It's scary to burn bridges

The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, at an extraordinary meeting held at the end of June in San Francisco, decided to address “with a final letter of admonition” to the Bishop of Tauride and Odessa Agafangel (Pashkovsky), who was banned from ministry in May of this year until he repented. Bishop Agafangel condemned last fall the decisions of the ROCOR Synod of Bishops on the upcoming reunification with “the Moscow Patriarchate, which is in schism,” as stated in the statement of the extraordinary diocesan meeting held under his chairmanship, and did not recognize the signing of the Act on Canonical Communion. In his diocese, which unites ROCOR parishes in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, the commemoration of Metropolitan Laurus in church prayers as the head of the Church Abroad was stopped (later, however, restored). After the reunification, the parishes of Agafangel refused to commemorate the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Alexy II. Bishop Anafangel also refused to go to the Buenos Aires and South American See, where, out of harm’s way, the foreign leadership wanted to send him.

At the meeting of the Synod, a letter from Bishop Agafangel addressed to Metropolitan Laurus was read out, in which he asks for advice and instructions on what to do. The Synod of Bishops decided to warn the bishop for the last time “about the dangerous and canonically slippery path” that he and the clergy who went into schism with him had chosen. At the end of 2006, part of the clergy of the diocese, headed by Bishop Agafangel, moved to the newly formed “Russian Orthodox Church,” which is headed by the former priest of the Western American Diocese of the ROCOR, Anthony Orlov, who proclaimed himself “Metropolitan of Moscow and All-Russia, Los Angeles and All-Diaspora.”