From Diaspora, an Overture to Russian Church

Nearly 90 years after the Russian Revolution, should the Russian Orthodox Church be forgiven for collaborating with an atheist police state? Only 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, can the church reportedly led by former KGB agents be trusted?

For hundreds of anti-communist parishes in exile, those questions have triggered a lot of soul searching.

But in a nearly unanimous vote in San Francisco last week, a special council of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia adopted a resolution to become a self-governing branch within the Moscow Patriarchate. A dozen bishops later endorsed the proposal to “heal the wounds of division within the Russian Church” and “commune from one chalice.”

But they didn’t say when.

That ambiguity represents a new twist in the long-running dispute between the Moscow-based church and the parishes outside Russia, whose founding pastors were chastised as renegades and “schismatics” in the 1920s when they fled their homeland along with hundreds of thousands of tradesmen, peasants, landowners and soldiers.

These parishes came to be known as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, or as they often refer to themselves, ROCOR.

Until now, these parishes established in the United States, Europe, South America, Africa, Australia and Asia had refused to even consider reunification unless the Russian Orthodox Church first publicly apologized for collaborating with the Soviet secret police.

All that began to change with the renewal of the church in Russia in the 1980s and the collapse of the Communist regime in the next decade.

More than half of Russia’s 144 million citizens now identify themselves as Orthodox Christian, although church attendance is significantly lower.

The easing of tensions eventually led to extraordinary meetings held over the last week by the All-Diaspora Council, 124 pastors and laypeople from around the world gathered at Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco to lay the groundwork for reconciliation. It was the fourth time such a council had been convened since 1920.

On May 12, the 124 delegates recommended reconciliation with Moscow. While leaving the question of timing open, the panel of 12 bishops backed the recommendation Thursday.

“I am for unity immediately,” said council secretary Father Peter Perekrestov. “Conditions will never get better.

“It’s true that some of our people don’t trust the patriarch, because they believe he collaborated with Russian authorities,” he said. “But we have to face facts. About 15,000 churches have been reopened during his tenure. That’s almost as many as were destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

“What he is doing now is for the glory of God,” Perekrestov added. “That is what matters most to me.”

A Moscow lawmaker praised the resolution as an important historical event, given that the parishes preserved millennium-old spiritual traditions suppressed by the Soviets.

“This is truly a great event,” said Natalia Narachnitskaya, deputy of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, “because every people has, figuratively speaking, a body, a soul and a spirit, and for the Russian people these components were separated for a very long time.”

“We faced off in the course of a hundred years shouting, ‘Crucify him!’ and ‘Repent!’ and unable to agree on a single issue of our past, present or future,” she said. “It is our task now to join the Russia that we lost, which largely exists in our consciousness and historic memory.”

Not so fast, argue doubters who believe that unity is premature and warn that the church in Russia remains a living remnant of the Cold War that cannot be trusted.

To hear them tell it, the Russian Federation may try to use ROCOR’s parishes as safe houses and intelligence gathering outposts for spies.

Valentin Scheglowski, a Russian interpreter in Minnesota and spokesman for a group opposed to unity any time soon, put it this way: “We want nothing more than unity with our clergy brothers and sisters in Moscow. The problem is that at the heart of the very top of the church are opportunists put there by the KGB.”

Unity, he said, would make it easy for Russian police to coax 77-year-old Moscow Patriarch Alexy II into “inserting agents into the role of clergy” so they could “conduct intelligence operations ... and facilitate illegal activity.”

“ROCOR currently has over 50 parishes and monasteries scattered throughout the United States, including major cathedrals in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; San Francisco; and Los Angeles,” he added. “Perhaps more importantly, a number of these parishes are close to strategically sensitive national security sites.”

Father Perekrestov dismissed that kind of talk as “malicious” and unfounded.

“If we reconcile,” he said, “the dissenters’ little world falls apart. All of a sudden, their enemy will disappear.”

The Russian Orthodox Church is among a group of autonomous Eastern Orthodox churches that trace their origins back a millennium.

They were created in the Great Schism of 1054, when many churches in the western half of the old Roman Empire accorded the bishop of Rome supremacy over other bishops, giving rise to the Roman Catholic Church in the West.

By the end of the 11th century, the Eastern Orthodox Church was firmly established and organized under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the church in Russia was stripped of its riches and spiritual traditions. Its property was heavily taxed, and its onion-domed churches were used as pens for domestic animals. Thousands of priests and monks were executed.

In 1990 the Supreme Soviet enacted a law guaranteeing religious freedom to all citizens and forbidding government interference in religious practice. No longer targeted by Soviet antagonism toward religion, the church began to flourish.

Open dialogue between the Russian Orthodox Church, which oversees about 27,000 churches, and ROCOR, which has about 350 worldwide, began about three years ago.

Many active laypeople believe that reunification is inevitable. Among them is Jean-Francois Mayer, a delegate from the Diocese of Western Europe.

“The issues at stake are purely political and have nothing to do with theology,” said Mayer, who voted for the resolution. “It’s no secret that Patriarch Alexy II worked for the KGB. But the renewal taking place in the Russian Orthodox Church today matters much more.

“I think there will be unity sooner or later; the time has come to commune and celebrate together,” he added. “The question is: How fast should it be done? And what should be the conditions for it?”

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Natasha Yefimova of The Times’ Moscow bureau contributed to this report.