Dispute Threatens to Split the Eastern Orthodox Church

During Lent, Christianity’s season of fasting and penitence, a quarrel has grabbed hold of the Orthodox Church that is so acrimonious that priests and experts say it could ultimately lead to the greatest split in Christendom in more than 900 years.

At immediate issue are souls, churches, monasteries and 8,750 acres in the small Baltic nation of Estonia. But this turf war between the two mightiest centers in the Orthodox world, Moscow and Istanbul, Turkey, also has the potential to divide Christians as far away as America and Canada.

“This conflict is a high-explosive time bomb under Christianity,” said Alexander I. Nezhny, an ordained Russian Orthodox clergyman and journalist.

Things have come to such a sorry pass in the Eastern Church that when Alexy II, the patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, said prayers amid swirling plumes of incense at Moscow’s Epiphany cathedral, he purposely omitted the Istanbul-based ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, from the list of high Orthodox prelates for whom he asked divine blessings.

It was the first time such a snub had been committed and recorded in more than 1,000 years.

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That same day, Feb. 23, the Russian church broke off ties with Bartholomew’s patriarchate in Istanbul, the historical Greek-language mother church that gave Christianity to Russia, which now boasts the world’s largest Orthodox community.

Specifically, the Moscow Patriarchate accused Constantinople of having “shattered age-old Orthodox unity”--a “tragedy for millions of Orthodox believers”--by reclaiming jurisdiction over the Orthodox church in Estonia three days earlier.

Unlike Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, the major branch of the Christian faith in the Middle East and much of Eastern Europe, is a fellowship of administratively independent churches, each of which has the right to elect its own head and bishops.

The Moscow vs. Istanbul rift is serious in that Orthodox churches representing about 300 million faithful from Syria to North America might ultimately be forced to side with one patriarchate or the other, shattering the Eastern Church into separate Slavic and Greek communities.

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“Potentially, this is the most serious split in Christianity since the 16th century and the Reformation or since the year 1054--the year when the Western church broke with the Eastern,” said Lawrence A. Uzzell, Moscow-based representative for the Keston Institute, a British-based organization that monitors religious affairs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

On Monday, one of the Russian church’s highest-ranking clergymen, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, summoned reporters to the church’s headquarters at Danilov Monastery. He accused the Constantinople Patriarchate of spreading lies and the Estonian government of running roughshod over the rights of ethnic Russians.

The Moscow clergy also drafted the support of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who wrote his Estonian counterpart, Lennart Meri, to express concern. For his part, Bartholomew moved to win the backing of Greece, dispatching a delegation to Athens to hold talks with the Foreign Ministry of that largely Orthodox nation.

The Orthodox Church in America, lamenting a “disastrous turn” in events, announced that its Holy Synod will meet March 18-21 to discuss the conflict, and called on bishops, clergy and laity alike to pray for the “welfare of the holy churches of God.”

At bottom, the rancorous dispute has arisen because of the Russian church’s role in past centuries as a loyal servant of the Russian state and circumstances of the Soviet Union’s breakup.

In mostly Lutheran Estonia, which regained its independence from the Kremlin in 1991, the Orthodox church is still viewed by many as a “hand of Moscow.” Crunch time came Feb. 22 when a small group of Estonian, Finnish, Russian and Greek clergy in Tallinn, Estonia, proclaimed the restoration of the patriarch of Constantinople’s jurisdiction over Estonia’s Orthodox community.

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From many Estonians’ point of view, that merely reestablished what existed from 1923-1940, when the church in the then-sovereign Baltic state sought help elsewhere to guarantee its survival against a militantly atheistic Soviet Russia.

But the Moscow Patriarchate was incensed by what it saw as inadmissible poaching on its ecclesiastical territory and a slight to the rights of ethnic Russian believers. “This is crude interference in the affairs of the church,” Kirill objected.

Bolstering Moscow’s case: Of 100,000 estimated Orthodox churchgoers in Estonia, the bulk are ethnic Russians; only a tenth are ethnic Estonians. It also so happens that Alexy Ridiger, the Moscow patriarch, was himself born in Estonia and served there as priest and prelate. “Throughout the years of the persecution of the church, we sought to maintain Orthodoxy there,” Alexy has said in defense of his church.

Informed sources say the pro-Constantinople faction has support from 54 of Estonia’s 84 parishes. Most believers, though, are ethnic Russians concentrated in large urban parishes and back continued ties with Moscow.

“Why should the voice of 10,000 Estonians be louder than 100,000 Russians?” asked Pavel Mashkov, an ethnic Russian who serves as curator of the century-old onion-domed Alexander Nevsky cathedral in Tallinn.

In another act unacceptable to Moscow, the head of the Orthodox Church in Finland, Archbishop John of Karelia and All Finland, was installed in a service in Tallinn’s Church of the Transfiguration as acting head of the Estonian church until a synod can meet to elect a local clergyman.

The property issue could be the thorniest of all. Three years ago, a group of emigres who had created an Estonian Orthodox church in exile in Stockholm registered in post-Soviet Estonia under the prewar name of the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church. That is the church that has been taken under Bartholomew’s wing.

And, as far as the Estonian government and courts are concerned, its registration now makes the pro-Constantinople faction sole legal heir to church property nationalized under the Soviets.

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Parishes faithful to Moscow have made it clear that they won’t give up their houses of worship or other properties. Tallinn’s Archbishop Kornelius, who is loyal to Moscow, has hinted at the possibility of violence.

The Russian Church maintains that the Estonian action is patently illegal because the emigre church had been disbanded and a church could not be registered under the Baltic republic’s own laws if its center was abroad.

Kirill has floated a possible compromise: that Orthodox churches in Estonia remain in the hands of their congregations, which would decide whether to submit themselves to the authority of the Moscow or Constantinople patriarchate. He said a formal decision on what future relations to have with the Constantinople Patriarchate will have to be taken by a Local Council of Russian Church leaders.

Times special correspondents Hugh Pope in Istanbul and Michael Tarm in Tallinn contributed to this report.