Page:John Feoktist Dudikoff - Beasts in Cassocks (1924).djvu/14

 etc. In doing this, the "Authorities in Cowls" made such clever use of the information thus obtained that the money of the person confessed would be transferred to the bottomless pockets of the Platons and Alexanders, and those who confessed would be deported to Russia and, not infrequently, would land in prison or be dispatched ad patres outright.

It seemed that with the advent of the Russian Revolution this practice would become part of a horrible tradition. It seemed that particularly in free America, our missionaries would reform with the Czar's fall, that for the sake of purging their consciences, for the sake of cleansing the Church and its rites which they themselves had polluted, they would begin to lead honest lives and would cease to make use of the sacraments and rites of the Church exclusively for their own personal ends and those of their superiors. The Fathers, however, seem to have sunk in this routine like drunkards in drunkenness, and cannot possibly mend their ways. Their present mode of life has penetrated into their blood and will surely be transmitted to the tenth, if not the twentieth, generation. As an illustration, I will cite what happened to me.

Early in May, 1914, having ferretted out that I had in my possession a little money which I had earned by hard labor, Archbishop Platon, who is now calling himsef [sic] the Metropolitan of Edessa, sent to me his right hand, Archpresbyter John Slunin, asking and imploring me to deposit my money for safe-keeping at the Mission Bank, located at the Consistory at East 97th Street, New York. Father Slunin assured me that at the Mission Bank my money would be safer than in any other bank, that I would be given a receipt with a guarantee that the money, with interest accrued, would be returned to me on demand, even though I should call for it at, say, one o'clock at night. Having taken the word of the spiritual Father who was supposed to be preaching against gain, against the appropriation of another's property, about the tortures which await one for theft and deceit, etc., etc., I brought my savings to the East 97th Street Consistory, and in the presence of Brother Boris Sochko, deposited for safe-keeping $2,800.00 and gave $5,000.00 for twenty shares of the Oil Field Company, which has its oil wells between the Caspian and the Azov Seas. The par value of these shares is $42,000. The entire sum, $7,800.00 was handed to Archpresbyter John Slunin, secretary to Archbishop Platon, in the presence of Platon himself. The latter who witnessed the money being counted out, told me that he, the "Saintly