About the hard and heroic life of Pskov Archpriest Pavel Adelheim

"Goodbye, until we meet at the Last Judgment!". 

Category: A little sample, about how good and sincere priests are treated inside of the Stalin created Moscow Patriarchia organization: (a mock Russian church, not the real thing)-  And this is the holy  institution, the so-called, 'Mother Russian Church', which Met. Lavre and his fellow betrayers, bowed themselves and their trusting but blind followers from the old ROCOR to, in May 0f 2007.  Back in 1970, the old North American Metropolia also, foolishly submitted itself to that same MP.  I believe, but am not certain, that Archpriest Pavel, is no longer in this world, but has gone to his eternal reward. May his Memory be Eternal!

"KESTON NEWSLETTER": Bishop’s Vendetta against Fr.  Pavel Adelheim

Fr Pavel Adelheim is one of the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) heroes from the communist past.He was ordained in 1959 and served in Uzbekistan under Bishop  Ermogen (Bishop of Tashkent 1953-1961) – one of the few bishops who protested against the restrictions placed on the church during the Khrushchev anti-religious campaign of 1959 1964. Fr Pavel helped to build a church in a remote village called Kagan and for this was arrested in December 1969. While in a labour camp the authorities staged an accident as a result of which Fr Pavel  lost a leg. After his release from prison in the spring of 1973 he returned to Uzbekistan to serve as a priest, from where he moved first to Latvia for a few months, and then to Pskov in 1976 where he has lived ever since.

Fr Pavel became an expert in canon law, and in 2003 published a book entitled Church Dogma according to the Canons and in Practice in which he criticised the governance of the ROC as uncanonical. Parish clergy, he told Keston’s  Encyclopaedia team in early 2007, are powerless: ‘A priest has no rights, he is not protected by church canons or by the law’. Clergy and laity have no opportunity to express their views – ‘the right to a voice belongs to the bishop alone’. Fr Pavel’s bishop, Metropolitan Evsevi of Pskov and Velikoluksky, developed a personal dislike for him, took away a school which he had established, removed him from one of his parishes in 2002, and was furious when he published his book on canon law calling it ‘the work of the Devil’ and describing Fr Pavel as ‘a servant of the Devil’. In 2003 Fr Pavel’s car was tampered with, leading to an accident which was intended to kill him. To undermine his work at the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, the bishop imposed on the parish Fr Vladimir Budilin, who proved a disruptive influence. The final blow fell this year: on 22 February the bishop issued Decree No 7, which dismissed Fr Pavel. We print below Decree No 7, Fr Pavel’s letter to Metropolitan Evsevi, written the day after his dismissal, and an open letter – ‘Cry of the Soul’ – from Fr Pavel’s wife, Vera Adelheim.

Decree No 7, issued by Metropolitan Evsevi,
22 February 2008
In connection with the on-going intolerable situation in the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women in Pskov, and your refusal to attend a session of the Pskov Diocesan Court, called to resolve the conflict between you and Fr Vladimir  Budilin, a priest at your church, and considering also your open hostility to former clergy at your church, you are released from the post of priest-in-charge at the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women in Pskov and will remain a priest at the said church. 

Letter to Metropolitan Evsevi
from Fr Pavel Adelheim,
23 February 2008
Your Grace,
Decree No 7 dated 22 February 2008 continues the groundless repressive action which you have inflicted upon me for the past 15 years. The Bolsheviks punished my grandparents and parents, who were innocent. As an innocent person I was tried and mutilated in prison. ‘Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers’ (Matt. 23:32). All of us have now been pronounced innocent, some posthumously, and I was rehabilitated after 40 years. In the years ahead your decree will be judged as an example of injustice. It contains the same kind of slander as the sentence meted out to me. Without any investigation you pronounced me the guilty party of an ‘intolerable situation’, although many witnesses have come forward and many letters in my defence have been sent.

1) You were not able to indicate what concrete acts I had committed. Nothing untoward has happened in the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women. For the past six months I have celebrated the liturgy daily within a peaceful environment. Vladimir Budilin broke eucharistic fellowship with the priest-in-charge [i.e. Fr  Adelheim. Ed.], he has not received communion with me, he has not observed liturgical rites and those of other sacraments, he has arrived late for services, for no valid reason he has not come to the church for six months. This was all stated in reports which you have ignored for a number of years. The attitude of the diocesan leadership to infringements of a priest’s duty and Christian ethics committed by Fr Vladimir Budilin is baffling. Fr Vladimir’s sin is described in Decree No 7 as an ‘intolerable situation in the church’. Because of his sin, you have judged and dismissed the priest-in-charge.

2) My refusal to appear in the Diocesan Court was based on canon law: I was to be tried without presentation of the indictment. Diocesan Court Regulations do not permit a trial without a statement of the crime and the indictment, as a Diocesan Court has the power to consider indictments which lead to defrocking and excommunication (5.1). Instead of an illegal trial you could have invited Fr Vladimir and me for a discussion, but you did not want to do this. 

3) ‘Open hostility to former clergy’ – this is a lie. For the 20 years during which I have been priest-in-charge at the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, the following have served as
priests:]
a. Archimandrite Elevferi Popov, now in charge of the Church of the  Dormition.
b. Fr Vladimir Georgiev, now in charge of two city churches.
c. Fr Mikhail Melnikov, now in charge of the Church of the Resurrection.
d. Fr  Evgeni Naidin, now in charge of the Matveev Church.

The Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women became a seedbed for future incumbents. I have maintained good relations with all of them. In 1997 you took away from me the church which I built in Bogdanovo. You dismissed me groundlessly from the  Matveev Church in 2001. Without establishing any guilt, in 2008 you took away a third church which I had raised up out of ruins. Having given me nothing, you have taken everything from me. You expressed personal hostility towards me during my first audience with you in March 1993, not concealing from me the consequences which were to oppress me over the next 15 years. Dismissal is the final blow; will annihilation follow? For what? Can one judge an innocent person? The greatest example is Christ the Saviour. He asked: ‘Which of you  convicteth me of sin?’ (John 8:46). But all the same ‘the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft and put him to death’ (Mark 14:1).

So I now go forth to my own small Golgotha, and repeat to you, as Bishop, that great prayer which Our Lord spoke to those who were crucifying him: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23:34).
Despite all the ill you have done me, with love
in Christ.

Open Letter from Vera Adelheim
to Metropolitan Evsevi,
29 March 2008
Cry of the Soul
The cock crew and Peter remembered the words of Jesus, and wept bitterly (Matt. 26:74- 75). The writer of this letter is the wife of Fr Pavel Adelheim  who has served within the ROC for 50 years, who suffered, to the shedding of his blood, under the godless communist regime and was repressed, and now is persecuted by the ROC and the Moscow Patriarchate through your person without just cause and without trial.

Like you I was born in the depths of the country. My father and four of my uncles died at the front, laying down their lives for their faith and fatherland. Another four uncles lived through the war and were honoured with the epaulettes and decorations of generals and colonels. Both my grandfathers got to Berlin. I was brought up according to strict rules. My grandfather gave me three instructions: ‘don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t swear’. I have abided by these rules from my youth upwards. When I finished school at 17, I married and went off to faraway Tashkent, where my husband and I lived in a paradise of warmth and love shown to us by remarkable priests and bishops. When Fr Pavel built a church in Kagan and was arrested, I was left with three children and without means. I was not abandoned, although everyone was in need. Bishop Ermogen, exiled in the Zhirovitsy Monastery, sent me part of his pension. Fr Mili Rudnev, who had seven children, helped me. Many shared their last crust with me. I did not feel alone, trusting in God and in good people. The Soviet authorities evicted my children and me from our flat, but God came to our aid. Those were different times and the Church, too, was different then.

We were happy until we met you. When you arrived life became frightening. There is no basis for your hatred, which, like hell fire, ignites within you. Fr Andrei Taskaev describes Fr Pavel as having ‘persecution mania’. It is I who have such a mania, not him. Every time a car stops outside, or a letter arrives, or the bell rings, my heart sinks as it did during the arrests of 1937. Night and day throughout these years the thought of death has never left me. 

My heart aches for good reason. Novaya gazeta [a liberal newspaper opposed to the government. Ed.] asks: ‘Have they really "banned" a priest?’ (No 53, 2003). The attack on Fr Pavel Adelheim [a car accident was deliberately engineered in 2003 with the intention of killing Fr Adelheim. Ed.] was provoked by the publication of Episcopal curses in Blagodatnye luchi [Rays of Blessing – a church publication. Ed.] (No 2, 2003). Who sent the murderer who tampered with the steering wheel? Who, having forgotten God, ordered the murder? ‘He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn!’ (Psalm 2: 4). Fr Pavel’s life was preserved! Fr Sergi Ivanov came to disrupt our peaceful parish. Without a thought for the church’s traditions established over a period of 20 years, he started a fire. Must the parish be destroyed? Must ‘the spirit and the life’ (John 6: 63) be killed? On Forgiveness Sunday, Ivanov tried to justify himself before the people: ‘I didn’t come of my own free will. The Bishop gave the order: either take off your pectoral cross [i.e. be dismissed. Ed.] or go to the Church of the Myrrh-Bearing Women.’

Last year you sent him to break up the parish of St John the Baptist: Fr Andrei Davydov left the diocese, his congregation fell apart, and its members went off to other churches. Ivanov bragged: ‘More than once I’ve been given the command to bring order to other parishes’. If you don’t like the spirit of a congregation or its priest, you rip it apart. That is why the time has come for Fr Pavel to prepare for the way of the cross; the end is near. But where are his parishioners to go?

During 15 years of persecution, you have destroyed everything in which the soul and ten years were invested: you took away three churches, a school, a home for the disabled, various enterprises, the health and peace of a family and marginalized Fr Pavel – for those less resilient your ‘pastoral care’ can lead to sickness and suicide.
Fr Evgeni Boroda from Dno hanged himself when he lost the parish where he had served for 45 years – all his life from the time of his ordination. A ban undermined the health of Igumen Roman Zagrebnev: he had a stroke and lost the use of his legs. Fr Vladimir Andreev, banned for ten years, became bedridden. How many of them have you destroyed? Why?! What end have you in store for Fr  Pavel? He will endure and hold out! It is more difficult for me to survive with my bad heart and a pacemaker. Your intrigues and machinations have broken my heart. Don’t blame others: it is you who do evil through others. From this you get the word ‘evil doer’. It is more difficult to pin a crime on the instigator than on the perpetrator.

When my husband was released from prison where he lost a leg, he went to see the bishop walking with a wooden leg and wearing someone else’s cassock. The bishop was touched and rewarded him with a pectoral cross which you intend to take away from him. The godless were persecutors; now a bishop of the ROC is oppressing us. You have turned the ROC from being a Church of martyrs into a Church which persecutes. It is no surprise. Our Lord Jesus was also persecuted and crucified by religious leaders. ‘Crucify him, crucify him!’ they cried, thirsting for the blood of the Son of God. It is the same thing all over again. Now a bishop is destroying the people of God.

Fr Pavel is not the first and will not be the last. You have taken revenge on many. ‘The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy’ (John 10:10). You are 69. Think about old age and death – you cannot stop the passage of time! The cock is already crowing! From those to whom much has been given much will be required.

Each person has his destiny. You are making human sacrifices. You have sacrificed us, and with you we will face God’s Judgement: a white mitre does not whitewash pastoral crimes.
Goodbye! Until we meet at the Last Judgement.
Keston Newsletter No 6, 2008