I won't be lulled into relaxing my vigilance, just because I have not heard any insider horror stories lately. I just got a wake-up call. Witnesses are even more afraid today to come forth. Etna has not changed. Etna is still the same Etna it always was. And it is worse than we know. This is the first "true" Orthodox seminary to give theology degrees to women. Legally, to maintain accreditation, they have to give degrees to lesbian women, also.
I met Max through my blog before he was baptized. During covid, in the hot Nashville summer, Max visited me and Fr. John Mahan in Brentwood. Soon later he also visited Holy Ascension in Fairfax, Virginia. Apparently he went from there to the Etna parish in Rochester. I did not hear from him for awhile, and figured he had found his path. I had warned him about Etna, but I guess he had to see for himself, which makes him just like me. Because I also had been warned about Etna (by Fr. Gregory Williams), and still I had to see for myself. That was back around 2009, after the ROCOR union when I found myself stranded on the west coast with no ROCOR parish within driving distance.
This post has 3 Parts:
Part 1. May 2022 article in Times Union newspaper,
Part 2. interview podcast Times Union with reporter
Part 3. emails written by Maximos
In the 3 parts below, any highlights are mine. ~jh
I met Max through my blog before he was baptized. During covid, in the hot Nashville summer, Max visited me and Fr. John Mahan in Brentwood. Soon later he also visited Holy Ascension in Fairfax, Virginia. Apparently he went from there to the Etna parish in Rochester. I did not hear from him for awhile, and figured he had found his path. I had warned him about Etna, but I guess he had to see for himself, which makes him just like me. Because I also had been warned about Etna (by Fr. Gregory Williams), and still I had to see for myself. That was back around 2009, after the ROCOR union when I found myself stranded on the west coast with no ROCOR parish within driving distance.
This post has 3 Parts:
Part 1. May 2022 article in Times Union newspaper,
Part 2. interview podcast Times Union with reporter
Part 3. emails written by Maximos
In the 3 parts below, any highlights are mine. ~jh
August 21, 2021 †
.
Part 1. May 2022 article in Times Union newspaper,
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Exorcism-cobleskill-17012511.php
An Exorcism in Cobleskill
An Exorcism in Cobleskill
A troubled young man’s final months included an international religious odyssey and a local monastery’s efforts to drive out demons
St. John of San Francisco Orthodox Monastery just outside of Cobleskill in Schoharie County on Monday, April 4, 2022.
Will Waldron/Times Union
By Chris Bragg,
Staff writer
Updated May 7, 2022 4:40 p.m.
COBLESKILL — On the final day of his life, Max Ledwidge boarded a flight from Houston to Las Vegas, rented a car and headed east. He took out his phone and began recording.
The 26-year-old calmly detailed how the Bible’s Book of Revelation, foretelling a holy war and the apocalypse, seemed to be playing out. He emailed the 40 minutes of audio to his family, along with a last will and testament.
“This world is evil. And I want to be gone from it,” Ledwidge wrote. “Jesus and the devil are one and the same. Following both are paths to destruction.”
Four hours out of Las Vegas, Ledwidge arrived at the Grand Canyon. His final moments that evening were captured on security video and later described to Ledwidge’s father by a police official who had viewed the footage.
Ledwidge walked to the canyon’s edge, looked over and walked back. He took off his shoes, deposited his phone and keys in them — and jumped.
Will Waldron/Times Union
By Chris Bragg,
Staff writer
Updated May 7, 2022 4:40 p.m.
COBLESKILL — On the final day of his life, Max Ledwidge boarded a flight from Houston to Las Vegas, rented a car and headed east. He took out his phone and began recording.
The 26-year-old calmly detailed how the Bible’s Book of Revelation, foretelling a holy war and the apocalypse, seemed to be playing out. He emailed the 40 minutes of audio to his family, along with a last will and testament.
“This world is evil. And I want to be gone from it,” Ledwidge wrote. “Jesus and the devil are one and the same. Following both are paths to destruction.”
Four hours out of Las Vegas, Ledwidge arrived at the Grand Canyon. His final moments that evening were captured on security video and later described to Ledwidge’s father by a police official who had viewed the footage.
Ledwidge walked to the canyon’s edge, looked over and walked back. He took off his shoes, deposited his phone and keys in them — and jumped.
He left the phone unlocked, providing a digital record of his tumultuous final year. Seventeen months earlier, Ledwidge had been a successful young software sales executive in Boston. Close friends said he appeared at that point to be the same kind and brilliant person they’d known.
The story of his mental unraveling combines several elements: the disruptions and isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic; a descent into the netherworld of online conspiracy theories; and a cross-country spiritual odyssey that led him to the sleepy college town of Cobleskill, where a little-known religious order decided Ledwidge needed to undergo a rite that survives in some corners of the Christian world: an exorcism.
It happened at the St. John of San Francisco Orthodox Monastery, located about 45 minutes west of Albany, outside of town at the end of a steep dirt road. Ledwidge spent a troubled winter there in 2020, immersing himself in a small, deeply conservative religious group, the Genuine Orthodox Christians of America.
Amid sloping green hills, the modest grounds include several rectangular living quarters, a pond and a small church. By the time the sun rises each morning, the black-cloaked, bearded monks have spent hours praying in near-darkness, repeating: “Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
To Ledwidge’s parents, the crucial event of their son’s decline occurred at the end of his two-month stay, when church leadership determined he had become possessed by a demon. They performed at least two exorcisms, seeking to expel what the church viewed as an invading evil.
The leader of the Genuine Orthodox Christians of America, His Eminence Metropolitan Demetrius, lives in the Cobleskill monastery. He authorized the exorcism prayers and conducted them, but never advised Ledwidge to seek mental health treatment.
“They’re such zealots, they probably thought they were doing the right thing by him,” said Max’s father, Tom Ledwidge. “When it was probably the worst possible thing they could have done: He was already suffering from some form of mental illness.”
After the exorcisms, Demetrius indicated to Ledwidge that the prayers had not fully worked — he remained “literally possessed.”
In an email responding to the Times Union’s questions, Demetrius said that in sacred settings, including church services, Ledwidge often demonstrated “obvious signs of agitation and discomfort,” including “trembling, writhing on the ground” and “abnormal distortions of the face and eyes.” There was also “cursing, yelling, shouting, shrieking or speaking with multiple voices simultaneously.”
“Maximos never manifested these behaviors in a secular context” — such as on the monastery grounds — where he could “interact with others in a perfectly normal manner,” Demetrius said.
Ledwidge died seven months after the exorcisms, and by that time had disavowed Christianity. Demetrius said he sympathizes with Ledwidge’s parents but was not responsible for their son’s death. Faced with suicide, parents are often “haunted by temptations to relive the past” and conduct an “endless search for a meaningful explanation,” he said.
Proof of Ledwidge’s alleged strange behavior at the monastery remains elusive. The Times Union reviewed videos of its prayer services, which are live-streamed on YouTube and then archived, and did not observe any shouting or shrieking during Ledwidge’s two months there.
‘Orthodox fanatics’
The 1973 horror film “The Exorcist” brought a previously obscure remnant of Roman Catholicism to public attention. Since then, various forms of the rite have gained popularity.
Exorcism prayers are a centuries-old practice within Roman Catholicism and the Greek Orthodox Church. In his 2001 book “American Exorcism,” author Michael Cuneo noted that — regardless of one’s belief in the supernatural — exorcism may have psychotherapeutic value for certain subjects, bringing hope of improvement. But in other instances, exorcism has proven dangerous.
In the 1990s, a psychiatrist diagnosed a Wisconsin woman with demonic possession and having 126 separate personalities, including Satan. The psychiatrist attempted to carry out an exorcism himself, and Nadean Cool subsequently attempted suicide by slashing her abdomen; she spent five days in a coma. Cool later explained, “I couldn’t stand the thought that I had Satan inside my body.”
In 1999, the Roman Catholic Church amended its rules for exorcism for the first time since 1614: A person who claims to be possessed must now be evaluated by doctors “to rule out a mental or physical illness.” Before an exorcism is approved, other possibilities must be exhausted.
The Eastern Orthodox Church lacks the same centralization. And the breakaway group Ledwidge joined, the Genuine Orthodox Christians (GOC), has consciously removed itself further from the mainstream and modernity.
“They have become what you would call ‘Orthodox fanatics,’ ” said George Demacopoulos, chair of Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University. “The Orthodox Church is not nearly as developed anyway, and a fringe group like this is going to have even less checks and balances than the mainstream.”
Demetrius confirmed exorcism remains “fairly common” in the GOC, at least relative to its use in contemporary Westernized churches.
Within mainstream Orthodox Christianity, Genuine Orthodox Christians are considered fringe, Demacopoulos said. Members of the GOC, meanwhile, consider mainstream Orthodox leadership to be heretical. The schism began in 1924, when the Church of Greece adopted a revised calendar that shifted important religious dates and sparked a breakaway “old calendarist” movement and the GOC.
The GOC came to the United States in the 1950s; in North and South America, there are 58 parishes and missions and six men’s monasteries and “sketes,” or small settlements of monks. The GOC rejects Westernized churches, seeking to emulate Christ’s early followers, practicing penance, and seeing life on Earth as a prelude to heaven.
There is reference to the Book of Revelation, the Bible’s final chapter predicting the coming of the Antichrist, a chief agent of Satan who forges a one-world government, then is defeated in the battle of Armageddon.
“Of course the Antichrist is coming,” Demetrius said in a May 2020 sermon. “And when he comes, many people won’t recognize him, because he is the spirit of deception, illusion.”
Told about Ledwidge’s case, Demacopoulos said that presenting this kind of environment “to a young man who was struggling — a vision of a world and Christianity that is very, very black and white — in this instance appears to have been psychologically devastating.”
“It was incumbent upon spiritual elders to, first and foremost, put the well-being first of a kid that was struggling — and not to be abusive of that authority,” he said.
Maximos
As a freshman at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Logan Koerner was himself struggling. Unlike other freshmen, he hadn’t previously gone to school with new classmates. He ate lunch alone.
Ledwidge, a fellow freshman, had many friends. Yet he soon made a point of inviting Koerner to eat lunch with his group, and to Friday evening basketball games at the Ledwidge home.
“He was always the person who made you feel important,” Koerner said. “In the darkest times, when I felt the most alienated, Max was always the person making me feel I had a friend.”
After Ledwidge died, Koerner spoke at a “celebration of life” ceremony, telling mourners: “If you have the opportunity, you should try to be someone’s Max.”
Ledwidge was a straight-A student without much effort and notched a near-perfect SAT score, his parents said. Though he never demonstrated serious mental health issues, he could be sensitive, burdened at times by his own high expectations.
Ledwidge attended Roman Catholic Mass regularly with his parents, as well as Catholic schools. He enrolled at Notre Dame University, though his best friend and roommate, Aiden Dore, said Ledwidge was not especially religious or political on campus.
“The running joke was that he was so relaxed and calm all the time,” Dore said. “He knew he was smart, and that things were going to be OK because he was a smart, good dude. I never got a whiff of mental illness or conspiracy theories.”
But Ledwidge left after his freshman year. According to his parents, the departure was partially due to his disgust with the Roman Catholic Church’s priest sex abuse scandal. (He also hated the bitter winters.) He transferred to Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, and earned a degree in economics.
In 2019, he moved to Boston for a job at Oracle and began attending a mainstream Greek Orthodox Church, making friends easily within his new faith.
Soon before COVID-19 struck, Ledwidge spent the weekend in New York City with Dore. He seemed his normal self, Dore recalled. They went to bars and talked about hip-hop music.
Ledwidge’s best friend since middle school, Robert Wolfe, last saw him back home in Florida for Christmas 2019. “It felt like old times,” Wolfe said. As the pandemic arrived in March 2020, they talked on the phone, and Ledwidge still seemed his normal self — politically conservative but not especially political or religious.
“He was always curious, not accepting that things had to be a certain way,” Wolfe said. “This conspiracy stuff never came up. The only aspect that sort of makes sense is that his curiosity somehow led him in that direction.”
Ledwidge had just left Oracle for another tech firm in Boston. According to his parents, he grew to hate working remotely at the new job due to the lack of human connection.
A voracious reader, he dove into religion — and began having misgivings about the mainstream Orthodox church, feeling it was “very uncomfortable” distinguishing itself from Roman Catholicism.
On YouTube, Ledwidge came across a 2007 talk given by a Genuine Orthodox Christian bishop.
“As I was watching, I just felt like my whole world had been turned upside down,” Ledwidge would recall in a video interview later in 2020. “It was all problems that I had noticed in the church and the Greek Archdiocese. And I couldn’t argue with them, basically.”
His fascination with religion would become an obsession. In May 2020, Ledwidge quit his job and moved to rural Virginia, where he could attend a GOC church and potentially pursue an interest in farming. His priest encouraged Ledwidge to consider enrolling in St. Photios Orthodox Theological Seminary in Etna, Calif. In August 2020, Ledwidge called his parents and said he’d moved again and enrolled at the school, possibly to become a priest.
In October 2020, Ledwidge spoke for 20 minutes in a video interview conducted by the GOC seminary, explaining the reasons for his new calling.
“There’s good and bad in the world. Each person experiences both, and the church provides us with many ways to deal with these wounds and these sicknesses,” Ledwidge said. “It can be very chaotic and confusing outside of the church.”
Ledwidge explained that life was supposed to be “one long sacrifice to God. You should try to lose all the parts of yourself that don’t help you along that path.” He was given a new name: Maximos, after a sainted early monk.
Ledwidge’s parents point to the contrast between Max in that video — appearing calm and collected — and the one that emerged several months later.
Ledwidge was supposed to cultivate humility and show deference to spiritual mentors. But while friends knew him for an uncritical nature toward people, he proved a defiant skeptic about religion.
In October 2020, Ledwidge was assigned to write a paper and solicited advice from the seminary’s leader, Bishop Auxentios. Ledwidge wanted to write about how the Bible’s story of human creation was correct; Auxentios responded that the topic was contentious. The paper was intended as nothing more than a basic test of writing skills.
According to Auxentios, Ledwidge took the advice as an affront: He wrote the paper, and instead of submitting it to his instructor, scattered copies through the seminary and in townspeople’s mailboxes. He then abruptly left the California seminary without telling anyone.
In a Facebook message to a friend, Ledwidge said he’d apologized to Auxentios for his abrupt departure. He hadn’t been ready for the seminary and needed to “work out” himself first.
Auxentios, who leads the GOC’s diocese in the western United States and Canada, conferred with Demetrius, the religion’s leader in North and South America. They encouraged Ledwidge to reflect in the quiet of Cobleskill.
‘Mark of the devil’
In the light of a December late afternoon, the prayer service began. By the time the hour passed, the chapel was dark, lit only by candles casting a red hue. Paintings of angels, brightly illuminated in daylight, turned to black, winged shadows
.
The service concluded with biblical passages denouncing those pursuing material things instead of spiritual sustenance: “He that trusteth in wealth shall fall.”
Ledwidge had been in Cobleskill for about six weeks. In conversations with his parents, he expressed newfound guilt — some of it related to his comfortable existence growing up.
“He began to think that money was the mark of the devil,” recalled his mother, Sanci Ledwidge.
Ledwidge became critical of his father, who over decades had built a successful Miami-area insurance practice.
“He felt like I’d spent my entire life just seeking richness — and that I needed to seek God,” his father recalled. “I said, ‘Max, you can do both.’ And he said, ‘No, you can’t. … You can’t serve two masters.’ ”
In college, Ledwidge’s parents were involved in Greek life, and at Vanderbilt, Ledwidge was in a fraternity. Now, Ledwidge expressed serious concern, both for his own soul and those of his parents.
The GOC staunchly opposes freemasonry, a movement of fraternal organizations tracing their origins to the 13th century, historically regarded as a secret society. Conspiracy theorists allege they aim for world domination. Ledwidge had learned that some fraternity rituals had ties to freemasonry; he seemed obsessed with the belief that some rituals included satanic symbols. Had he and his family unwittingly received the “mark of the beast” signaling allegiance to Satan?
Each weekday, the monks rose before 3:30 a.m. and held a prayer service lasting three hours in a darkened church. There was a second shorter service in the afternoon, then a third hour-long service in the early evening. According to Ledwidge’s parents, he additionally worked six hours a day making candles. Quiet hours began at 7 p.m.
Around Christmas, Ledwidge called his parents and apologized for being a “bad child.”
“He said was going to spend the rest of his life in the eternity of hell,” his mother recalled. “And we were trying to say, ‘No, you were a good son, you never gave us any trouble. Max, you’re not making any sense.’ And then, within a few days, they do this exorcism on him.”
‘Possessed’
Unlike Ledwidge, Demetrius was steeped in the church: Born in Toronto to a father who was a monk, Demetrius entered a monastery at age 20. In 2014, he was elected Metropolitan of America at 40.
Demetrius said Ledwidge was the first person to bring up “the idea of possession.” The church leader was “not initially receptive to the idea,” he said, but Ledwidge persisted.
“I came to my conclusions only after multiple private and confessional conversations with Maximos, a period of observation, and my own prayerful reflection,” Demetrius said.
Demetrius has no formal training in psychological diagnosis. Nonetheless, he is critical of the Roman Catholic Church policy requiring professional psychological evaluation before exorcism can be considered. That shift, according to Demetrius, has caused exorcism prayers to take on “melodramatic and frightening connotations.”
If he'd seen signs of mental health problems, Demetrius said, he’d have sought help from a professional — adding he has “several spiritual children under such care, with my encouragement.”
On at least two occasions near the end of 2020, Demetrius stood and read exorcism prayers over Ledwidge, whose head was bowed. One was by Basil the Great, asking for God to “drive away every operation of the Devil, all magic, sorcery, idolatry, divination by stars, astrology, necromancy, divination from birds, voluptuousness, eroticism, avarice, drunkenness, fornication, adultery, licentiousness, shamelessness, anger, contentiousness, instability, and every wicked fancy.”
As the prayers were read, Ledwidge showed more intense manifestations than ever, Demetrius said, adding that the symptoms were “seen by many witnesses.”
David Frankfurter, a professor of religion at Boston University and an exorcism expert, said if a person believes they’re possessed, the subject could easily mimic popular depictions like those in “The Exorcist.”
“The person who is cast as the possessed person has a role to play,” Frankfurter said. “They have to act like a crazy demon, they have to growl, they have to convulse . It’s spontaneous but it’s also willed; it’s also scripted. It’s a role that’s in our culture.”
In Cobleskill, as in California, Ledwidge had picked a fight with a spiritual leader, demanding Demetrius forbid his faithful from receiving the new COVID-19 vaccine, arguing its development relied on using “aborted fetuses.” Demetrius refused.
That rebelliousness could have contributed to the belief that Ledwidge was possessed, Frankfurter said.
“You have a person staying within a religious system — submitting himself — but also getting into disputes,” Frankfurter said. “One way of making sense of this impulse inside him is through demonic possession.” (Demetrius said the quarrel did not contribute to his diagnosis.)
After the exorcisms, Ledwidge abruptly left the monastery. In an email on Jan. 2, 2021, he told Demetrius that the vaccine dispute was the reason.
“Rather than addressing that here,” Demetrius responded, “and reasoning with unreasonable demons (which are in your mind), I offer the real reason you left. … I always say, ‘If we don’t work on expelling our demons, we will be expelled together with the demon,’ ” Demetrius wrote. “In your case, it’s worse, because you are literally possessed.”
Ledwidge’s parents began calling the monastery, worried about their son. They got a call back from a priest, Hieromonk Joachim, who told them an exorcism had taken place.
Joachim explained that beforehand, the monks conducted a test: One snuck up behind Ledwidge with a crucifix and Ledwidge allegedly started spontaneously shaking, screaming and foaming at the mouth.
“We were just kind of speechless,” his mother recalled. “We said, ‘Why wouldn’t you get him help with his mental health?’ And he said, ‘No. Max showed a spiritual affliction.’ ”
Ledwidge’s parents were incredulous that their son had exhibited those behaviors; Joachim said an audiotape of an exorcism existed, asking if they wanted a copy. Shaken, they declined.
Reached by phone by the Times Union, Joachim declined to comment. Demetrius said the priest had made the recording without permission — and that when Demetrius found out, he asked Joachim to discard it.
On YouTube, meanwhile, there remain more than 100 hours of footage of prayer services from Ledwidge’s two months in Cobleskill.
Asked to cite an instance within those videos of Ledwidge screaming or cursing, Demetrius did not. He said disturbances were quickly moved out of the church, and that Ledwidge did not display the “worst sort of vocal disturbance at every service.”
‘A dark sleep’
Tom Ledwidge had bought a plane ticket to New York, wanting to see what was happening to his son. But Max had left Cobleskill and was soon en route to Kyiv, Ukraine.
For Ledwidge’s parents, the following months were among the darkest of their lives. Their son was distant. He confirmed to them that an exorcism had taken place, but wouldn’t discuss it further.
Ledwidge frequented Reddit forums detailing conspiracies about COVID vaccines. His parents begged him to fly home, but that required a COVID test. Ledwidge now believed the swabs held microorganisms that could penetrate one’s brain.
“He was isolated and depressed, and just feeling really horrible about himself,” his father said. “And he just had so much time to read.”
In a March 2021 Facebook message, Ledwidge stated he was “mentally unwell and having trouble sleeping.”
Kyiv is the site of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, a preeminent center of the Orthodox religion in Eastern Europe. Ledwidge made appointments to talk to Ukrainian bishops, telling one he was researching a historical schism in the GOC.
He continued to fear hell. In a notebook entry, he wrote: “How could God be good if he’s constantly witnessing the eternal torture of his own children forever without end?”
After four months, Ledwidge suddenly returned to the United States, flying to Houston because it was the cheapest flight. For five weeks, he seemed better. In phone calls with his parents, he was no longer talking about conspiracies or religion, though he discouraged them from visiting Houston.
In early July, Ledwidge went to Paraguay for two weeks, telling one friend the reason was lighter COVID restrictions. He returned to the United States, and on July 19 had an appointment in Houston with a renowned specialist for a painful jaw condition from which Ledwidge had suffered since college.
Ledwidge never showed up. He was on the road, for the last time.
In the recording on his way to the Grand Canyon, Ledwidge spoke about a cabal of powerful people who ran the world, folding the COVID vaccine into a theory of global dominion. They were likely putting out signs mimicking the Book of Revelation, but the prophecy might well not be real. In fact, he no longer believed in Christianity.
“So it seems to me like this, all this stuff — this apocalypse stuff, the Antichrist stuff — is just to get a small group of people who are absolutely, maniacally devoted to this Jesus Christ,” he said.
Ledwidge hoped he was going to another universe, one where organisms didn’t have to kill one another to survive.
“And if they aren’t out there, then I guess that’s just the end of life — and I’m OK with that,” Ledwidge said. “I would rather just be in a dark sleep than have to live in this world anymore.”
With that, the recording ended.
Seven weeks after Ledwidge’s death, Demetrius delivered a sermon titled “The Devil Can Manipulate Our Thoughts.” Aug 23/Sept 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds1u-u46has
He spoke of the danger posed to a person who believes they are always “right.” Ledwidge was not mentioned and Demetrius told the Times Union the remarks were about Christians generally.
In the sermon, Demetrius spoke of God calling an unnamed person to Christian life, “someone who was in the world, someone who was a servant of the devil.”
“And instead of seeing the great gifts that the Lord has given to the person … he sees the light as darkness, he sees the darkness as light,” Demetrius said. “And it’s because the devil has manipulated everything in such a way that the end result of his thinking — of his train of thoughts — would be that he is correct and that those who know more are not. Even the Holy Fathers.”
In Fort Lauderdale, two areas of the Ledwidge home remain littered with photographs of Max. His mother still spends some days crying, looking at the photos.
In an early March interview at their home, Sanci Ledwidge’s voice shook as she described the unjustness of her son’s death.
“He was a good person," she said. "He wasn’t a person that did drugs or did bad things.”
“We spent months crying, feeling like we missed all these signs,” Tom Ledwidge said. “I had just been like, ‘Oh, the Greek Orthodox Church — it’s like the Catholic Church.’ ”
Mental health problems sometimes don’t emerge until a person’s mid-20s. Tom Ledwidge believes his son had an undiagnosed issue that might have been resolvable if he had been steered into professional treatment. Instead, Max was prescribed exorcism.
“Ultimately, it led to his decision to take his own life,” Tom Ledwidge said. “I have no doubt about that.”
Part 2. interview podcast Times Union with reporter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BuxwA3hwVQ
segment 12:15–24:25
Transcript
12:11
actually in person in my office which is something new for me with Chris Bragg our outstanding investigative reporter
12:18
who I don't think has ever written a story at least not in the Times like the one that was published in our
12:26
print edition last Saturday under the headline and exorcism in Cobleskill so Chris thanks I know you've been working
12:34
on this one for a long time and I guess the first question is who was Max Ledwidge
12:41
yeah Max Ledwidge was a a 26 year old man who committed suicide in last July he jumped off the Grand Canyon
12:49
which is you know very dramatic and terrible way for him to die he was known by friends and family as a very
12:57
kind and brilliant person but over the last year or so of his life had these serious mental issues that cropped up
13:06
first you know with the covid pandemic starting and starting to believe in online conspiracy theories and then getting
13:14
immersed in a church that had its own very unusual conservative views and those things kind of mixing together and
13:22
ultimately resulting in his death and certainly I would say it's it's fair to say it's it's all a very strange and
13:30
very tragic story but certainly one of the oddest elements of it is the fact that at the
13:37
end of 2000 when Max Ledwidge was staying at a monastery
13:46
run by this religious order the Genuine Orthodox Christians of America out in Cobleskill that is a community
13:55
just about you know less than an hour west of of albany that it was determined by the church's
14:04
or this monastery's leadership that he had been possessed by a demon quite literally and that that he needed to be
14:12
subjected to the rite of exorcism when we of course when we all think of exorcism we think of the William Friedkin you know hit movie
14:20
from almost 50 years ago but exorcism persists in some kind of corners of
14:29
especially the Catholic faith is that right that's correct actually after the exorcist came out in 1973 it became a lot more popular because
14:38
people didn't really know about it before then in like Pentecostal Churches other even non-Catholic churches it's become
14:47
pretty popular in some areas it less is known about the Greek Orthodox Church in exorcism it's not something that's been studied to a great degree but it's
14:56
actually been around in the Greek Orthodox Church for hundreds of years so it's not like the movie and you know the people at the monastery made that
15:04
clear that they're not dealing with you know crazy special effects like the movie or something like that right they're
15:11
they're standing over the person reading a prayer and asking for the devil to be driven out but you know according to
15:19
Metropolitan Demetrius the head of this monastery Max was exhibiting signs like shrieking talking with
15:26
multiple voices screaming shaking and this supposedly happened especially when he was having these exorcisms there were at least two
15:36
I think it's worth noting that a lot of what's in this article is based on Metropolitan Demetrius's account and he was answering questions from a
15:44
newspaper defending himself so we're we're kind of taking him as at his word a little bit on some of this stuff
15:52
Max's parents have different theories about what actually happened you know was some of the belief that Max was
15:59
possessed by a demon because he had clashed with Metropolitan Demetrius and sort of been rebellious
16:06
you know to what extent was that an explanation you know so so much but this relies on the account of what
16:13
Metropolitan Demetrius says and I think a lot is still unknown I watched many hours of videos
16:21
of the monastery's prayer services during the two months that Max was there did not observe any shouting or shrieking an audio recording of the
16:29
exorcism has been destroyed apparently so by by the staff at the monastery right so
16:37
i think just a lot still remains unknown and it would be you know great if more people would talk who were directly
16:44
there so we could find out more you spoke to experts on exorcism scholars who had looked at journalists as well
16:52
who would who had looked at it and noted that some believe that there is an almost
16:59
kind of shock therapy potential value to it for someone who is a believer
17:07
that in fact you you might simply in the secular world the secular world would would say this person is suffering from
17:15
a mental disturbance of some kind but the exorcism for those who believe and believe very strongly
17:23
could have a potential benefit in the sense that if the believer believes that the exorcism helped them perhaps you
17:30
know it really did help them the flip side of that is that if a believer believes that they're possessed and they come away from an
17:39
exorcism thinking that it might not have worked the problem still lies within not the demonic problem but but a mental problem right
17:47
for for anyone who's interested in this topic I would definitely recommend a book that came out in 2001 called american exorcism by an author named
17:55
michael cooneyo he went around and interviewed hundreds of people who had had exorcisms witnessed a number of exorcisms and he
18:04
did find that some people were helped just psychologically by the idea that they were improving because they'd had this right performed
18:13
in other cases it's been dangerous there was a case in the 1990s in Wisconsin where a woman tried to commit suicide
18:20
after her psychologist attempted to do an exorcism on her so Max is not the first to have that kind
18:27
of experience after an exorcism was done it's of course impossible to say that for people who die by suicide the
18:36
causes can be so tangled up and in this story it's certainly no different you note that
18:45
Max Ledwidge's mental decompensation as it were seemed to begin when he lived in Boston right around the beginning of the pandemic
18:53
when clearly he was isolated from work living in a big city that kind of thing and
19:01
then he went on he was attending a Greek Orthodox Church but he went on what can sort of only be described as a cross-country sort of
19:10
spiritual odyssey you know before coming to this monastery and Cobleskill he was at a GOC church I believe like a seminary in
19:18
California right according to his friends he was doing okay he seemed fine before the pandemic who knows but it really seemed like the isolation
19:27
caused him to dive very deeply into religion he came across a youtube video of a bishop from the the GOC
19:35
and just took to it immediately decided to quit his job in Boston moved to Virginia potentially started working as a farmer
19:44
in Virginia and attended GOC church there the leader at that church convinced him to go to the seminary in california where he was going to maybe
19:53
become a priest and then you know these these issues that he had kind of combining conspiracy
20:00
theories together with religion started to crop up this was not exactly it but in California he suddenly quit and
20:08
left because he got into a dispute with the leader of the seminary there over whether evolution was a topic that he should be
20:17
writing about or not he wanted to write that the story of human Creation in the Bible was correct so kind of stormed out of there without telling anybody um
20:25
drove back across the country and on the advice of GOC leaders decided to spend some time in Cobleskill where hopefully it was nice and quiet and he could work
20:33
out some of his issues yeah it continued after the exorcism that the ideas about the covid pandemic and the vaccine
20:42
in you know Bill Gates and all these conspiracies he kind of put those together in his mind with ideas about religion and the GOC to make these sort
20:50
of very grandiose theories that ultimately he was talking about on the day he committed suicide the leader of the monastery
20:58
was actually an advocate for the community getting vaccinated so
21:05
actually Max's some of his ideas were actually more conservative than this church that wanted to rely on ideology
21:12
that dated back to you know 100 a.d or something like that Christ's early followers so you know it's a complicated story it's
21:21
not it's not straightforward and I think that was the difficulty of this you know I my frame of reference going into this
21:28
was a series i'd written about child murders in family court and this turned out to be very different it was a suicide
21:36
it involved an adult not a child it was not a murder it turned out to be much more complicated and nuanced than I thought you get into ideas thinking
21:44
about religion just thinking about well is it crazier or not for somebody to believe in a demon I just haven't never
21:52
thought about that I think about science and but when you think about it there are unexplainable things in the universe and you have to consider
21:59
that person's point of view and so you know it just got very complicated in my thinking and it was a good experience
22:06
but you know a lot to deal with so you know in the past I think maybe even you and I have spoken about it you
22:13
are primarily a political investigative reporter you do deep dives into documents into
22:21
campaign funding that type of thing you are a master at it but the family court stories that you have done and now this story the kind of
22:29
human tragedy and the interactions you've had with sources who are families who have been through quite literally just about the most horrible
22:37
things that people can can go through I mean that takes its own kind of psychological toll which you've been writing these stories all through the
22:45
pandemic when you know it's great to sit here in the office with you but over the course the last two years you two have been isolated I mean was there a certain
22:54
i don't want to say that like you've been through anything like what Max Ledwidge went through but I think was there a certain amount of
23:01
common consciousness of what that kind of isolation can do to a person yeah a little bit you know the family court stories dealt with an institution
23:09
which was the court system and this also dealt with a sort of institution which was this religious order but the things were
23:17
not necessarily the same and there were nuances but they were the same in the sense that I was dealing with the parents of somebody who had died and
23:26
that's in in my political reporting I can be very aggressive and lose my temper you cannot do that when you're dealing with
23:33
the parents of somebody who's died and you have to be sensitive and these people were wonderful by the way the legend parents they seemed like
23:41
great people really caring parents and I felt so badly for them I went to their house in Fort Lauderdale when I was down in
23:49
Miami and visited them and you know the mother was crying the father cried at various points
23:56
so it's very hard to stay objective in some ways when you're talking to somebody like that so that was a challenge and the story
24:04
was trying to stay objective and I i think hopefully we pulled that off but honoring the memory of somebody while also getting into
24:12
their very deep mental health issues is not an easy line to walk and i'm sure in fact I know that this was a tough
24:19
article for them to read so I thought it was it was very fair I thought it was fair to the monastery fair to
24:26
this fairly singular faith that you were writing about that I think most readers have never heard of and and very fair to the family while of course recognizing
24:34
that they've been through a trauma and there are aspects of their son's life that that even they are are sort of not not fully aware of so thanks very much
24:42
an exorcism and Cobleskill it's it's a long story one of the longer ones we will probably run in the times union this year but it's definitely well worth
24:50
your time
Transcript
12:11
actually in person in my office which is something new for me with Chris Bragg our outstanding investigative reporter
12:18
who I don't think has ever written a story at least not in the Times like the one that was published in our
12:26
print edition last Saturday under the headline and exorcism in Cobleskill so Chris thanks I know you've been working
12:34
on this one for a long time and I guess the first question is who was Max Ledwidge
12:41
yeah Max Ledwidge was a a 26 year old man who committed suicide in last July he jumped off the Grand Canyon
12:49
which is you know very dramatic and terrible way for him to die he was known by friends and family as a very
12:57
kind and brilliant person but over the last year or so of his life had these serious mental issues that cropped up
13:06
first you know with the covid pandemic starting and starting to believe in online conspiracy theories and then getting
13:14
immersed in a church that had its own very unusual conservative views and those things kind of mixing together and
13:22
ultimately resulting in his death and certainly I would say it's it's fair to say it's it's all a very strange and
13:30
very tragic story but certainly one of the oddest elements of it is the fact that at the
13:37
end of 2000 when Max Ledwidge was staying at a monastery
13:46
run by this religious order the Genuine Orthodox Christians of America out in Cobleskill that is a community
13:55
just about you know less than an hour west of of albany that it was determined by the church's
14:04
or this monastery's leadership that he had been possessed by a demon quite literally and that that he needed to be
14:12
subjected to the rite of exorcism when we of course when we all think of exorcism we think of the William Friedkin you know hit movie
14:20
from almost 50 years ago but exorcism persists in some kind of corners of
14:29
especially the Catholic faith is that right that's correct actually after the exorcist came out in 1973 it became a lot more popular because
14:38
people didn't really know about it before then in like Pentecostal Churches other even non-Catholic churches it's become
14:47
pretty popular in some areas it less is known about the Greek Orthodox Church in exorcism it's not something that's been studied to a great degree but it's
14:56
actually been around in the Greek Orthodox Church for hundreds of years so it's not like the movie and you know the people at the monastery made that
15:04
clear that they're not dealing with you know crazy special effects like the movie or something like that right they're
15:11
they're standing over the person reading a prayer and asking for the devil to be driven out but you know according to
15:19
Metropolitan Demetrius the head of this monastery Max was exhibiting signs like shrieking talking with
15:26
multiple voices screaming shaking and this supposedly happened especially when he was having these exorcisms there were at least two
15:36
I think it's worth noting that a lot of what's in this article is based on Metropolitan Demetrius's account and he was answering questions from a
15:44
newspaper defending himself so we're we're kind of taking him as at his word a little bit on some of this stuff
15:52
Max's parents have different theories about what actually happened you know was some of the belief that Max was
15:59
possessed by a demon because he had clashed with Metropolitan Demetrius and sort of been rebellious
16:06
you know to what extent was that an explanation you know so so much but this relies on the account of what
16:13
Metropolitan Demetrius says and I think a lot is still unknown I watched many hours of videos
16:21
of the monastery's prayer services during the two months that Max was there did not observe any shouting or shrieking an audio recording of the
16:29
exorcism has been destroyed apparently so by by the staff at the monastery right so
16:37
i think just a lot still remains unknown and it would be you know great if more people would talk who were directly
16:44
there so we could find out more you spoke to experts on exorcism scholars who had looked at journalists as well
16:52
who would who had looked at it and noted that some believe that there is an almost
16:59
kind of shock therapy potential value to it for someone who is a believer
17:07
that in fact you you might simply in the secular world the secular world would would say this person is suffering from
17:15
a mental disturbance of some kind but the exorcism for those who believe and believe very strongly
17:23
could have a potential benefit in the sense that if the believer believes that the exorcism helped them perhaps you
17:30
know it really did help them the flip side of that is that if a believer believes that they're possessed and they come away from an
17:39
exorcism thinking that it might not have worked the problem still lies within not the demonic problem but but a mental problem right
17:47
for for anyone who's interested in this topic I would definitely recommend a book that came out in 2001 called american exorcism by an author named
17:55
michael cooneyo he went around and interviewed hundreds of people who had had exorcisms witnessed a number of exorcisms and he
18:04
did find that some people were helped just psychologically by the idea that they were improving because they'd had this right performed
18:13
in other cases it's been dangerous there was a case in the 1990s in Wisconsin where a woman tried to commit suicide
18:20
after her psychologist attempted to do an exorcism on her so Max is not the first to have that kind
18:27
of experience after an exorcism was done it's of course impossible to say that for people who die by suicide the
18:36
causes can be so tangled up and in this story it's certainly no different you note that
18:45
Max Ledwidge's mental decompensation as it were seemed to begin when he lived in Boston right around the beginning of the pandemic
18:53
when clearly he was isolated from work living in a big city that kind of thing and
19:01
then he went on he was attending a Greek Orthodox Church but he went on what can sort of only be described as a cross-country sort of
19:10
spiritual odyssey you know before coming to this monastery and Cobleskill he was at a GOC church I believe like a seminary in
19:18
California right according to his friends he was doing okay he seemed fine before the pandemic who knows but it really seemed like the isolation
19:27
caused him to dive very deeply into religion he came across a youtube video of a bishop from the the GOC
19:35
and just took to it immediately decided to quit his job in Boston moved to Virginia potentially started working as a farmer
19:44
in Virginia and attended GOC church there the leader at that church convinced him to go to the seminary in california where he was going to maybe
19:53
become a priest and then you know these these issues that he had kind of combining conspiracy
20:00
theories together with religion started to crop up this was not exactly it but in California he suddenly quit and
20:08
left because he got into a dispute with the leader of the seminary there over whether evolution was a topic that he should be
20:17
writing about or not he wanted to write that the story of human Creation in the Bible was correct so kind of stormed out of there without telling anybody um
20:25
drove back across the country and on the advice of GOC leaders decided to spend some time in Cobleskill where hopefully it was nice and quiet and he could work
20:33
out some of his issues yeah it continued after the exorcism that the ideas about the covid pandemic and the vaccine
20:42
in you know Bill Gates and all these conspiracies he kind of put those together in his mind with ideas about religion and the GOC to make these sort
20:50
of very grandiose theories that ultimately he was talking about on the day he committed suicide the leader of the monastery
20:58
was actually an advocate for the community getting vaccinated so
21:05
actually Max's some of his ideas were actually more conservative than this church that wanted to rely on ideology
21:12
that dated back to you know 100 a.d or something like that Christ's early followers so you know it's a complicated story it's
21:21
not it's not straightforward and I think that was the difficulty of this you know I my frame of reference going into this
21:28
was a series i'd written about child murders in family court and this turned out to be very different it was a suicide
21:36
it involved an adult not a child it was not a murder it turned out to be much more complicated and nuanced than I thought you get into ideas thinking
21:44
about religion just thinking about well is it crazier or not for somebody to believe in a demon I just haven't never
21:52
thought about that I think about science and but when you think about it there are unexplainable things in the universe and you have to consider
21:59
that person's point of view and so you know it just got very complicated in my thinking and it was a good experience
22:06
but you know a lot to deal with so you know in the past I think maybe even you and I have spoken about it you
22:13
are primarily a political investigative reporter you do deep dives into documents into
22:21
campaign funding that type of thing you are a master at it but the family court stories that you have done and now this story the kind of
22:29
human tragedy and the interactions you've had with sources who are families who have been through quite literally just about the most horrible
22:37
things that people can can go through I mean that takes its own kind of psychological toll which you've been writing these stories all through the
22:45
pandemic when you know it's great to sit here in the office with you but over the course the last two years you two have been isolated I mean was there a certain
22:54
i don't want to say that like you've been through anything like what Max Ledwidge went through but I think was there a certain amount of
23:01
common consciousness of what that kind of isolation can do to a person yeah a little bit you know the family court stories dealt with an institution
23:09
which was the court system and this also dealt with a sort of institution which was this religious order but the things were
23:17
not necessarily the same and there were nuances but they were the same in the sense that I was dealing with the parents of somebody who had died and
23:26
that's in in my political reporting I can be very aggressive and lose my temper you cannot do that when you're dealing with
23:33
the parents of somebody who's died and you have to be sensitive and these people were wonderful by the way the legend parents they seemed like
23:41
great people really caring parents and I felt so badly for them I went to their house in Fort Lauderdale when I was down in
23:49
Miami and visited them and you know the mother was crying the father cried at various points
23:56
so it's very hard to stay objective in some ways when you're talking to somebody like that so that was a challenge and the story
24:04
was trying to stay objective and I i think hopefully we pulled that off but honoring the memory of somebody while also getting into
24:12
their very deep mental health issues is not an easy line to walk and i'm sure in fact I know that this was a tough
24:19
article for them to read so I thought it was it was very fair I thought it was fair to the monastery fair to
24:26
this fairly singular faith that you were writing about that I think most readers have never heard of and and very fair to the family while of course recognizing
24:34
that they've been through a trauma and there are aspects of their son's life that that even they are are sort of not not fully aware of so thanks very much
24:42
an exorcism and Cobleskill it's it's a long story one of the longer ones we will probably run in the times union this year but it's definitely well worth
24:50
your time
Part 3. email from Maximos to Joanna
2 emails from Maximos dated November 2020
archived here
https://web.archive.org/web/20220523214241/https://remnantrocor.blogspot.com/
also here
https://app.box.com/s/m944xlaehshh8ghxs6vvxdgp0ffy9q4h
According to the timeline I've put together, these emails were written shortly after he was scandalized by Etna and left Etna. And next her went to St. John's for "retreat." A month later, on world's Christmas, Maximos phoned his parents and told his mother he was going to hell. I assume it was before, not after, the phone call that he had said something to Metr. Demetrius. If you follow the trail, he picked up the demon(s) either at Etna or on his way to St. John's.
Sunday Nov 22, 2020
Hi Joanna,
May God bless you through the prayers of St. Nektarios!
I hope you are doing well. Right now I’m doing an extended stay at the St. John of Shanghai monastery in NY. The past 3 weeks have been a big blessing, attending all the services and experiencing some amazing things. It’s starting to get cold though!
I was wondering if you knew anything about how the Churches in Greece, Romania and Russia/Ukraine had handled the covid lockdown measures since March? Did a majority of the old calendarist churches decide to follow orders to stop allowing lay people at services or limit the number to 10 or so? I ask because I’ve seen a few opinion pieces floating around the GOC about why the lockdowns are a good thing and why we’re apparently doing a God-pleasing thing by complying, but I’m not buying it.
It seems like in the US I’d say it’s about 50/50 whether a parish complied with lockdown measures or not. Do you have any insight on what the numbers looked like in the Orthodox countries for our fellow true Orthodox brothers and sisters?
Anyway, how are things down south?
I do not have the answer I wrote back.
I did not have the information at the time to
reassure Maximos that Vl. Agafangel, in his comments on Internet Sobor,
calls the vaccine a "potion" and the Bulgarian Church absolutely forbids
her children to take the vaccine. They had a full page of rant against
the vaccine — top page on their official website — for years
afterwards. You might find it in the Way Back Machine https://bulgarian-orthodox-church.org/index.html
https://startingontheroyalpath.blogspot.com/2024/08/recovered-post-vladyka-agafangel.html
It is discomforting to all of us that our monasteries did not see the evil in the vaccine. Etna even recommended people get vaccinated. Maybe not officially, but insiders reported they were "pushed" to get vaccinated by Bp. Auxentios. At least Metr. Demetrius said let each person decided for himself. We expect our leaders to be more alert... For a newcomer, giving obedience, giving himself over trustingly into the hands of somebody who does not recognize the evil? "Discomforting" is not a strong enough word... Guaranteed Archbishop Averky would have seen it.... all of old Jordanville would have seen it....
It is discomforting to all of us that our monasteries did not see the evil in the vaccine. Etna even recommended people get vaccinated. Maybe not officially, but insiders reported they were "pushed" to get vaccinated by Bp. Auxentios. At least Metr. Demetrius said let each person decided for himself. We expect our leaders to be more alert... For a newcomer, giving obedience, giving himself over trustingly into the hands of somebody who does not recognize the evil? "Discomforting" is not a strong enough word... Guaranteed Archbishop Averky would have seen it.... all of old Jordanville would have seen it....
I do recall telling him that I had heard through the grapevine that he went to Etna.
Wed Nov. 25, 2020
Hi Joanna,
Yes I decided to enroll at Etna. I wanted to overlook their past and trust that they truly were of one mind with the rest of the Church. I found that to not be true however. Etna still likes to throw around their whole “sick and ailing members of the Church theory” that I believe they were supposed to stop teaching after the union. They like the “River of Fire” piece by Kalomiros, which doesn’t contain a single heresy [huh? https://startingontheroyalpath.blogspot.com/2012/01/river-of-fire-by-dr-kalomiros.html] but seems like it has so much wrong with it that it’s almost impossible to untangle.
Worst of all to me at least, was the fact that essentially Etna is teaching that the theory of evolution is compatible with Orthodox doctrine. A student I spoke with said when he came to Etna he did not believe in evolution, and after attending he does believe in it and believes it’s perfectly compatible with Christianity. They do not outright claim that God created through evolution, but in their “Science and Religion” course they teach the standard 14 billion year universe theory and evolutionary theory that everyone excepts as fact nowadays, leaving students to come to the conclusion that evolution is compatible with Church doctrine. I went to speak with Bishop Auxentios, telling him I was planning to write a paper on the compatibility of evolution with the Church’s Patristic teaching on Genesis. He spoke for about an hour on the topic. His main “issue” with evolution was that it could be “impious”. When I attempted to summarize what he believed about the topic I said “so one could believe that God created via evolution or created more in the Creationist way of thinking, and both would be fine?” He responded yes you could say that.
I later wrote him and the teacher of the course a long email pointing out some potential errors with evolution, to which the science professor said he wasn’t going to take the time to respond. Also, when we spoke about the subject Bishop Auxentios (thinking I agreed with him) warned me about writing about evolution because we have a lot of “uneducated and ignorant people in our Church”, AKA everyone outside of Etna who does not agree with them.
I spoke with Bishop Auxentios again, and he started to deny that he had ever endorsed “theistic evolution” and he began to change his position on the matter. This kind of lack of concern for the truth was appalling to me. I would have been less upset if he preached evolution outright than whatever kind of mental gymnastics they try to pull claiming that “death as we know it now came into existence after the fall”, obviously leaving the door open for “some kind of death” that could have existed pre-Fall, and thus leaving the door open for God creating via evolution.
I decided that I could not get behind the school, the diocese and its mission if it isn’t going to be of one mind with the Church and the Fathers. This can be summed up by Bishop Auxentios telling me “we are the Church of the Fathers... [took about a 15 second pause thinking about how to put it without sounding impious] but the Fathers didn’t know everything about science.” While it’s true the Fathers did not know everything about science, Genesis is about Divine Revelation, not science. As you know nobody broke down this issue better than Fr. Seraphim but Bishop Auxentios seemed unconcerned with his thorough discussion of the matter.
I’ll send you what St. Edward’s Brotherhood has said about the matter as well as Fr. Thomas Marietta. Met. Moses also sent out an email about the whole situation yesterday.
I’ll ask to see if they have any copies and let you know. One other question I had for you is that I remember you mentioning we should not “sing or hymn” the Jesus prayer. I have noticed there are several people here who seem to do that and also say it rather loudly. I read St. Ignatius comments on prayer https://www.orthodoxprayer.org/Articles_files/Brianchaninov-Jesus%20Prayer.html. He says the prayer should be said slowly, lingering over each word, and just loud enough so you can hear it (whispering it).
I only ask because I’m a beginner, don’t know what I’m doing, and don’t want to pick up bad habits.
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