The Man in the Cellophane Mask

As I had pointed out earlier, Rod Dreher's writing over the last year or so has been greatly curtailed by his employer, the John Templeton Foundation. In the meantime, speculations and questions from various sources about when he might be back have abounded. A hostile gay site asks "What's going on with Rod Dreher?" Another mean spirited blog entry hopes aloud that he was fired. Then there are Bluegrass Up and Alexandria voicing a more friendly curiosity, and from the online birthday party at Red Cardigan we learned that although Rod is not allowed to blog, he is allowed to comment on blogs. That was on February 14.

About two weeks later on March 3, Rod began blogging at the OCATruth site under the pseudonym "Muzhik", which means peasant in Russian. This was revealed by the OCA News site on April 30 based on "leaked" emails sent to Mark Stokoe, the OCA News site administrator. Since then, Rod has not added to his fifty blog posts as Muzhik. News items include the termination of a priest, Father Joseph Fester, who was in on the creation of OCA Truth and an FBI investigation about leaked emails. There is evidence that several OCA Truth posts hastily written since the outing have been since removed, a pretty good indication that they are shaken and confused, although to my mind they seemed to be the wronged party here.

Pikkumatti requested that I write up the cliff notes to this pile of spaghetti, but I admit that I need to buy a vowel as well. I don't know all the characters in this soap opera, and I admit that readily. The comments to the OCA news revelation may serve as a beginning, and there are some criticisms and condemnations of Dreher written there which make mine look mild and moderate by comparison. Some are strong enough to make me resemble the guy's drinking buddy. That suggestion is probably more likely than the narrative behind Mark Shea's accusation that I really, really hate Rod Dreher which he made a year ago in National Catholic Register. But no, I'd rather drink with happy, non-anonymous people who don't hug the bottle, and I doubt our Working Peasant would want to kick a six of MHL with such an admitted cultural Philistine.

Another piece penned around the same time a year ago was Dreher's blast at the OCA's former administration, suggesting that Metropolitan Herman has a gay lover and extolling the newly elected Metropolitan Jonah for condemning the previous administrations for corruption. Maybe he got that idea from shots at George Bush in Barack Obama speeches? I was thinking that Rod's line—"Seeing him lead us at the March for Life made me so proud to be OCA, and that’s not a feeling I’m accustomed to"—on that first post as Muzhik reminded me of Michelle Obama's comment during the 2008 campaign. An interesting admission, I think, that he's rarely proud of his new denomination. But this is a digression, sorry. My main point in bringing up the "Primate Rape" post is that in the comment section, he predictably returned to his old standby topic, the Roman Catholic clergy abuse scandal, and wrote 3 or 4 times the copy as the original post about the OCA. I won't excerpt any of that here, you can go read it yourself. He hit all the old memes: the Pope's moral failings, the lack of action on the part of Catholic lay people because they shrugged and said "It's no big deal" instead of starting blogs, bishops didn't attack other bishops enough in public, the absolute need for righteous journalists to uncover corruption, etc.

It appears that Muzhik is not much different than Rod Dreher. In his post titled This is not a game. This is real life, peasant Muzhik informs his Orthodox readers about what is going on in the Catholic church in a warning tone.

Any OCA bishop not affected by what the Roman Catholic Church has suffered because its bishops did not take sexual integrity and immorality seriously, is a fool. In Philadelphia, a grand jury recently indicted a monsignor of the Roman church over his alleged complicity in the rape of children by two priests. This monsignor did not participate in any sexual assault. The grand jury indicted him because he knew these priests were pedophiles, and he assigned them to ministry anyway.

If the state is willing to go that far there, in Philly, will it not do the same elsewhere? Personally, I rejoice in this. The bishops of the Roman church are incapable of policing themselves, and in taking their responsibilities to the faithful seriously. Let some of them start going to jail for the damage they do. That will get their attention. If our hierarchs don’t get right on this issue, they too may face jail. And that is not a bad thing.

To my knowledge, we don’t have any issues in the OCA like what the Catholics are dealing with, but I am in no position to know for sure....

Here's a cute one from March 14 where Muzhik publishes a note from a reader. Read the letter. Of whom does the reader remind you?

Over the weekend, I received an e-mail from a man who said he had been thinking for a long time that “the OCA promised by Metropolitan Jonah” is the place he and his family belonged. They are feeling defeated by the chronic problems in the Roman Catholic Church, and want a solid, orthodox place to grow in Christ. The recent trouble between the Synod and His Beatitude had discouraged the man, but he said that seeing my name on the list of Jonah supporters gave him confidence. I’m honored by his confidence in my judgment, and I’m glad to be part of an effort to spread the good news about Met. Jonah, and to remind the wider world that there’s another side to the story. His letter reminds me, though, that there are huge implications to this crisis beyond the immediate result of whether or not His Beatitude survives it. People are watching us, and not just fellow Orthodox. We are a very small church, and we cannot afford to lose potential converts. More importantly, we cannot afford to lose ordinary families who are desperate for what Orthodoxy offers. That’s how my family found its way into the OCA. We didn’t come because we believed in the bishops. We came because we believed in Orthodoxy. But the bishops, if they don’t get their act together and act like men of God instead of CEOs, will make it ever more difficult for people on the outside to hear the call of the Gospel in Orthodoxy over the noise of the petty game-playing and agenda-pushing.

The emphases are mine. Sounds like the Working Boy, doesn't it? It sort of reminded me of the episode where Bruce Wayne calls Batman on the Bat-phone. Alfred has to use some special kind of computer keyboard connected to the phone and programmed with words spoken in Batman's voice. The internet sure has simplified things.

Here's another post, The Long Game (didn't he say "This is not a game" earlier?) which takes some more shots at the Catholic church. For the record, I'm not really concerned with the posts that don't contain the word "catholic" in them. That's how I've chosen the ones to highlight, by the way.

Fr. Ted Bobosh, who is the ethics chair of the MC, has publicly stated that he doesn’t believe homosexuality to be a sin, and Mark Stokoe, Bobosh’s parishioner, is living with a same-sex partner, though we don’t know whether or not they are living chastely. Again and again, I don’t make it my business to pry into the sex lives of other people, but as an Orthodox layperson, I have a right to expect that the private lives of the men and women who serve in leadership capacities in our church — especially top leaders like MC members — are lived in conformity with Orthodox teaching, especially on a subject as contentious within all Christian churches as homosexuality. +Tikhon can’t brush this aside (nor can the other bishops), especially not in light of the destructive experiences of the Roman Catholic and Mainline Protestant churches with this subject. Not only is this a matter of theological divisiveness, but a hidden culture of sexual sinfulness among the clergy (homo and hetero) has wreaked total havoc within other churches, especially the Catholic Church. We cannot let tolerance for that kind of thing take hold in the OCA, because it will tear us apart. The OCA is not going to change its teaching on homosexuality, but neither have the Catholics, and they have been devastated by the secrets kept and lies told to keep a facade of holiness for the laity’s consumption while the reality of life among some of the clergy is very different.

Got to love that ol' Catholic facade of holiness!

I had already blogged on this post by anonymous blogger Tovarishch which features a letter from non-anonymous Rod Dreher. Here's an excerpt from it which I find darkly humorous:

The OCA, like the Roman Catholic Church in our country, is too often an absolutely passive church, one that just stands back from the culture in self-satisfaction and with a false sense of invulnerability, while opportunities to open the door for Christ to save souls slips through our complacent fingers. True, none of us need the permission of priests or bishops to evangelize for Orthodox Christianity, but when you have a visionary pastor like His Beatitude, who is all-in for a visible, counter-cultural Orthodox mission, it does wonders for one’s sense of hope and confidence.

I agree that everyone, Catholics included, should be doing more to spread the Gospel message. But I'm sorry, when you add in the current context, what I'm forced take away from this is that if Catholics were more active in spreading the Gospel, we'd be starting more anonymous blogs, then we'd be writing letters to the anonymous authors and signing our real names to be published in said anonymous blogs. Whiskey, tango, foxtrot.

I could go into a long list of books written by Bishops like Chaput and Wuerl and Popes like Benedict and John Paul along with those by hundreds of Catholic priests and lay people. But what a waste of time that would be, tilting at the cardboard windmill of Dreher's official narrative.

Well you can read the rest of the entire Rod Dreher Muzhik catalog on your own. I wish I had read more of it a couple weeks back. I think I might have outed Dreher as Muzhik without doing anything potentially illegal or unethical. He's wearing a mask, but it is made of cellophane. Who could have written this stuff other than him?

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