METROPOLITAN ANTHONY BLOOM: A PERSONAL TESTIMONY
Olga
Moss
Introduction: Recent reports from Russia
and Serbia that the MP’s Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh is considered
to be a saint and may be canonized, together with the fact that the St. Herman
Calendar for 2006 included the date of his death as if he were a righteous man,
led me to ask my wife, Mrs. Olga Moss, who was very close to him for several
years in the 70s, to write down what she knew about him. Some will object that
one should not speak ill of the dead. Our reply is: if, by not knowing the true
facts about a dead man, the living are going to be led into soul-destroying
error by venerating and praying to a pseudo-saint whose teaching was heretical
and his life unclean, then it is better – better, perhaps, even for him,
wherever he may be now – that the truth be told.
Readers will excuse us if, in order to put
these facts into context, my wife includes some biographical details about her
own life.
Vladimir
Moss.
I
was born in Batavia, Indonesia. My father was Dutch and
worked for a Dutch bank. My mother, née Maria Arsenievna Morozova, was a
White Russian from Moscow.
Every six months or so we had to move to a different town.
All the schools I went to were Protestant. When the war broke out my mother and
I were in prison under the Japanese for three and a half months, exactly 100
days, and after that we were in a concentration camp for approximately two
years.
After the war I came to England
with my first husband, an English officer serving in the Gurkhas in Java. I
joined the Anglican Church and had my four children baptised in it. Looking at
the beautiful churches with their stained-glass windows depicting the apostles
and the saints, and hearing the creed being recited, I presumed that the
Anglican Church had the Apostolic Faith. But when I was about 40 years old, I
felt something “missing” in the churches. I was also weary with listening to
sermons on third-world poverty and politics, and never about spiritual subjects
such as the angels, death, hell, etc., or with a
profound interpretation of the Scriptures. Then I met someone who belonged to
the Moscow Patriarchate in Ennismore Gardens, London.
That Sunday I visited it and when I entered and heard the choir sing: “Iisus
Khristos”, I realized how hungry I had been for the worship of the Lamb. My
heart longed for spiritual food and worship.
Always as a child I had believed in the Divine Mystery of the Body and
Blood of Christ. My mother, being Orthodox, used to take me to Orthodox
liturgies, while my father, being a Protestant, took me to the “Apostolic”
Church. When I was about nine years old, when my father was on leave and we
were staying with relatives of my mother in Paris, I met Vladyka John Maximovich.
Since as a child I had never been stopped from receiving communion in
the Orthodox Church, although I was baptised in the Lutheran Church, I went up
to receive communion in Ennismore Gardens without first doing confession. But
when I was told by Fr. Michael Fortounatto that I had to do confession first, I
readily agreed. Then my mother pointed out that I should be received into the
Orthodox Church since I had only been baptised in the Lutheran Church.
So I phoned up Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, who told me to come to his house in Upper Addison
Gardens, where he gave me
chrismation. I asked my youngest daughter, Sonia, to come with me to be a
witness.
Metropolitan Anthony then asked me to arrange retreats that were to be
conducted by him. So we had retreats in St. Teresa’s convent school in
Effingham and other places.
In 1970 I went to the Lebanon
and then to Jerusalem.
After three weeks in Beirut and one week in Jerusalem, I joined up with a wonderful Orthodox group
from America belonging to the
Russian Church in Exile, as she was then called.
They took me to Hebron,
where I met the saintly Igumen Ignaty. They complained to him that I belonged
to the Moscow Patriarchate. He looked at me intently and smiled: “Olga does not
know, but when she finds out the truth about the Moscow Patriarchate, she will
act and leave it.” I was bewildered! What was wrong with the Moscow
Patriarchate? I asked to do confession with Fr. Ignaty, and suddenly tears
poured out of my eyes. But then they stopped as abruptly as they had started. I
felt as if I had been cleansed from soot like a chimney. Fr. Ignaty had the
gift of giving people tears of repentance. I went back to may seat and wondered
in what way I had sinned so much!
Returning to England,
I began to listen carefully to the sermons of Metropolitan Anthony, and to the
talks he gave at the retreats I organized. I was shocked when I heard him say
to an Anglican girl who had a fiancé who could not accept that the Lord
went up with a human body at the Ascension: “Of course not! What would God the
Father say to Christ: ‘What is this human flesh sitting next to me?’” She laughed in a relieved way, thinking it was not
essential to believe that the Lord went up with His human body! I was at a loss
and ignorant, but I knew in my heart that the reason why Christ died for us was
in order to carry His humanity into the life of the Holy Trinity. I eagerly
started to read the Church Fathers, to learn how to answer heretics and in that
way learn the truth more exactly.
On another occasion I gave Metropolian
Anthony a lift to Woodham church in Woking,
where he gave a talk on the Orthodox Church. One speaker asked: “Do you believe
that the Orthodox Church is the True
Church?” He replied: “It
is for me! But if you are English, then it is your culture to be an Anglican.”
I was very angry, and had words with him when I drove him to Ennismore Gardens.
Surely, I said, there is only One True Church,
which is the Bride of Christ, and there cannot be thousands of different Christian Churches all believing something
different? He did not answer, but changed the subject, saying only that we have
to be tolerant with “beginners”. I was alarmed and thought: How would the
Apostles and Saints have answered that question?”
I also noticed that Metropolitan Anthony never liked to speak about the
Church as the elect.
At one retreat, Vladimir, who had just come on the scene in Ennismore Gardens, asked Metropolitan Anthony a
question about the Holy Spirit. He gave an evasive answer, and Vladimir looked puzzled.
As I had been in the Lebanon
and talked with Abbot Elias and his monks about the Holy Spirit, I went up to Vladimir and said: “God
the Holy Spirit is a Person in His own right – the third Hypostasis of the Holy
Trinity.” For Vladimir,
this came as a revelation. I continued: “I’ve discovered that Fr. Anthony can
speak neither about the Holy Spirit nor about the Church.” I also told him
that, according to the Arab Orthodox whom I had visited in the Lebanon,
all the words for the Holy Spirit in Syriac and Aramaic, such as “ruach” and
“shekinah”, are feminine.
Once someone asked Metropolitan Anthony about the ten virgins, and why
the five wise virgins did not share their oil with the foolish ones. He laughed
and said that in fact the action of the five wise virgins was quite
unchristian… I looked up St. John Chrysostom on this passage, and found that,
according to him, the source from which the wise virgins get their oil is the
Holy Spirit, and that oil is grace and one cannot share grace with anyone else.
One can only tell him where to get it.
Once my mother came to England
and spoke to Metropolitan Anthony for quite a long time after the liturgy. He
seemed quite scared of her. Then she told me: “He’s not Orthodox”, and compared
him unfavourably with the bishops and priests of the Russian Church
in Exile whom she had known.
He once told me that as a bishop he could break the canons. When I told
this some years later to Metropolitan Epiphanios of Cyprus, he laughed and
said: “It is precisely we bishops who have to uphold and protect the canons!”
Once a member of the Russian Church Abroad who was a practising
homosexual was told by Vladyka Nikodem of Great Britain that he was not
allowed to receive communion as long as he practised this sin. He went
to the senior priest at Ennismore Gardens, Fr. Michael Fortounatto, who put his arm
around him and told him that in Ennismore
Gardens they would allow him to
receive communion since the Moscow Patriarchate was the Church of Love…
Archimandrite Barnabas, who had a small monastery in Wales, told me the following story.
He said that he and Anthony Bloom and one other person had been living in a
skete in France
shortly after the war. (It should be pointed out that Metropolitan Anthony was
a French citizen, a surgeon by training, who had worked for the Maquis, the
communist underground, during the war.) Once a man from Moscow came to the skete and asked to speak
to each of the monks separately. The three monks gathered afterwards to compare
notes. Anthony Bloom refused to reveal the contents of his conversation with
the man, but Archimandrite Barnabas and the other monk found that he had made
them both the same offer: if they joined the MP, opened a parish for the patriarchate
in London, and supplied them with information about the parishioners gleaned
from confession or gossip, then they would be well looked-after by Moscow.
Archimandrite
Barnabas and the other monk rejected the proposal, but very soon Metropolitan
Anthony and his mother turned up in London in a
house with a plaque saying “Moscow Patriarchate”, and proceeded to divide the
parish of the Russian
Church in Exile, bringing
many people to his new MP parish. Within a few years he was promoted to the episcopate…
On Good Friday, 1975, I was sitting outside the cathedral in Ennismore Gardens waiting for the burial service
to begin. Two women came up to me separately and began to talk to me. One was a
young Frenchwoman. She cried and said that Metropolitan Anthony had raped her.
I could not believe it! But then the other woman, an Englishwoman who worked
for Church Times, and said that she
had been raped by him. The descriptions given by the two women, who did not
know each other, were almost identical! I went to Fr. Michael Fortounatto and
told him what I had heard. He looked at me haughtily and said: “Are you not
used to sin?! I was stunned…
After Pascha I went to the church again, to the place where confessions
were heard. Metropolitan Anthony came out, and I told him: “I haven’t come to
do confession, but to ask you if it is true that you have raped
Françoise and [the other woman’s name]?” He said: “I have! But I’ll tell
you something. I know that when I die I will go to hell. But not because of the
sins I’ve committed against women – that’s nothing! – but because of the sin
I’ve committed against the Church.” I said that even Judas could have been
saved if he had repented and not lost hope in the mercy of Christ. But he said:
“It’s too late…”
What could this sin against the Church be?
I did not dare to ask. Everything was happening at once. It was like a pack of
cards falling down…
Metropolitan Anthony once told me that Metropolitan Nikodem of Leningrad
was a great friend of his and a wonderful Christian, and that they had gone
together to represent the MP at the General Assembly of the World Council of
Churches in New Delhi in 1961. At that time I did not know that Metropolitan
Nikodem was a KGB bishop, and there was nothing written against him in the
English newspapers. However, my father sent me from Holland a large article from De Telegraaf which claimed that
Metropolitan Nikodem was a major-general of the KGB. I went to speak to the
foreign editor of De Telegraaf, and
he told us that Metropolitan Nikodem had been spotted as good material for the
KGB already in his childhood. But he also told us: “Your greater enemy is
Anthony Bloom, since he is an arch-ecumenist and erodes the Orthodox faith from
within.”
It is certainly true that Anthony Bloom was an ecumenist. He was even
given a decoration by the Anglicans for his ecumenical work. He wore this on
many occasions.
I was still in the MP when once I was drinking some tea after the
liturgy. Metropolitan Anthony came up to me and said: “Today I’m going to your
country.” He meant Holland,
which is where my parents lived. I asked him: “Why?” He replied: “I have to see
Bishop Dionysius, as he has caused a crisis in the Church.” I asked: “Why? Is
he a Mason?” He replied: “It is worse than that. I have to discipline him.” At
that time his driver used to be a Russian woman from Cambridge called Irene, so I asked him: “Is
Irene taking you to the airport?” He replied: “No, I’m going by taxi.” I asked:
“When will you be back?” He said: “Today, I’m just going over to see him.”
Now on that day, which was Sunday, I did not know that I myself would be
going over to Holland
soon. My father phoned me and asked me to come. When I had arrived and was
sitting with my parents in their sitting room, my father said: “Isn’t it awful
that Bishop Dionysius died so suddenly last Sunday?” I said that I had not read
anything about it in the English newspapers. My father told me that Bishop
Dionysius had asked reporters from all the Dutch newspapers to come and see
him. This was on a Friday. He told them that he had left the Moscow
Patriarchate because Patriarch Pimen had been telling lies publicly on
television and radio, saying that there was no persecution of the faithful in Russia
and some other lies. The next day, Saturday, the papers published this
head-line news. Then, on the Sunday, Fr. Arseny, the monk who lived with Bishop
Dionysius, and who had left him in the morning after the liturgy, returned in
the evening to find him dead. On Monday the newspapers announced that Bishop
Dionysius had died of a heart-attack. I was stunned…
I went with my parents to visit some friends, and Fr. Arseny happened to
be there. He told me with tears that nobody wanted to bury his bishop. The MP
refused to do so, and the Russian
Church in Exile also
refused because, although he had applied to join them, he had not yet been
officially received by them. Instead, he had been buried by the local council
with Fr. Arseny and his parishioners standing round his coffin crying. I said
to the monk: “Of course you know that Metropolitan Anthony visited him on
Sunday?” “What?!” exclaimed Fr. Arseny. I told him of our conversation and how
he had told me himself that he was going to visit Bishop Dionysius that day
because he needed to be discipline because of the crisis he had caused in the
Church. Fr. Arseny went pale and said: “I had better disappear from the scene
now that I know this...”
Coming back to England after the nightmare of all these discoveries I
had been making about Metropolitan Nikodem of Leningrad, the women who claimed
they had been raped by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, his confession that he would
go to hell for his sins against the Church, I consulted with the other members
of our parish, and on the feast of the Dormition we decided to leave the Moscow
Patriarchate. Then I decided I had to go and see him to tell him personally
that I was leaving. He granted me an interview in his house in Upper Addison
Gardens. We sat opposite
each other with the window on either side of us. Not knowing how to begin, I
asked him to pray to the Holy Spirit to guide us. He seemed surprised, but
agreed. Then I said: “Why did you lie to me about Metropolitan Nikodem, saying
that he was a wonderful Christian? According to the Dutch newspapers that he is
a major-general of the KGB, and according to Keston college,
he is a lieutenant-colonel of the KGB. He was groomed as a child to become a
KGB agent.” Metropolitan Anthony went pale and looked worried. “How much more
do you know?” he asked. “I want to know for whom you are working – Christ or
Antichrist? The Prophet Elijah said you cannot have one foot in each of two
opposing camps.” He jumped up: “What are you going to do?” I said: “Leave you,
of course, as you are not a true bishop.” He did not deny this, but said:
“Where are you going?” I said: “Perhaps to the Russian Church
in Exile.” He snapped: “That splinter group!” I said: “I’d rather be with a
splinter group if God is there than with a mighty Church organization if God is
not there.” “What is the parish going to do?” I answered: “Leave you, of
course.” “I want all of you to come to my house next week after the liturgy of
the Exaltation of the Cross to talk with me. Then I will show you documents to
prove that you are wrong.” I said: “We’ll come to your house, but not to the
liturgy.” “Olga,” he said, “there is nothing wrong
with the Cross of Christ.” “There is nothing wrong with the Cross of Christ,” I
agreed, “but there is with the man whose hands are holding it.”
On the feast of the Exaltation, several
members of the parish, including Vladimir and I, went to his house. Vladimir explained the
reasons for the parish’s decision – the sergianism and ecumenism of the Moscow
Patriarchate. I then asked the metropolitan to show us the documents he had to
prove that we were wrong. He said that he could not find them at that moment…
They were in his attic… We told him that he had had enough time to find them,
and began to leave the room, not asking for his blessing. I was the last to
leave. “May God be with you,” he said to me. “He will be,” I replied, “if I
remain faithful to Him.”
Our parish joined the Russian
Church in Exile on the
feast of the Protecting Veil, 1975. Over a year later, in January, 1977, we
were visting Archbishop Vitaly in Montreal.
To our amazement, he told us that Metropolitan Anthony Bloom had applied to be
received by the Russian
Church in Exile during
the year after we had left him. The Synod of Bishops had met to discuss his
application, and it was agreed that he could be received into the Church, but
not as a bishop. Metropolitan Anthony did not accept this condition, and
remained in the MP. As Archbishop Vitaly said to us: “How
could we receive him as a bishop when for years he had collaborated with the
communists?”
Woking.
March 4/17, 2006.