The whole clusterfrack that is the Orthodox Church in America leadership imbroglio just got a whole lot more complicated. Abbess Aemeliane, who leads a group of DC nuns who had become a flashpoint in the conflict between the former Metropolitan, Jonah, and his enemies on the Synod, has just released a trove of documents, intending to defend herself and her monastery. Aemeliane & Co. were recently released from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), which had received them after the OCA gave them the boot.
This situation is impossibly, well, Byzantine, and these documents don’t clarify much, at least to a pair of eyes uneducated in the ways of canon lawyers. But it does seem clear that the laywoman who made rape allegations against a troubled priest-monk closely associated with the nuns is really unstable, and hard to credit. Plus, Aemeliane has some sort of canonical beef with Bishop Melchizedek, such that it appears she’s trying to offer evidence that he was received into the OCA (where he became bishop) under false pretenses, though I cannot figure the documents out. The main thing I took away from this reading is: Abbess Aemeliane thinks she and her group are martyrs in all this, and, in the grand tradition of Christian martyrs, is probably going to sue you. And you, and you, and you.
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