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A sorrowful Orthodox bump. I not posting this because I glory in it, I am posting this because I believe it important for as many Orthodox as possible to understand the circumstances surrounding this case, and because I want the rest of the world to see that Orthodox do not cover up molestation cases -- they prosecute them.

Spare me any accusations that this was some kind of a witch hunt. The original investigators were Orthodox (from ROCOR) and honest and honorable men and women. The last thing they wanted was for the accusations to be true. Having discovered that the mare's nest existed, they did the right thing -- reported it and acted on it.

As a Roman Catholic, I sympathize with ROCOR. Snakes like these often take advantage of good people, simply because those good people want to believe the best about others.

It should also be noted that this Texas group may have been horrible, but the NYC ROCOR people I have met are of irreproachable character.

In my own Church, certain bishops have proved to be abject failures in protecting their flock from wolves (like Cardinal Law in Boston), yet others have been zealous crusaders for the faithful against perverts, like Bishop Chaput of Denver. Those who have failed in their most important responsibility need to be punished more effectively.

I as an Orthodox Christian had no problem with the article at all, which seemed to me to prove quite conclusively that the monastery in question was an independent group which along the way got the idea to latch onto Orthodoxy's good reputation for its own purposes. We have had a problem for most of the past century with many people (we refer to them as "vagantes", a Latin word for "wanderers") who will CLAIM to be Orthodox and set up shop even so far as to claim to be bishops, cashing in on our good name. Given the free-speech provisions of the USA, there sessm to be nothing anyone can do about misusing the name, and conning the actual Orthodox hierarchy into cases such as the above.

But no matter what, I think it is good that there has been and will continue to be competition within the jurisdictions, since an unanticipated by-product is that this ensures that all such cases are exposed and dealt with, rather then being successfully covered up as in the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages being paid out by the Roman Catholic Church. I say it is better to follow Jesus Christ's advice that if one eye offends thee, better to pluck it out.

Were it not for our loss of tens of millions of Orthodox Christians in Europe and Asia this past century from the three most powerful totalitarianisms (Communism, Nazism, and Islam), we would be in a stronger position to deal effectively with the con men and others, but I think overall we don't have to worry about losing our very essence and function, which is to remind mankind of sinfulness and need for repentance through the Church established by Christ.