Russian Bishops Open Council to Mark 1,000 Years

Russian Orthodox bishops Monday opened a general church council to celebrate 1,000 years of Christianity in what is now the Soviet Union.

The four-day council is only the third such gathering allowed in the Soviet Union since World War II.

After a service sung by the monks of the Holy Trinity and St. Sergius Monastery in Zagorsk, a center of church activity 35 miles north of Moscow, the Russian primate, Patriarch Pimen, declared the council open in the monastery’s baroque refectory.

Konstantin M. Kharchev, head of the state Council for Religious Affairs, which supervises church activity in the Soviet Union, read a message from the government assuring believers and atheists alike that the state would protect their interests.

The council will discuss a draft charter on internal church management. This is in addition to a new law on church-state relations that the state is currently preparing.

Outlawed by Stalin

Believers hope the new state law will ease restrictions on such activities as the teaching of religion and the organization of charity, outlawed by Josef Stalin in 1929.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert A. K. Runcie, one of scores of foreign churchmen who observed the opening of the council, said in an interview that he sees the millennium as a thanksgiving for the Russian church’s “triumph over trials and suffering over past centuries and to the present day.”

Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state, is due to leave for Moscow on Wednesday to take part in the observances.