Missionaries Find Hostility in Commonwealth

Religious freedom in the new Commonwealth of Independent States has brought an influx of missionaries, creating problems for Orthodox Christian leaders, who view themselves as preservers of the true Christian faith.

Orthodox leaders, regarding their churches as strongholds of the ancient faith, feel they have an obligation to protect even the nominally Orthodox against influences of other denominations.

As an example of the tensions developing, Gregory Havrilak, director of information for the Orthodox Church of America, said Orthodox Christians object to recent talk of “evangelizing” Christians in Eastern Europe.

“Recent statements in the evangelical press about sending millions of Bibles to evangelize the Slavs implies that the Slavic Orthodox have never heard the gospel and are not already Christian,” he said.

The Orthodox Church of America has historic ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, the dominant religion in Russia. That 1,000-year-old church, in turn, has ties to older Orthodox churches that trace their history to the apostolic times.

The Baptists involved in the Bible distribution had “hoped the Orthodox would want everyone to have the chance to read the Bible,” said Paul Montacute, director of world aid for Baptist World Alliance.

The Orthodox have been engaged in serious conflicts with the Roman Catholic Church as well. Aleksy has accused Pope John Paul II of making converts and establishing “parallel missionary structures,” appointing bishops as apostolic administrators for Latin-Rite Catholics in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine. Aleksy cited these complaints when he declined the Pope’s invitation to attend a synod of European Catholic bishops in Rome last month.

The patriarch also criticized appointing Catholic bishops to large cities where only a few hundred Catholics live.

“If the Pope consider us as a sister church, why would the Catholics establish their own structure where there is already an Orthodox one?” remarked the Rev. Peter L’Huiller, chairman of external affairs of the Orthodox Church of America.

The Pope has maintained that the bishops were appointed only to serve the spiritual needs of the existing Catholic communities and that his intention is not to proselytize.

Another dispute between Aleksy and the Pope has been over ownership of church buildings in the western Ukraine, buildings which the Ukrainian Catholics claim belonged to them.