Can a priest be deprived of his rank?

By Fr. John Burdin

1. On June 30, another priest was deprived of his rank, who placed the gospel commandments and his Christian conscience higher than the commandments of the church authorities. The Telegram channel “For the Church and for the People” calculated that in the first quarter of 2026 alone, fifty (!) clergymen were deprived of their rank in the ROC MP for one reason or another. The measure, which was once exceptional and extraordinary, has become routine under the current patriarch. As, by the way, the subsequent restoration to rank of those deposed clergymen who turn to the Ecumenical Patriarch for protection is also becoming routine.

And this makes us ask ourselves the question: what does “dethronement from office” actually mean – a sacred act, that is, deprivation of the grace of the priesthood, final and irreversible, or a form of administrative punishment that can easily be appealed and canceled? Is it possible for someone to be deprived of the grace of the priesthood at all? To cancel a sacrament performed by God? To withdraw the Holy Spirit by decree of the patriarch or by decision of a council?

In today’s ROC, this issue is easily resolved. So easily that priest Georgy Maximov was not even ashamed to declare that God, as he gives, “and takes away this gift – again – by decision of a bishop or bishops”. But far from the entire Church – both Western and Eastern – shared and shares this opinion.

2. Priesthood refers to one of the seven sacraments along with baptism, the Eucharist, marriage, etc. If this is a sacrament, it is performed not by man, but by God. This is precisely what distinguishes it from all other church rites – funerals, consecration of a house, etc.

And we know that man cannot undo what God has done. “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,” it is said of the sacrament of marriage. In other words, the grace given in the sacraments is indelible: God does not take away His gifts. Therefore, a person who has fallen away from the Church returns to it through repentance, and not through re-baptism; and a sin forgiven in the sacrament of penance is not confessed again.

“The Church never deprives anyone of the blessings it once taught,” writes theology professor Vasily Ekzemplaryarsky. “The highest form of church punishment, anathema, also consists in cutting off the unworthy member of the Church until his repentance… The grace of Baptism, Confirmation, etc., performed on him in the Church before the Fall, is not “taken away” by anathema.” Why then should it be taken away from a priest who has sinned?

Based on this, the Catholic Church believes that the grace of the priesthood is indelible, and for serious offenses it applies not a deprivation of rank, but a ban on ministry, which has an administrative, not a sacred, character. In this it follows the teaching of Blessed Augustine, who writes that a deserter who fled from the battlefield and was disgraced for this, if he asks forgiveness from the emperor, is again given the right to wear on his body the military sign – a tattoo with the number of the legion and the personal number of the soldier: “Are then the Christian sacraments by their nature less permanent than this bodily sign?” And he directly claims that a priest can be removed from office, but it is impossible to be deprived of what has been given to him by God: “Even if one of the clergy is removed from office for some offense, he is not deprived of the sacrament of the Lord once entrusted to him, although it is reserved for his condemnation.”

Therefore, as the Catholic Church teaches, neither one’s own unworthiness nor the decision of any bishop, even the Pope of Rome, can “destroy” or take away the grace of the Holy Spirit, which makes the priest an “instrument of Christ.” By decision of the church authorities, he can be removed from office (temporarily or forever) and be forbidden to perform the sacraments. But if, despite the prohibition, he still performs them, these sacraments are considered valid.

3. In Orthodoxy, everything is complicated. “The Greeks know only lifelong removal from the priesthood, but no ‘deprivation of rank,’” writes Archimandrite Cyprian Kern. Although in Greek church law there is a type of punishment denoted by the word καθάδηρεσις (dethronement). In the New Testament it is used three times, exclusively in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, and never once does it refer to the punishment of someone, but always means “destruction, demolition, destruction.” The same word in church law is also used to denote the punishment of clergy for serious crimes: fornication, murder, theft, beatings, breaking an oath given in court, drunkenness, ordination for money, etc. In Russian, this word is translated as “dethronement from rank” or simply “deprivation of rank.” However, Byzantologists argue whether it is correct to translate it in this way, or whether it would be more accurate to use the word “deposed”, which can be understood as an administrative removal from the position of a priest, and not as a deprivation of the grace of the priesthood.

In the practice of the Greek Church, a “deposed” priest is not deprived of priesthood as a sacrament and grace, that is, he does not cease to be an ordained cleric, but only loses the right to perform divine services and duties. This is what makes his “reinstatement” possible in the event of unjust punishment.

In fact, this is not “expulsion” (as in Russian) or “deprivation of rank”, but only a temporary, until the time of appeal, or in severe cases – a lifelong “ban on ministry”. And if a cleric who has been subjected to καθάθηρεσις continues to perform the sacraments, they are considered illegal, but valid.

Moreover, in modern church practice, the rank can be returned not only to an unjustly punished cleric, but even to a guilty one who has subsequently repented.

Thus, in 1998, when overcoming the church schism, the Pan-Orthodox Council in Sofia, Bulgaria, on the recommendation of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, accepted into the same rank all the previously “deposed” schismatics after their repentance. Moreover, all the sacraments that they had performed, formally no longer being priests, after their “deposition,” were recognized as “real, effective, and transmitting grace and sanctification.” That is, in essence, the Council recognized that they had de facto remained priests despite the decision to “depose from the rank.”

The indelibility of the sacrament of Ordination is affirmed in the 16th definition of the Epistle of the Patriarchs of the Eastern Catholic Church on the Orthodox Faith of 1723: “Baptism, like priesthood, leaves an indelible seal. For just as it is impossible for someone to receive the same degree of priesthood twice, so it is impossible for someone who has once been properly baptized to be baptized again, even if he has fallen into countless sins or even into actual apostasy from the faith. For whoever wishes to turn to the Lord again receives the lost adoption through the sacrament of Repentance.” It is significant that this fragment was removed by Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow from the official translation of the Epistle into Russian. The Metropolitan himself believed that no considerations about the “mysterious nature of the priesthood… should have any influence on the judicial decision to deprive and remove from the priesthood…, are expelled from the priesthood completely.”

The problem is that the supporters of this version not only ignore historical reality, but also fall into several theological traps at once.

4. First, the question arises: if God “has taken away the grace of the priesthood” from the one who is guilty of a grave sin, are the sacraments that he managed to perform up to the moment of deprivation of the priesthood valid?

From what moment do the sacraments performed by him lose their validity: after the sin was committed, after the removal from ministry, after the decision of the church court is pronounced, after this decision is confirmed by a bishop’s decree, or after the last session of the appellate (church, ed.) court?

And most importantly: are the sacraments performed by those “unworthy” priests whose sins have not yet become apparent real?

Thus, a person can be deprived of the opportunity to receive the sacraments altogether if every priest is examined under a microscope: what if he has already committed a sin for which he will later be “deposed”!

Secondly, if the grace of the priesthood is taken away by God, regardless of whether immediately after the sin is committed, or after a decision is pronounced by a court, bishop, or council, then how can it then be returned not through a new sacrament, that is, God’s action in man, but through a bureaucratic procedure – an appeal against a court decision, even an unjust one?

This, by the way, was paid attention to by the professor of theology Vasily Ekzemplaryarsky: if the grace of the priesthood disappeared in the “deposed” priests, then “there could be no question of their restoration to office.”

And in the history of the Church there are many examples that can hardly be reconciled with the theory that demotion is possible and has a “final and irreversible” character.

5. St. John Chrysostom was demotion (“deposed”) by a church council attended by bishops who maintained apostolic succession. Some of them were even canonized by the Church, such as Epiphanius of Cyprus and Acacius of Melitina.

Does this mean that St. John was simply a monk? That he was deprived of grace? If this action is irreversible, then on what grounds and in what way did another council, 31 years later, posthumously restore his episcopate and priesthood?

But there is an even more interesting story, when two bishops were deposed and restored one after the other. Moreover, they themselves took a very active part in this struggle against each other.

In 858, Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople, who had taken the “wrong” side in the struggle between the emperor and his mother, was deposed and sent into exile. In his place, the layman and civil servant Photius was ordained.

Two months later, disgruntled bishops organized a council at which they condemned Photius in absentia and declared him deposed. In response, Photius called his own council, who excommunicated these bishops from the Church and condemned Ignatius.

In 861, in order to give legal form to the deposition of Ignatius, a council of 318 bishops was convened, together with representatives of Rome, to which the former patriarch was also invited. After Ignatius refused to voluntarily renounce (his teeth were knocked out during the exhortations), he was accused of uncanonical election and was excommunicated, that is, deprived of his rank.

In the meantime, the council adopted 17 disciplinary rules, which are now part of the canonical collection of the Orthodox Church, so it is difficult to recognize it as “robbery” or illegal.

Impressed by the crackdown on Ignatius, Pope Nicholas I of Rome convened his own council, which deprived Photius and all those he had managed to ordain, and declared Ignatius restored to his rank and see. At the same time, an anathema was imposed on all who would hinder this restoration.

Despite this “demotion,” Photius quietly occupied the patriarchal seat for another four years, until the emperor who was favorable to him was killed. After the change of power in 867, a council deposed Photius and returned the rank and throne to Ignatius.

In 869, another council was convened, which anathematized Photius and ruled that he had never been a bishop; therefore, all the clergy ordained by him were deprived of their rank.

But in 877, Ignatius died and Photius was returned in his place. Moreover, it seems that the council, which was supposed to recognize that he (Photius, ed. note) was still “a bishop,” was convened retroactively, closer to 879.

In fact, after seven years, he again had to renounce the patriarchal chair in order to make way for the nephew of the new emperor. Photius died in exile.

As a result, the Church canonized both patriarchs – both Ignatius and Photius, who had been repeatedly deprived of their rank and restored to it.

If their depositions are considered a sacred act, “final and irreversible,” as some Russian canonists put it, then it turns out that after each decision of the council, the grace of the priesthood disappeared in one bishop, the deposed one, and manifested itself in the other, the restored one. And so on six times.

And each time, “finally and irreversibly.”

6. Drawing attention to the similarity between the rites of the sacrament of Wedding and the sacrament of Ordination – the procession around the lectern or the throne, the singing of the same hymns: “Isaiah, Rejoice”, “Holy Martyrs”, the doctor of theology, author of works on pastoral theology, liturgy and patrology Archimandrite Cyprian Kern writes:

“The marriage of a priest with his flock is an indissoluble union, just as marriage itself is indissoluble in principle… The grace bestowed by the hierarch in the sacramental action during the liturgy cannot be taken away by any power on earth. To believe that an ecclesiastical judicial act can deprive a person of the grace of the Holy Spirit is a theological inconsistency. Both baptism and the priesthood are inalienable and indelible… The most terrible sin committed by a priest and led him to a condemnation of “deprivation of rank”, cannot in itself, just as the ecclesiastical judicial act cannot, deprive the priest of grace.”

Unfortunately, this simple and clear thought, theologically confirmed in the Catholic and Greek churches, has not become predominant in the Russian church.

In our country, this issue has never been fully resolved. In Tsarist Russia, the “deposition from rank” was consciously given the form of a “sacrament”, only turned inside out.

Under the cries of “Anaxias”, “Unworthy”, in the church the cleric was stripped of his vestments according to rank: cassock, undershirt, camel’s hat, hood, etc.; his hair and beard were cut off, he was dressed in lay clothes and the so-called “letter of ordination” was taken away from him – the certificate of ordination. Then he was driven out of the church with a rod.

For example, Archbishop Varlaam of Mogilev was deposed, convicted of treason in 1813, that is, also for political reasons, like John Chrysostom and Bishops Photius and Ignatius.

Archimandrite Cyprian Kern called this pre-revolutionary rite of excommunication “terrible and blasphemous” and compared it to the satanic “black mass”, in which all liturgical actions are turned inside out.

At the Local Council of 1917–1918, an attempt was made to consider the issue of reinstatement, including from a theological point of view. However, the Fathers of the Council did not dare to pronounce a decision on the indelibility of the grace of the priesthood, which is why this problem remained unresolved in the document they adopted.

In the modern Russian Orthodox Church, “deprivation of rank” often becomes a convenient form of dealing with the inconvenient. Metropolitan Sergius of Stragorod stripped priests and bishops of their dignity who, while remaining faithful to Christ, refused to join him in serving the Bolsheviks. It was important for him not only to forbid them to serve, but to declare that they had ceased to be equal to him in their priesthood, that they had lost grace.

This tradition of political squabbles, unfortunately, is still preserved in our church today. And the motives for doing this precisely in such a form, are exactly the same. Although, unlike pre-revolutionary Russia, today the “deprivation of rank” is an exclusively administrative punishment: no attempts are made to disguise it as a sacred act.

Neither the decisions of the church courts, nor the decrees of the bishops contain any “may it please the Holy Spirit and us”. There are only references to “articles” from the canons, often arbitrarily chosen.

The trouble is that such arbitrary administrative “management of the Holy Spirit” inevitably deprives the sacrament of the Priesthood itself of its ontologicality and sacredness.

If a priest or bishop can be so easily appointed (ordained) and even more easily removed (deprived of rank) by a corresponding decision or decree, then what descent of the Holy Spirit and what “marriage between the shepherd and the flock” can there be any talk of at all? The Holy Spirit is not a hypodeacon, so that the bishops can now send Him and now recall Him.

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