Suddenly Orthodox

The Holy Order of Mans, and eclectic New Age sect born in San Francisco, had changed its name, put on robes and aligned itself with Orthodox Christianity.  Has it found its spiritual home, or lost its way?

This World/May 31, 1992

By Don Latin

Eclectic in the 60's, Orthodox in the '90s. The Holy Order of Mans is the chameleon of new religious movements.

Its story is a parable of San Francisco in the 1960's and America in the 1990s, an examination of cults, Christianity and the search for truth - a story about how religious sects are born, blossom and refuse to die.

Founded in 1961 by Earl Blighton, a retired electrician and mail-order minister, the Holy Order of Mans began with that mix of esoteric wisdom, self-styled mysticism and personal prophecy we now call New Age.

Thirty years later, the order has changed its name, changed its garb and, according to the high priests that now control the sect, changed its religious beliefs.

Gone is the belief in reincarnation. Gone is the belief that Jesus Christ is only one of many enlightened masters to roam the Earth. Gone is the belief that only chosen few can be initiated into the secret teachings of the ancients.

As the Reverend Phillip Tolbert tells it, the Holy Order of Mans is "a New Age success story."

"It's the story of a journey into authentic Christian Orthodoxy," said Tolbert, a national leader in the sect, which now calls itself Christ the Savior Brotherhood. "It's a shedding of that eclectic mix of teachings called New Age."

Others tell a different tale. They say the Christ the Savior Brotherhood is doing what it had always done - pretending to be something it is not.

"It is fraudulent, cut-and dried fraudulent," said the Reverend George Gray, a priest with the orthodox Church in America who has followed the sect for the two decades.

"It smells like Orthodoxy. It looks like Orthodoxy. But it is fraudulent, " he says. "They wear the vestments, but they never seem to fit quite right."

Christ the savior Brotherhood dates back to an organization Blighton founded in San Jose in 1961 called the Science of Man Church.

Blighton, who died in 1974, had a number of previous religious associations, including the Roman Catholic Church and the Rosicrucian Order, a secret worldwide brotherhood that claims to possess ancient esoteric wisdom. His new church neatly combined the two.

Reincorporated in San Francisco in 1968 as the Holy Order of Mans, members of Blighton's church took lifetime vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and dressed like Roman Catholic priests, but followed an esoteric course of study that combined Christianity, astrology, Buddhism, Blighton's personal "revelations," and the belief that the order would soon usher in a "new age" of spiritual illumination and the unity of all religions. Women could be ordained as priests. Blighton, known as Father Paul by his followers, was thought by some to be the reincarnation the Apostle Paul.

Despite these unorthodox beliefs, Blighton adhered to the traditional Christian emphasis on social service ministry - sheltering the homeless, helping the poor, feeding the hungry. His legacy is best remembered and most visible through a network of shelters for struggling families, called Raphael House, and a chain of low-cost eateries, called Brother Juniper's Restaurant, which continue to operate in can Francisco and several other U.S. cities.

By the time of Blighton's death, the Holy Order of Mans had taken on a life of its own. Fueled by a steady stream of spiritual seekers flocking to San Francisco in the late '60s and early '70s, membership peaked in the mid-'70s with some 3,000 members. Missionaries fanned out of San Francisco liken an army of New Age Jesuits, setting up brother houses, mission stations, youth hostels and homeless shelters in 48 states and several European cities.

"People were sent off with a few dollars in their pockets and a suitcase full of teaching materials," said Johann Morse, who came to spend a night in a Holy Order of Mans shelter in San Francisco in 1971 and ended up spending 15 years with the sect. "You'd go to a city, get a room in the YMCA, find a job, and start doing street missions two or three nights a week."

"There was really a spirit of something happening," said Brother Fred Krueger, who joined the order in San Francisco in 1969 and remains a member. "It was alive. There was a willingness to jump into all kinds of projects without a lot of bureaucracy."

Paul Brown joined the order in 1971, and within three years was appointed by Blighton as abbot of the Brown Brothers of the3 Holy Light, a subdivision of the Holy Order of Mans, whose members wore brown robes reminiscent of the Franciscan order. Brown's main job was to start a chain of Brother Juniper restaurants around the country to raise money for the order.

"Everyone acted like I was mystically advanced, but I wasn't," said Brown, who became disillusioned with the sect and left in 1987. "It was like we were playing a game of religion, pretending to be Franciscan monks. For the most part, we were a bunch of sincere, misguided people who were seeking the truth, but not finding it."

Brown, who now lives in Denver and runs two shoe repair shops, said the Brown Brothers were set up along with another supposedly celibate order for women called the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Mary. According to Brown, Blighton had sex with the 19-year-old abbess of that order, Sister Marion, who became pregnant with 72-year-old Blighton's child.

"We all knew it was him, but he just lied, "said Brown. "He tried to tell us it was an immaculate conception, but we just told him to knock it off."

Blighton died several months later. His death sparked a four-year leadership struggle, ending in 1978 when Vincent Rossi, one of Blighton's top lieutenants, emerged as director general of the order.

Another event that same year the murder and mass suicide in Guyana of more than 900 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones had a profound effect on many new religious sects, including the Holy Order of Mans.

After Jonestown, the order began showing up on the lists of "cult groups" published by organizations devoted to curtailing cult activities. Here was another quasi-Christian religious sect based in San Francisco with a strong social service outreach and members living communally under an authoritarian leadership.

Always concerned with its public image, the Holy Order of Mans began looking for ways to connect with a larger church, to gain legitimacy as a mainstream religious denomination.

"We never looked at ourselves as a cult, but there is no question there were abuses of authority on a sporadic basis," said the Reverend Jacob Myers, who joined the order in 1971 and is not pastor of a Christ the Savior Brotherhood church in Atlanta.

"After Jonestown, we began to examine ourselves," Myers said, "We were looking hard for something more traditional. We were looking for a place to land."

Over the next 10 years, Rossi gradually led the flock away for Blighton's potpourri of philosophies toward a more traditional Christian theology. Rossi and his brethren spent years holed up in the set's rural Sonoma County retreat hidden in the hills west of Santa Rosa, studying in the roots of the Christian faith, reading the church fathers, shopping around for a denomination.

Of the three major branches of Christianity - Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox - they felt most at home with the rich liturgy and deep spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church, which split off from the Roman Catholic Church, headed by the pope, in the famous schism of 1054.

But Rossi and his members were not easily accepted. Most mainline Orthodox denominations looked askance at the order's eclectic roots. Individual members were welcome to renounce their past and join established Orthodox churches, but accepting the Holy Order of Mans in masse posed a host of problems for the Orthodox Church.

According to Brown and other former members, Rossi wanted to come under the "protection" of an Orthodox bishop, but did not want to lose control of the sect and its assets/ although the order had lost many members in the 1980s, it still controlled millions of dollars in real estate and other assets across the country.

"It's not small potatoes," said Brown. "When I left in 1982 the restaurant chain was bringing in $1 million a year in profits. One of the last financial statements I saw in 1987 said the order was worth $14 million."

Rossi found a solution in the strange ecclesiastical jurisdiction of His Eminence Metropolitan Pangratios Gerasimos Vrionis, spiritual leader of the Holy Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Vassilopoulos, Queens, New York.

Pangratios founded his own archdiocese in 1970, the same year he was defrocked for "disobedience" by the mainline Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America.

Bishop Isiah, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox archdiocese, said Demetrios G. Vrionis, which was Pangratios' original name, was ordained as a deacon in 1962 and a priest in 1963 in the mainline Greek church.

In the late '60s, Pangratios was leading a now-defunct church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when he suddenly left that assignment and returned to New York.

Pangratios' file does not say why he left the Harrisburg church, but states that he was soon called before a church tribunal. Pangratios' case was then reviewed by the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul, Turkey, which made the decision "to defrock him from the priesthood."

"There was a charge of being disobedient to one's superior," said Bishop Isiah.

Pangratios, who declined to be interviewed, states in his parish directory that he was consecrated and enthroned in New York by a trio of Orthodox prelates- an exiled Russian, an Orthodox Albanian and a Romanian bishop said to be the confessor to the Romanian royal family.

"None of our bishops consecrated him as a bishop," said Isiah. "But we have quite a number of Orthodox bishops like this in New York. It's like a doctor operating without a license."

Unlike most Orthodox churches in the United States, Pangratios' church is not recognized by the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas, nor is it in communion with the vast majority of Orthodox parishes, meaning that parishioners from brotherhood churches cannot take communion in the celebration of Mass of most other Orthodox churches.

Questions have been raised about the validity of Pangratios' consecration, but because of the myriad of tiny Orthodox churches operating the United States, and the endless internecine squabbling among them, it's hard to say who is a "legitimate" Orthodox bishop and who is not.

"Unfortunately, there are groups stated by defrocked clergymen," said the Reverend John Bacon, an Orthodox Church in America pastor and expert of the "pseudo-Orthodox."

"In the United States, you can go out and for 10 bucks incorporate yourself as an ecclesiastical organization," he said. "You don't have the Byzantine Empire standing there with an army to enforce uniformity."