Last year the OCA produced a video from His Grace Bishop Alexei of Alaska at the All-American Council explaining the history and troubles of the diocese. He talked about how one of the great fragmentations of the Church in Alaska is recent, that there were abusive spiritual dynamics from authority and that the laity have become very cynical and hostile. He said that the priests were often put to shame in public by higher ecclesial authorities while the laity watched. As a result, Church authority now has to be very gentle and overlook things that they would normally address. He did not go into detail, but the subtext was clear. Some members of the clergy had taken advantage of the people’s trust, and now they have a slow journey to earn it back.

This is what COVID did to the Church as a whole, and there are no exceptions. Some zealots praise certain jurisdictions as having resisted COVID lockdowns, but this is false. Although some jurisdictions opened up and loosened restrictions more quickly than others, all the various synods and ruling bishops still shut down churches in March of 2020. They excommunicated the laity and restricted Easter to the Brahmin caste. The entire ecclesial structure of Orthodox Christianity in the Anglosphere shares in the guilt. https://orthodoxreflections.com/the-great-shift-dynamics-of-ecclesial-authority-after-covid/