Orthodox Consecration - the Mystery Unfolds

From Dr William Tighe, with many thanks from your blogger:

I have been making inquiries about this. Nobody seems to know who this “Metropolitan John” may have been. Possibly it may have been John Theodorovich (d. 1971), who in the early 1920s was one of the Ukrainian priests trying to set up an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and was elected one of its bishops. But as no living bishop could be found to consecrate them, they exhumed the body of one of their recently-deceased bishops and, holding his hand on the heads of those bishops-elect, pronounced “on his behalf” (as it were) the formula of episcopal consecration. In 1924 this Metropolitan John came to America, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was reconsecrated in 1949 by other, canonical, Orthodox bishops. He may be your man. However, the Ukrainian Orthodox community in America produced numerous splinter groups from the, some of them having bishops in the “dead hand” succession, others in more regular successions; and a few of these small bodies quickly degenerated into “ordination factories” run by episcopi vagantes.