Chancellors in the OCA

The word “chancellor” has different meanings in different places within both the OCA and the larger picture of the American Orthodox scene.

In the GOA, chancellor is a staff position more like a secretary. For the Antiochians, the chancellor is another word for “legal council”.

But within the OCA the office of chancellor came to be the “sub-bishop” for ailing or inattentive hierarchs. They travelled and spoke and “appeared” and were regular features at big events.

Not all ailing bishops used their chancellors as much as they probably should have. Archbishop Peter L’Huillier would not have lost $250,000 in assessments that flat out disappeared if there was someone he entrusted his managerial affairs to. That’s what a chancellor does- he manages the office for the bishop, instead of replacing him.

But the decline in leadership of the OCA created a power vacuum. In the early years of Metropolitan Theodosius Lazor’s reign, Fr. Alexander Schmemman ran the OCA not as chancellor but as ‘guru par excellence’ who taught Lazor in seminary and knew what buttons to push.

Schmemman’s death in 1982 meant that the Holy Synod would go without real leadership until a priest name Robert Kondratick appeared in the late 1980s as the Chancellor of the OCA. Within a few years, financial problems began to arise.  By the middle of the 1990’s there was a full on crisis involving millions of dollars.

But what was clear from the investigation is that Lazor and Kondratick worked together to move money out of the OCA’s pockets and into the netherworld. It is pretty clear from meeting Lazor that in addition to being uninspiring as a leader he was also disinterested in leading. He read speeches he clearly did not write and seemed more preoccupied with collecting vestments than anything else. He was not even trying.

He did not have to because he had Kondratick who was all too happy to fly out somewhere and hand out a check for the OCA ‘central administration’. He liked doing everything that Lazor seemed to preoccupied to do, like take his office seriously.

Rumors swirled about Lazor’s personal problems, drinking and homosexuality were often bantered about. These were the open secrets of the OCA on the eastern seaboard. The only thing that kept the cat in the bag was that most of the bishops were “old school” and hated talking about problems, especially those problems. Plus most people agreed that Lazor appeared harmless… up until they found out he was taking “their” money.

I told you before that the other bishops dealt with Lazor’s pathetic ministry by turning inward. Every bishop made sure his diocese was set up the way he liked in and the status quo gave each bishop a lot of freedom while avoiding the obvious problems with the “Decorator in Chief” in Syosset. Royster was fond of telling people that everything was OK in his diocese. When he refused to turn Kondratick over to Swaiko for spiritual court his theological letter did not even address his accountability to the Holy Synod that he had sworn an oath to.

A Chancellor-run OCA does not need a strong Synod. It needs a strong chancellor. But this is not how the OCA is set up according to the Statute and it certainly is not the model in the canons of the Church. This is why God pulled the rug out from under the OCA and let the chips fall where they may. The enabling of Lazor’s malaise was brought to an end with a “stroke” and finally Alzheimer’s.

Swaiko certainly ran his own affairs. Indeed, he had seen enough of chancellors and wouldn't have one, running his own diocese alone without a chancellor. Surrounding him were not strong chancellor types but weak, unaccomplished, and compromised cronies who would bask in his favor and lord it over the monks, students, and diocesan clergy, including of course, those who actually got the work done that made those institutions run. It used to be said that he knew how much power he himself had accrued underneath Archbishop Kiprian Borisevich, and didn't want anyone to do to him what he had done to Borisevich. Unchecked, he mingled the financial affairs of everything he was responsible, the diocese and two separate stavropegial institutions, St. Tikhon monastery and seminary. After his election as Metropolitan, he passed over Dahulich and for Tikhon Mollard, a fine monk… but who had never even been in a parish. Now he made sure that he had a chancellor put in place in Eastern Pennsylvania for his successor. It has only been in the last few years that Mollard has actually run the Diocese of Eastern Pennsylvania without the active involvement of Swaiko. As Metropolitan, Swaiko wanted to lead but he was not able to get beyond the “every bishop for himself” model. He had made too much use of it himself.

With an active chancellor Kondratick, Lazor began to accrue for himself vacant diocese after vacant diocese as bishops died and no new ones were elected. This gave Kondratick more managerial “activity” and more money to collect and spend. This also allowed him to ingratiate himself to clergy in those dioceses and he dealt with their problems and Lazor stared out the window. He got to look like a “good guy” while no one pushed the big question- when are you electing new bishops?

The excuse was always the same- there are not enough candidates. Well there were not enough of the right kind for Lazor and Kondratick.

The bishops got older and sicker. In Fitzgerald’s case, the sickness was in his head. He also needed a “strong” chancellor while dealing with his weak bowels that kept him off aircraft and in his bathroom where he could surf the internet and post gems like these:

Why, Seraphim! No big deal! I’m not "keyboard-challenged." I consider participation in THIS public forum to be part of an Episcopal ministry, and I am astonished that so many Bishops have no time for any public forum. Some actually seem to lift up the hems of their garments, lest they be soiled by public contact with the "Great Unwashed of the Internet!" Satan doesn't sleep, not even during the Great Fast, obviously. What? "Let Satan have the Internet?" I'll be 70 in November, but sometimes men much younger than I demonstrate an alarming decreptitude and failure to recognize these Lists as at least as worthy of their presence as Mars Hill, or the place dedicated to the Unknown God (who, it turns out, is Mercury).

This, by the way, takes an infinitesimal amount of time. Today I've come down with a torrential flux, and may not budge more than two steps from my bathroom, while waiting for Immodium to "take hold."

I also take my laptop with me on my visitations. Thus much of my participation on the Lists was accomplished in the two-three hour dead time one has at LAX and other airports. I recommend Seraphim himself get out in the real world more, and then he might avoid this "astonishment."

What is astonishing about this post on the Indiana List is not necessarily that a ‘sitting bishop’ would talk about his “throne” but that Fitzgerald would even remember what being at LAX was like. In 2002 when he posted this revelation he made less than 10 trips from Los Angeles even with a diocese of over 50 parishes.

How did he manage to keep his diocese in any kind of order? The chancellorship of Soriach who maintained a parish in Las Vegas while filling in for Fitzgerald when the other was tending to his ‘personal needs’. We will soon get to that story but what I want to say is that Soriach was very much Fitzgerald’s own version of Kondratick.

In the OCA this strong chancellorship appears to arise when a bishop stays in office past his prime if he had a prime to begin with.

The problem is that the Chancellor of the OCA is not the Metropolitan’s personal assistant- the Statute says that the chancellor is appointed by the metropolitan at the recommendation of the Metropolitan Council and fired by the Metropolitan at the recommendation of the Holy Synod.  Thus the office belongs to the greater OCA.

The chancellor is not supposed to help an incompetent, disabled, or distracted bishop stay in office. When this happens, problems occur. We will look at some bad examples of this arrangement that the new Holy Synod is trying to rectify.