Orthodox Church in America ousts its leader

The Orthodox Church in America announced that it had forced its leader, Metropolitan Jonah, to resign earlier this summer, 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 dated July 16.

The case concerned a priest whom Jonah accepted into the OCA despite knowing about the man’s past problems with alcohol and his record of violence toward women. Then in February of this year, Jonah, 52, learned that the priest had been accused of rape in 2010 but did not alert the police or church authorities or investigate the matter, the synod said.