Ottawa, August 11, 2022
rocorstudies.org
On July 7, on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, the Church of Blessed Ksenia of St. Petersburg in Ottawa returned to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia after several years in schism, reports the ROCOR Canadian Diocese.
The parish community was formed in 1989, and in 1997, the first Divine services were celebrated in its own church building. However, the community eventually ended up one of the several splinter ROCOR groups that rejected what they believed to be ecumenism in the canonical ROCOR.
Parish rector Archpriest Oleg Mironov spoke about his personal journey in an interview last month with Archdeacon Andrei Psarev.
One of the things that finally convinced Fr. Oleg, an anti-ecumenist, to return to ROCOR after several years in schism was “the cooling of relations between our church leadership in Moscow and international organizations as a result of the conflict in Ukraine.”
“As we know from the Orthodox Catechism, the Lord often turns even evil arising from the evasion of free will or goodness, into good,” Fr. Oleg commented.
“It seems to me that the degree of involvement of our hierarchs in the ecumenical movement has been very seriously limited owing to such providential actions, perhaps even against the wishes of many of these hierarchs. This seems to me to be a very positive thing. That is, in such a terrible way, the Lord may lead the Church to recover, to overcome some internal temptation.”
At the same time, the various “Remnant ROCOR” groups “have developed absolutely Zealot, non-Orthodox expressions,” says Fr. Oleg.
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