The intellectual prowess of Father John Whiteford’s disciples on full display.

“Nothing good comes from talking to female liberaldox ‘journalists’  with hyphenated last names”*

(Marjorie Kunch, Owner, Pascha Press)

From Merriam-Webster:

sect noun

1 a : a dissenting or schismatic religious body
   especially : one regarded as extreme or heretical

3 a : a group adhering to a distinctive doctrine or to a leader
   b : PARTY
   c : FACTION

The April 2024 edition of Texas Monthly features a report by Meagan Saliashvili on Father Whiteford’s sectarian activities, Inspired by the Confederacy and Czarist Russia, “Ortho Bros” Are on the Rise. We recommend that Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s worldwide audience take the time to give Saliashvili’s article an attentive reading. She reports that Metropolitan Nicholas’ office declined to comment for her article and Archbishop Peter’s office did not return her calls or emails.  The purpose of our article today is to make a reasonable request in our global forum for comment and clarification from His Beatitude and His Eminence.

This is not the first time Whiteford’s sectarianism has brought bad press to ROCOR. Previously, as we reported here, his 3+ hour video interview with Peter Heers, the sectarian par excellence condemned by both ROCOR and the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops USA as uncanonical, and as “teaching the faithful and those who inquire into Orthodoxy…in a manner outside of the Holy Canons,”  incurred a sharp rebuke from Archbishop Peter, Whiteford’s bishop.

Our questions for Metropolitan Nicholas and Archbishop Peter:

1. 1. Does studying theology at Southern Nazarene University qualify a man for ordination to the priesthood in ROCOR? What formal Orthodox theological education and spiritual formation was required of Whiteford, before or after his admission to holy orders? The Orthodox Church in all its North American jurisdictions is reaping the sectarian, indeed ethnophyletist, harvest of the flood of unconverted converts ordained to the priesthood and becoming internet celebrity-priests.
   2. Does ROCOR condone, or at least permit to its priests, the preaching and teaching of anything but the Gospel of Jesus Christ in all its universality, whether from the ambo in vestments or from the social hall in cassock and pectoral cross? Does Archbishop Peter’s directive that his priests’ personal opinions on “corrective baptism” must not be aired in any forum, whether spoken or written, apply by extension to other matters of personal opinion required by neither the Gospel nor Holy Tradition, including homeschooling, the superiority of agragrianism over urban life, the glorification of the Confederacy, historical revisionism (e.g., on the causes of the American Civil War), conspiracy theories (impending martyrdom at the hands of the US government),  the creation of an Orthodox sect dedicated to the superiority of the South’s religious culture (slavery, anyone?) over the North’s godlessness? Is “Southern Orthodoxy” vs. “Northern Orthodoxy” not a form of ethnophyletism writ large? Does this not pit ROCOR’s Southern flock against its own Northern flock? (Such a ridiculously meaningless distinction anyway in Orthodox ecclesiology.)
   3. Does Archbishop Peter’s directive that priests must not criticize their bishops publicly or in private conversation on the (re)baptism of converts extend to other matters? The article in question notes, “Whiteford invited questions and spoke about the different ways some Orthodox bishops botched their handling of Communion during the pandemic.”

*Ms. Kunch seems to be confused. The journalist named in the article doesn’t have a hyphenated last name. One would hope that the owner of a so-called publishing house had better reading skills.