Wednesday, June 24, 2009

OCA Ends Relations with Episcopal Church

His Beatitude, the Archbishop of Washington, Metropolitan of All America and Canada of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) announced recently that his church has ended its ecumenical relations with The Episcopal Church, and will establish instead formal ecumenical relations with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

Metropolitan Jonah of the OCA made the announcement June 24 at a plenary session of the ACNA’s founding convocation at St Vincent’s Cathedral, Bedford, Texas.

An autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church, the OCA was established by eight Russian monks in 1794 on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Known as the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in America, it was granted autocephaly, or autonomy, by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970. The OCA has 700 congregations, monasteries and communities spread across the United States and Canada.

Metropolitan Jonah, 49, was reared in The Episcopal Church, but joined the OCA while a student at the University of California, San Diego, in 1978.

Read it all here.

2 comments:

Ecgbert said...

Good for the OCA and not surprising. Its parent the Russian Church ended them right after Gene Robinson as you probably know.

Recently talked to a Greek Orthodox priest who studied at General in the 1950s when many Episcopal priests were Catholic-minded and really interested in that sort of ecumenism. He went to a recent reunion and was heartbroken by the change.

(20 years ago in England I met somebody who was at the Anglo-Catholic Congresses in the 1920s.)

But if you look realistically at Anglican history - the Erastianism, the Protestantism, the big hit that church took at the 'Enlightenment' (discreet unitarianism or outright unbelief has been normal there since the 1700s) - you can see it was inevitable.

Alice C. Linsley said...

Sad, but true, John.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the proposed dialogue between the Orthodox and Nashotah.