This is from the blog of Andrew Walsh:
RELIGION IN THE NEWS
Winter 2009, Vol. 11, No. 3
Scandalous Days in the OCA
... the activists at ocanews.org showed themselves to be true believers in the OCA’s “American” vision. They demanded institutional transparency, open accounts, servant leadership, and less emphasis on gaudy display. In September and October, the site lobbied hard against selecting a bishop tainted by the scandal as metropolitan, and even against a campaign orchestrated by the influential faculty at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary to elect a Russian Orthodox bishop serving in Austria, on the grounds that the OCA must have an American leader.
That’s what led to the election of Bishop Jonah Paffhausen, a man described in a headline in the Abilene, Texas Reporter-News as “a baby bishop in a hot seat.” Paffhausen is a shining example of a certain sort of American Orthodox in this time—an intellectual who converted in college because of theological reading.
Julia Duin of the Washington Times, the first secular reporter to produce a profile of Paffhausen (on December 1), quoted Father Steven Kostoff’s blog from the council where he elected to explain the dramatic choice: “The black hole of our scandal was sucking the life out of the OCA,” Kostoff wrote. “The election of an untainted candidate with a good reputation now seems like not only a brilliant and spontaneous response by an alert body, but the work of the Holy Spirit.”
Paffhausen himself explained the scandal this way: “A lot of it was growing pains, moving from an old-style centralized church into a 21st-century church conscious of itself as a nonprofit that has to abide by normal modes of operation.” Previously, “what the bishop wanted, the bishop could do without checks and balances.”
If that attitude sticks, this will be a new day in the 2,000-year-long history of Orthodoxy. But it is by no means clear that the rest of the Orthodox church—in the United States, let alone the rest of the world—is with the program.
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