Syosset, N.Y. — The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) has announced that it forced its controversial leader, Metropolitan Jonah, to resign in July chiefly because he had failed to remove a priest accused of rape.
“In light of the recent widely publicized criminal cases involving sexual abuse at Penn State and in the Philadelphia Archdiocese and the Kansas City Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church, the extent of the risk of liability to which Metropolitan Jonah has exposed the Church cannot be overstated,” bishops of the Holy Synod, the OCA’s leadership board, said in a statement July 16.
The case concerned a priest who Jonah accepted into the OCA despite knowing about the man’s past problems with alcohol and record of violence toward women. Then in February of this year, Jonah, 52, learned that the priest had been accused of rape in 2010 and he did not alert the police or church authorities or investigate the matter, the synod said.
OCA leaders also said Jonah, who was elected metropolitan in 2008, was involved with unnamed others in attempting to keep the alleged victim and a relative of hers from pursuing the case, telling them that “their salvation depended on their silence.”
Jonah, in a letter, “begged forgiveness … for whatever difficulties have arisen from my own inadequacies and mistakes in judgment.” Jonah’s statement was an effort to clarify rumors that he had been forced to resign over a rape case.
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