine’s Representation Church in Moscow, that he “expected to divide
the Beslan funds with Zacchaeus 50/50 and to receive his share in Moscow.”
Kondratick apparently expected to use the money to pay the costs of an OCA
delegation visit to Russia.
Wood consulted
with Archbishop Osacky, “who advised him to give the funds to the Beslan
charity.” The archimandrite then videotaped a meeting at which Kondratick
demanded his half and then showed the video the next day to Metropolitan
Herman and “related these events” to three additional OCA hierarchs then
visiting Moscow.
Osacky
apparently sent Herman a full copy of the video, and became the first
hierarch to begin to push for a full accounting of the church’s financial
records. When Osacky’s diocese demanded better accounting at the church’s
next All American Council in June 2005, Herman sent him an angry letter: “I
am dismayed and deeply saddened that a member of the Holy Synod would
undermine the Holy Synod’s dignity and authority by suggesting that its
stewardship is less than responsible or appropriate.”
In October,
former treasurer Wheeler wrote to the Metropolitan and Holy Synod to report
allegations of “massive financial improprieties during his tenure as OCA
treasurer.” In November, Wheeler wrote a second letter, and then released
it, along with a cache of documents to the public.
By January,
ocanews.org was up and running and, by February, stories with headlines like
“Accusations of Misused Money Roil Orthodox Church” were appearing in places
like the Washington Post.
On March 18,
the Post’s Cooperman reported that Metropolitan Herman had abruptly
fired Kondratick and “brought in an independent law firm to conduct a full
investigation.” According to Cooperman, “senior clergy and lay leaders
across the country had demanded an investigation and eight Orthodox
Christian lawyers wrote a letter last week warning church leaders that they
could face legal consequences if they did not act soon. But the sudden
dismissal of Chancellor Robert S. Kondratick, the church’s chief
administrative officer for the past 17 years, surprised even insiders at the
denomination’s headquarters.”
Metropolitan
Herman struggled mightily to keep the investigations and audit under his
control, while (along with some other diocesan bishops) ordering his priests
to be silent about the scandal. Other members of the synod, especially
Bishop Tikhon Fitzgerald of the Diocese of the West, took to the Internet to
defend Kondratick and attack Archbishop Osacky and Orthodox Christians for
Accountability.
At
ocanews.org, a continuing rumble of complaints focused on Metropolitan
Herman’s refusal to say much about the scandal or to promise full disclosure
of the audit or investigation results, especially after it became clear that
the metropolitan had arranged for the New York law firm of Proskauer Rose to
report to himself, rather than publicly to the church’s metropolitan
council.
In March of
2007, prompted by the conclusion of the Proskauer investigation and one by
an internal subcommittee of members of the council, the synod suddenly
shifted course.
“It must be
confessed that during early 2006, there were many of us who believed that
the allegations were exaggerated, motivated by the personal animosity of the
accusers, or that there were simple explanations to these
misunderstandings,” the statement said. “In March of 2006, it became
apparent to us that we were wrong in these beliefs, and that there was
substance to at least some of the claims.”
When Proskauer
delivered an oral report on its findings, the synod admitted that the “body
of evidence that was presented was detailed and quite frankly, shocking. The
confirmed instances of the abuse of Church trust were determined to be
centered on one person, the former Chancellor of the Church.”
The synod
quickly moved to conduct an ecclesiastical trial, and it eventually voted to
defrock the uncooperative Kondratick in July. For his part, Kondratick
argued that he was being set up as the fall guy. Although stripped of the
priesthood, he remained (and remains) an employee of Holy Spirit Church in
Venice, Florida, a position to which he was appointed by Bishop Royster of
the Diocese of the South.
But
Metropolitan Herman balked at releasing either the Proskauer report or that
of the investigative committee chaired by Archbishop Osacky—pulling that
report from the OCA’s website after an hour. He then moved to dismiss layman
Lewis Nescott, a federal prosecutor and a member of both the investigative
committee and the metropolitan council, for insubordination.
In response,
the Diocese of the Midwest and some parishes from other parts of the country
began withholding contributions, deepening the OCA’s chronic fiscal woes.
One piece of depressing information shaken loose during the scandal was that
the OCA, which had consistently claimed a membership of 1 million, actually
had only 27,000 dues-paying members.
In the middle
of all of this, the Rev. Thomas Hopko, the retired dean of St. Vladimir’s
Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York, released a glum “reflection” on
ocanews.org that gave some insight into the quandary would-be reformers
faced, locked as they were into an ecclesiastical system where the hierarch
holds all the cards: “We can obey our leaders who disagree with us, and
refuse to meet with us and speak with us, to the extent that they do not
lead us into heresy or immorality, whatever they are doing, or not doing, in
their personal lives and pastoral actions.”
At this low
point, blogger Rod Dreher, a columnist for the Dallas Morning News
and a fairly high profile OCA covert who left the Roman Catholic church
because of the sexual abuse scandal of the early 1990s, admitted that he
couldn’t bring himself to face up to the current OCA scandal. “There’s a big
financial scandal in the Orthodox Church in America and I have deliberately
avoided getting too involved with learning about it because I know from hard
experience that that sort of thing is a spiritual and emotional trap for
me,” Dreher wrote.
Others,
however, persevered. In late 2007 and 2008, much of the OCA energy was taken
up by the Alaska sub-scandal. But Herman felt enough pressure in the fall of
2007 to appoint a second investigative committee, this time chaired by
Bishop Benjamin Peterson, who had replaced the retired Tikhon Fitzgerald as
the leader of the Diocese of the West. Significantly, the group included
priests like John Tkachuk of Montreal and Philip Reeves, who were well known
reformers.
Under growing
pressure to adopt administrative “best practices” and surrounded by a new
team of administrators, Herman had more and more trouble squelching dissent.
Bishop Nickolai of Alaska was finally deposed in May of 2008, after several
fits and starts and a lot of embarrassing public tumult. The bishops of the
synod had also been pressed into scheduling an emergency All American
Council in November to discuss the scandal and church finances.
Preparations
for that revealed the depth of rage in the parishes. A series of eight “town
hall meetings” was called to discuss plans for the council. All eight were
well attended by angry clergy and laity.
“It is time to
rip off the band-aids and expose the wounds,” Mary Sporcic said at the July
23 meeting in Hartford. “We have been given promises of reports, delays,
etc. Take care of the problem! Enough is enough! Time to clean house!”
Calls for
Metropolitan’s Herman’s resignation or removal occurred at almost all of the
meetings. On August 30, the synod, having read a summary of a second
investigative committee’s damning report, issued a humbling statement:
“Recognizing our weakness, and our failures, the Holy Synod of Bishops bows
low before the clergy and the faithful of the Church, and we ask forgiveness
from you all. We are truly sorry that this could come to pass in the Church,
and that this has happened under our supervision.”
On September
3, Metropolitan Herman refused to attend the meeting where the investigative
report was to be released and requested a medical leave, which the synod
denied. On September 4, he retired.
This was not
the way things were supposed to go for the OCA. More than any other Orthodox
jurisdiction, it had a special sense of mission about life in America and a
vision for what American Orthodoxy could be.
Planted by
Russian missionaries to Alaska in the late 1700s, for much of its history it
was, like other Orthodox jurisdictions, mostly a haven for immigrants in a
new land. But, in the decades after World War II, its leaders laid out a
vision of transformation into a genuinely American church—post-ethnic, using
English, establishing a cloud of small mission churches, openly seeking
converts, and struggling to build an organizational structure that balanced
“American” voluntarist and democratic impulses with the hierarchical
traditions of Orthodoxy. During the years of communist domination of Eastern
Europe, it was the OCA’s intellectual leadership—theologians like George
Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann, and John Meyendorff—who shaped a
cosmopolitan church and spoke for all of Orthodoxy on the world stage.
In the 1970s,
the Moscow Patriarchate made the OCA the first “autocephalous,” or fully
self-governing, Orthodox jurisdiction in America. While this status wasn’t
recognized by other Orthodox churches here, it made a powerful statement
about the Orthodox tradition’s movement into America.
But while the
OCA did gain many converts, it did not grow, shrinking by more than 50
percent since 1970. Further, the church’s bishops worked to undercut lay and
clerical participation in governance in the name of authentic Orthodox
ecclesiology. (The OCA picked a new metropolitan three times between 1967
and 2003, and each time, the candidate selected by majority vote of the
clergy and laity representatives at an All America Council was rejected by
the bishops in favor of their own choice.)
However, the
activists at ocanews.org showed themselves to be true believers in the OCA’s
“American” vision. They demanded institutional transparency, open accounts,
servant leadership, and less emphasis on gaudy display. In September and
October, the site lobbied hard against selecting a bishop tainted by the
scandal as metropolitan, and even against a campaign orchestrated by the
influential faculty at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary to elect a
Russian Orthodox bishop serving in Austria, on the grounds that the OCA must
have an American leader.
That’s what
led to the election of Bishop Jonah Paffhausen, a man described in a
headline in the Abilene, Texas Reporter-News as “a baby bishop in a
hot seat.” Paffhausen is a shining example of a certain sort of American
Orthodox in this time—an intellectual who converted in college because of
theological reading.
Julia Duin of
the Washington Times, the first secular reporter to produce a profile
of Paffhausen (on December 1), quoted Father Steven Kostoff’s blog from the
council where he elected to explain the dramatic choice: “The black hole of
our scandal was sucking the life out of the OCA,” Kostoff wrote. “The
election of an untainted candidate with a good reputation now seems like not
only a brilliant and spontaneous response by an alert body, but the work of
the Holy Spirit.”
Paffhausen
himself explained the scandal this way: “A lot of it was growing pains,
moving from an old-style centralized church into a 21st-century church
conscious of itself as a nonprofit that has to abide by normal modes of
operation.” Previously, “what the bishop wanted, the bishop could do without
checks and balances.”
If that
attitude sticks, this will be a new day in the 2,000-year-long history of
Orthodoxy. But it is by no means clear that the rest of the Orthodox
church—in the United States, let alone the rest of the world—is with the
program.
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