Exile Orthodox to vote on Moscow tie
by Adam Tanner
Reuters
Wednesday, May 10, 2006; 9:53 PM
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, long exiled in the United States, votes on Thursday on whether to embrace the Moscow-based church it left after the 1917 Communist revolution.
For his part, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, Patriarch Alexiy II, is actively encouraging the Church Abroad -- which has bishops in the United States, Germany, Australia, Russia and elsewhere -- to end the long division.
"There has also grown a mutual understanding of previously contested issues, which for the last two years have been discussed by special commissions," he said in a message on the Church Abroad's Web site. "Our Lord has allowed us to collaborate on some great things, but we believe that our greatest work is yet to come."
The Church Abroad's All-Diaspora Council -- only the fourth since 1920 -- is set to vote on a resolution in San Francisco on its future course on Thursday, church officials said, with bishops to make a formal decision the following week.
The head of the Church Abroad, Metropolitan Laurus, has talked about religious unity but without ceding control of the administration of his roughly 350 communities worldwide.
Yet many church officials are wary about embracing Moscow, where they say the clergy collaborated with the Soviet KGB secret police. The issue has repeatedly divided the flock.
DIVISIONS WITHIN DIVISIONS
In fact, the whole story of the Eastern Orthodox Church itself started with Christianity's Great Schism into Eastern and Western halves in 1054 in a dispute over Papal authority.
"Over her entire history the Holy Church of Christ has been tempted by various divisions," Nikolai Savchenko, a priest, told the All-Diaspora Council this week. "Some of them resulted in schisms and heresies so that entire communities fell away."
"One can hardly find in history an age of complete internal calm or tranquility."
In the centuries that followed, the Orthodox Church played a vital role in Russian life. Atheistic Communists curtailed the church after the 1917 revolution, the event which gave rise to the Church Abroad in the 1920s.
The story following the Soviet collapse in 1991 is one of bitter struggle over doctrine as well as authority. In the 1990s, the Church Abroad made an effort to set up its own churches inside Russia at the same time the Moscow Patriarchate was experiencing a spiritual revival.
A leading convert in that early effort was Bishop Valentin in the 1,000-year-old village of Suzdal, where dozens of churches in a bucolic setting recall Russia before Soviet industrialization.
Citing doctrinal differences, Valentin soon left with a group of allied churches, eventually even consecrating his own bishop in the United States. The American division, headed by Archbishop Gregory of Denver, in turn split from Valentin in 2004, saying that they are the only ones true to Orthodoxy.
"The bottom line is -- I hate to say this because it sounds proud -- but there is one true Russian Orthodox bishop in the United States and it is me," Gregory told Reuters on Wednesday.
If the internecine struggle was not complicated enough, the Church Abroad also experienced a major defection in 2000 when its former head, Metropolitan Vitaly, emerged from retirement to lead a new group opposed to closer relations with Moscow.
