Those who clamor for constant "active participation" in the liturgy, translation of divine services into the vernacular, and greater ecumenism with non Orthodox are examples of liberalism in this Church. No Orthodox version of Richard McBrian or Hans Kung (yet anyway). But Schemmen and Meyendorff were not far from Karl Rainer and Von Balthazar in our faith.
My experience has been that the Greeks, not the OCA, tended to have the most modernist problems (ironically, they also have the most reactionary types as well). The OCA, after all, canonised St. Alexis of Wilkes-Barre, whose main claim to fame was to essentially create the OCA out of a large (tens of thousands) group of Ruthenian Catholics back around the turn of the pervious century. This does not seem to me to be very "ecumenical." It seems to me that aside from the boutique sect Orthodox, whose Orthodoxy is an extention of their trendy Russian-arthouse-film-and-sushi lifestyle, and aside from thier financial scandals, the OCA is in significantly better shape than GOArch because so much of the OCA is made up of converts, as opposed to a bunch of ethnic Greeks and their non-Greek spouses, whose Orthodoxy consists of being Greek.
I disagree that the use of the vernacular is an example of Orthodox modernism. Rather, it seems to be following the pattern of traditional missionary activity, for example, when the Faith was brought to the West and translated into Latin, or to the Slavs and translated into Slavonic. As for the use of English, St. Innocent of Alaska was already working on English translations of Liturgy and the Services back in the 19th Century when he moved the American mission from Alaska to San Francisco. The quality of the Orthodox translations of their services is far better than the Unitate versions, and it seems to me that the real fight is between using modern pronouns like the Greeks and some of the OCA, using slightly-Elizabethanised English like some of the OCA and the Antiochenes, or using heavily-Elizabethanised St. John of Krondstadt Press English like ROCOR.
I have not read much Meyendorff (either of them), but I have read a lot of Schmemann; why do you think he is a modernist? What does he say that Cabasilas did not say,
mutatis mutandis, back in the 14th Century? It seems to me that Schmemann was primarily concerned with making the liturgical life of the Church a lived reality for Orthodox Christians--first by promoting a greater understanding of the sacraments themselves, and more significantly by promoting the incorporation of a sacramental mindset in daily life. I think Schmemann correctly saw that Orthodoxy had been declining into a cultic Chruch--that is, a Church that exists for the sake of performing the services, but with little fruit in the lives of the Orthodox. Arguably, this is what the Roman Catholic Church was prior to Vatican II, and what it still is now--except that the cult is so much less attractive. The Orthodox do have an advantage over the Catholics in this regard--they fetishize ethnic custom the way Catholics fetishize power, and so it is unlikely that they will be able to muck up their Liturgy the way the Catholics have.
