MOSCOW, (Alexei Makarkin, Deputy Director General of the Center for Political Technologies, for RIA Novosti)
- The latest Bishops' Council of the Russian Church Outside Russia, or RCOR, approved a draft Act on Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate. This certainly does not mean the two churches will merge at once, though the prospect is close at hand. The RCOR and the Moscow Patriarchate both intend to make the draft public for the flock even before its final approval.
Reunification efforts were launched with dynamic participation of Russia's secular authorities. President Vladimir Putin met with RCOR hierarchs. A dialogue between the churches, which started several years ago and has gone on to this day, encountered many problems. Thus there is an extremely involved matter to settle-the status of the members of the clergy who left the Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate for the RCOR in the 1990s. Some of them received promotion, unrecognized by the Moscow Patriarchate as yet. There is another issue, RCOR parishes in Russia and Ukraine, which are in harsh and lasting confrontation with the Patriarchate. Last but not least, there is the RCOR Eucharistic communion with some of so-called Old Style ecclesiastical communities in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. Such communities owe their name to the Julian calendar, to which they still cling though their countries' established churches have long shifted to the Gregorian. Those communities direly oppose the official top of their national churches. To communicate with them is the last thing the Russian Orthodox Church wants, with its firm desire to preserve friendly contacts with the canonical sister churches.
However essential those issues might be, they boil down to sheer technicalities, and can be settled if a reunification understanding is reached in principle. Such an understanding is available now, despite all the obstacles the parties have come against. Thus, the RCOR was initially expected to finally determine canonical communion with the Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate reinstated at its General Synod, which preceded the Bishops' Council to gather bishops, clerics and members of the laity. Many of the RCOR clergy and flock approve of the merger idea, for a number of reasons, and point out the sizeable progress the Moscow Patriarchate has made to meet the RCOR halfway and comply with conditions the Church based abroad deems indispensable for ecclesiastical unity, so the reunification prospects appear quite tangible.
Thus the Russian Orthodox Church has canonized many of the New Martyrs-victims of Bolshevik reprisals. The Royal family is among the newly canonized. That matters a great deal to the RCOR, many of whose clergy and flock worshipped Russia's last Emperor as a holy martyr even before 1981, when the RCOR, then Russian Church in Exile, canonized him.
There is another major problem also rooted in the distant past. The Church abroad insisted on the Moscow Patriarchate denouncing the 1927 Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius, which spelt the start of concordance between the Bolshevik regime and such part of the Russian Orthodox clergy and laity as approved their Primate's move. The Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate certainly cannot denounce the Declaration-otherwise, it will undermine the prestige of Sergius, who ascended the Patriarchal throne at the decline of his life, and of all its subsequent Primates. However, a majority of the present-day RCOR clergy and hierarchy regard Patriarch Sergius as belonging to the hoary past, and do not intend to break lances over the verbal subtleties of documents related to him. They are willing to make do with the Church distancing itself from the State, as the Russian Orthodox Church stresses in its Social Doctrine.
There is another point of controversy, the most involved of all-ecumenical activities of the Moscow Patriarchate. However insistent the RCOR purists might be in their demands to put an end to ecumenical contacts once and for all, the Patriarchate is set against leaving the World Council of Churches, the principal vehicle of ecumenical efforts, even though the Russian Orthodox Church has limited such efforts.
The opposition within the RCOR is strong enough. It threatened to split the Church even during its General Synod. That was why the gathering failed to make a final reunification decision. Nevertheless, it came to a compromise resolution to approve reunification prospects in principle with mild references to the necessity to convene the Local Council, and to the highly desirable withdrawal of the Russian Orthodox Church from the ecumenical WCC. Practical decisions were left for the Bishops' Council, where the opposition is not nearly as resolute. However, the Council did not dare to make any binding resolutions, and merely approved unity prospects as a vague matter of principle. The Council also chose to shift responsibility, this time to the Bishops' Synod of five, of whom Bishop Gabriel alone opposes tentative merger.
To all appearances, the Bishops' Synod will approve reunification after all remaining issues come to a long-awaited settlement. There is another stumbling block, however-the Local Council to be convened. Many in the Russian Orthodox Church do not think this is a good time for the Council lest it provide the rostrum for irresponsible propaganda by radicals of the many trends. If the Local Council does not come up in the Bishops' Synod resolution as an indispensable condition, the opposition will feel morally justified breaking away from the RCOR. Most probably, it will join the many Old Style communities based in Russia and Greece alike. The prospects promise a spectacularly improved public image of the Moscow Patriarchate and Russia's secular authorities, to which the church merger will come as a revival of pre-Soviet traditions.
