One possibility to at least make things slightly better, I suppose, might be for each diocese in a hypothetical unified American Orthodox Church to have one OC hierarch and one NC hierarch. So I guess you’d still have overlapping jurisdictions, but it would be uniform and limited — two bishops per diocese. That might at least mitigate the problem. But I really don’t know what the right answer is.

In the late 1960s I was a member of the St. Andrew mission in Suffolk County when we voted some 90 percent to use the new calendar but Metr. Ireney would not approve it – he did not reject it either – until we had a meeting with him at the 2nd Street cathedral!

At the time Father John Nehrebecki, whose parish in Paramus was well organized, had submitted their request immediately after the Sobor and the Metropolitan approved it immediately. Perhaps , for the rest of us, he felt taken by surprise as many of the “English” parishes in the New York City area that wanted to use the new calendar all had a hard time getting approval, such that representatives of these parishes held a number of meetings trying to figure a way to get Metr. Ireney’s approval.

I notice that the Orthodoxwiki article (http://orthodoxwiki.org/All-American_Sobor) on the All-American Sobors does not mention the authorization scheme to use the new calendar. The 1982 reference may be to the act by Bishop Herman to command the use of the new calendar in his diocese in the early 1980s that caused the defection and split of a number of parishes.