Talk:American Orthodox Catholic Church
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[edit] Possible copyvio???
Looking over this document it smacks of copyvio. But the only thing I could find was that it is a copy and paste from [The Independent Movement] wiki. I think that gives the article some freedom. Somebody with more knowledge than me should verify this. James084 13:49, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] npov
Reading this article, I have absolutely no idea what the AOCC actually is, just what their religious agenda is like. This article needs someone from outside the church itself to write a good, concise summary of its history and program, and to make it relevant and intelligible. --Cantara 19:50, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] American Orthodox Catholic Church
Much of the information given in the article is valid up to a point; it's the conclusion that is misleading. There are several denominations which claim authority from the Propheta line as the AOCC (especially in the 1960s) was notorious as a "bishops mill": Propheta consecrated bishops with reckless abandon, and this writer was present at several in a relatively short period of time.
The article mentions some of the co-consecrators of Propheta in 1964, but does not mention Theodotus de Witow, a member of the occult society, the Societas Rosicruciana in America (SRIA), which had a small chapel and office on Manhattan's Upper West Side. DeWitow's superior and consecrator, one George Winslow Plummer, was an associate of the famed English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley at one time and edited a Rosicrucian journal entitled Mercury in the 1920s. All in all, a chequered line of apostolic succession.
The article is absolutely correct, however, on Propheta's connections with the FBI, with Thomas Dewey, and oddly enough with Cardinal Spellman. Propheta's anti-communist campaigns lasted throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and he appeared on television raising consciousness concerning the Katyn Forest Massacre. It was as an anti-communist with ties to Eastern Europe that Propheta came to the attention of American and foreign intelligence services, a legacy that has continued with some of the bishops who claim succession through him (though not, I don't believe, with Gabre Medhin Jeremiah).
The article speaks of the influence of Propheta that was "extended to many parts of the world": this was due, at least in part, to the AOCC being used as a front for intelligence activity. The name of the church comes up several times in the National Archives files on the JFKennedy assassination, as Carl Stanley -- a bishop with the AOCC -- had consecrated David Ferrie and Jack Martin (two putative members of a Kennedy assassination conspiracy and depicted in Oliver Stone's film JFK by Joe Pesci and Jack Lemmon, respectively). Ferrie and Martin were investigators for Guy Banister in New Orleans, the Camp Street office that supposedly "ran" Lee Harvey Oswald when the latter was fronting for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Other investigators for Banister later became consecrated as bishops in the AOCC, including Thomas Jude Baumler; so much so that this writer refers to Banister's office as the "Camp Street Cathedral". The story of the AOCC is fascinating, if a little bizarre and difficult to understand if one is not aware of the "wandering bishop" phenomenon. I recommend Peter Anson's book, Bishops At Large (which has just been reprinted) for background on the phenomenon, and humbly my own work, Sinister Forces - Volume One, for more background on the AOCC and its links to the JFK assassination and other intelligence activities. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Levenda (talk • contribs) .
The article confuses several things about Orthodox Church history - especially in its apparent attempt to call upon Russian Orthodox Church history as a pedigree of descent for the AOCC. What it ought to come clean about is that no Orthodox church of any description (including the Greeks, the Orthodox Church of America, or the Russian patriarchal Church of Moscow, acknowledges it or has any communion with it whatsoever. The same is true in regard to the Catholic Church. It is not an Orthodox church in the common understanding of that term, and the irrelevant data concerning Moscow's grant of Autocephaly to the OCA which it speasks about as part of its origin( the OCA being a legitimate Orthodox Church) serves only to confuse that issue for the innocent reader. Belisarios 22:33, 14 November 2006 (UTC) Belisarios.
[edit] Edited somewhat
Did a quick-and-dirty edit to make it a bit less like an advert and introduce the simple fact that 99% of Orthodox Christians would regard the AOCC as quackery. Shinkage
