Saint Ambrosii of Belaya Krinitsa - Conversion To The Old Faith

Conversion To The Old Faith

After a trip along the Danube, Bishop Ambrosii and the monks Pavel and Alimpii arrived in Tulcea, nowadays in Romania, where five hundred Nekrasov Cossacks, together with the monks of the monastery of Slavo-Rus, their Father and Igumen Makarii Arkadii Lavrentiyevskii presented the Metropolitan the traditional tokens of hospitality: bread with salt. The government requested and obtained from the Patriarchate of Constantinople a favorable report on the bishop, before giving him permission to establish his residence in their domains. After a meeting to discuss the procedure for settlement of Ambrosii, on 28 October 1846 he held the office Vigil in honour of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker. The following day, after having read the usual confession of faith in Slavonic, Bishop Ambrosii was accepted according to Canon 95 of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. The priest monk Ieronim, with the blessing of the first and the new Metropolitan of Belaya Krinitsa and all the Russian Old Believers, began the Divine Liturgy, celebrated by Ambrosii.

The bishop read the prayers in his native language, Greek, but the deacon and the choir used Slavonic. Due to the absence of two other bishops, he used two archpriests, a procedure already used before in the history of the Church in cases of necessity, and described in some lives of saints. In August 1847 there was the ordination of Bishop Arkadii by Salvo-Rus, an ancient seat of an Orthodox monastery at Tulcea, which still exists in Romania.

The Russian Foreign Ministry threatened to retaliate the government of the Roman Catholic, if it had not withdrawn the permission to the Old Believers to establish their own Metropolia in the Habsburg Empire. The Holy Synod, by which the Tsar controlled the State Church since the abolition of the Patriarchate under Peter I, likewise threatened to cut all financial assistance from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, if he had not done everything in its power to induce the Metropolitan Ambrosii to change its position. Metropolitan Ambrosii, however, refused. Certainly the Old Believers convinced him that the system of the Holy Synod, established in 1700 by Peter I to check the status of the church in place of the patriarch, and with whom they have not wanted to do was not a canon. By decree of Tsar Paul I, the Russian rulers had declared "the Church" and all the bishops of the church had been obliged to honour an oath to that effect.