Justice wrote:NotChrysostomYet wrote:Justice wrote:Actually the number of Old Calendarists is way more than 500,000 there are suspected to be at least 1 million in Russia alone.
Frankly that would surprise me very much, partly because the Russian Orthodox Church is still on the Old Calendar (therefore diminishing the appeal of an Old Calendarist jurisdiction for people in Russia - Old Calendarism is primarily a phenomenon in Greece). But perhaps you're right. Do you know of any synods that claim at least a decent fraction of that number in Russia?
Still, the point remains: playing the numbers game as an Old Calendarist is not to your advantage, especially when I'm not even trying to say that the Old Believers as they are today are the "true" Orthodox.
I know, of course numbers don't determine the true church (that would be silly ) and actually I and the Traditional church would argue that even though Russia is still on the old calendar, it doesn't diminish the appeal of the Traditional Orthodox. The Russian Orthodox Church is involved in ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholics, Monophysites, Nestorians etc. This has caused many people in the Russian church to seek elsewhere and to stop commemorating the MP. As for the Majority of Traditional Orthodox synods in Russia, I believe it would be either the ROAC or the RTOC but I could be wrong since the synod under Metropolitan Rafail has quite the following in Russia and there are many Greek True Orthodox synods there as well.
Okay, fair enough. I'm still highly suspicious of those numbers, but oh well.
Moving on: anything specific about the Old Believers you'd be interested in/have a question about? Edit: Or I can bring up something about them, and we can continue the discussion on that. (Or not at all, lol.)