Rome, May 19, 2025
Barbara Larin with schismatic clerics: Evstraty Zorya, a man best known for his vitriol against his fellow Ukrainians who are faithful members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and Cyprian Lozinsky. Photo: Facebook
After being disciplined by the Holy Synod the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia for disobedience, just days after she traveled to Kiev to enter into prayerful communion with schismatics and platform persecutors of the Orthodox Church, former riassaphore nun Barbara (Sr. Vassa) Larin announced her apostasy from canonical Orthodoxy.
During her time in Kiev, she met with several schismatic clerics who had themselves apostatized from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and were under canonical suspension, attended Liturgy with a schismatic community, and interviewed the head of the governmental department that is tasked with shutting down all Orthodox churches and monasteries in the country, giving him a platform to blatantly lie and deny the persecution.
She also gave lectures to students of the schismatic “Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s” Kyiv Theological Seminary, and it was then announced that she is joining its faculty next year.
However, Larin’s former jurisdiction, ROCOR, stands firmly with the canonical and persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church, led by His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine, and thus her trip to Kiev was seen as the final straw after years of serious issues.
Thus, the Synod confirmed the decision of His Grace Bishop Luke of Syracuse, abbot of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, to remove her monastic veil “for disobedience … thus removing her from the ranks of monastics.”
The day after the ROCOR announcement, former Sr. Vassa made her own announcement: Rather than obeying the Synod’s discipline, she has joined the state-sponsored “Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”
Larin attempted to shift the issue away from her communion with schismatics, in direct disobedience to her own hierarchy, and paint herself as a martyr for the anti-war cause:
For the last two years, the ROCOR hierarchy has attempted to silence me on the issues connected to Patriarch Kirill’s vocal and even heretical support of the criminal Russian aggression against Ukrainians. And his jurisdiction’s uncanonical defrocking of clerics for “disobedience” to his anti-Christian agenda and teaching on “Holy War.” Now the ROCOR has issued a decree (that was sent to me in Russian, using the old, pre-revolutionary Russian orthography, which is the only not-Soviet aspect of the decree) that is meant to unmake-me a nun and to tell me how to dress. For some reason it has been posted on the ROCOR website, perhaps to assure the Kremlin that the ROCOR has nothing to do with me anymore.
However, it is well known that ROCOR has never endorsed war, and, in fact, several of its hierarchs have explicitly condemned the war.
Many have noted that even as a nun, she frequently appeared without her monastic habit, in plain clothing. In response, Larin described obedience in such matters as a mental defect:
What I wear or do not wear is dictated by common sense as it is in the case of any adult living in the free world. I don’t consult a bishop across the ocean about it, because I am not mentally impaired.
Six months ago, then-Sister Vassa published a video discussing whether there is “Neo-Sergianism” in ROCOR, and now she is a member of the state-created “Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” which is an active partner in the state’s campaign to drive canonical Orthodoxy out of Ukraine.
“To anyone wondering, I am fine. I am Sister Vassa, a ryassofor nun in the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” Larin announced.
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