Schism threatens Russian Orthodoxy

Christian Century, Dec 9, 1998

When the World Council of Churches' assembly convenes this month in Harare, Zimbabwe, the specter of losing its largest member, the 80-million-member Russian Orthodox Church, will loom large over the proceedings. But for the token delegation from the Russian Orthodox Church, there will be a far more ominous threat back home: schism.

Leaders of the Russian church are faced with an increasingly insistent conservative movement that threatens to break apart the church along a deepening generational and philosophical fault line, with participation in the WCC a key symbolic issue. Conservatives denounce participation in the WCC--with its discussions of homosexual clergy and feminist theology-as sullying Russian Orthodoxy with the heresies of the West.

"If you don't want a schism, then you can't maintain involvement, you can't stay in the ecumenical movement," said Yevgeny Nikiforov, who heads the Radonezh Orthodox Brotherhood--a group that operates two radio stations, publishes a newspaper and is among the leading conservative forces in Russian Orthodoxy today. "I am being invited to have relations with people who call God `It' as they do in the Episcopal Church in America ... [and] with people who recognize homosexual marriages," said Nikiforov, a dapper man with a small ponytail and a persuasive manner. "You must understand, it is not even a matter of theology. We just don't want to associate with that kind of people."

The man leading the three-person delegation to the WCC assembly, Hieromonk Hilarion Alfeyev, is often pilloried in Nikiforov's newspaper for his ecumenism, and while there is no love lost between the two, one thing they do agree on is the issue's potential to divide the 1,000-year-old Russian church. Alfeyev, 32, acknowledged the danger of schism and the dicey nature of his mission to the WCC assembly. "I feel very strong pressure because obviously it is very difficult to represent a church where very many people have an antiecumenical attitude," said the softspoken Alfeyev, head of his church's secretariat for inter-Christian relations in the department for external church relations. "We must try to be a true representation."

Along with a husband-and-wife team of lay workers from his department who will round out the delegation, Alfeyev is under orders not to take part in voting, ceremonies or prayers, in keeping with an agreement reached at a pan-Orthodox meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece, in May. Other Orthodox delegations are expected to follow suit and present a common position at Harare.

In recent years two Orthodox churches, the Georgian and the Bulgarian, have dropped out of the WCC. The Georgian Orthodox Church, headed by Catholicos-Patriarch Ilya II, a past president of the WCC, is often cited as a cautionary tale for the much larger Russian Orthodox Church. Rebellious monks threatened schism over the issue of ecumenism in the spring of 1997, prompting Ilya to take his church out of the WCC in May of that year.

Church historian Yakov Krotov, an acerbic critic of the Russian Orthodox leadership, said predictions of schism over ecumenism are overblown and underestimate the power of the church's head, Patriarch Alexsy II, himself a veteran of ecumenical dialogue as a leading Sovietera hierarch. "The patriarch is not interested in ecumenism or nonecumenism. He is interested in power," said Krotov, adding that Alexsy has flexed his muscle of late by, for example, successfully lobbying for a restrictive Russian law on religion. "The patriarch has the money, the power and the political will to kill any schism." !After a letter from the northern Russian monastery of Valaam attacked both ecumenism and the patriarch, Krotov said, Alexsy traveled there in October, dressed down the monks and eventually reassigned their spiritual director to Greece's Mount Athos.

Opposition to ecumenism, however, is not confined to isolated monasteries or Orthodox brotherhoods, as shown by a visit last winter by Konrad Raiser, WCC general secretary, to the prestigious Moscow Theological Academy and Seminary. There, after delivering a talk to the church's future priests and theologians, Raiser was greeted with cries of "heretic" and accused of never having read the Bible and of heading an organization that promotes homosexuality.

The debate in Russia over whether the Russian Orthodox Church should remain in the WCC often divides on generational lines. Pro-WCC clergy, including the ruling apparatus, tend to be those who rose through the ranks at a time when involvement in the WCC was a way to bring international pressure on the Soviet government to allow at least a limited amount of religious freedom. Other, often younger Russian Orthodox see the church's joining the WCC in 1962 as evidence of how much control the KGB wielded over the church. This is the position of Nikiforov, who characterizes the church's department for external relations as having always been a department of the KGB. "Through the people in that department, the KGB maintained its influence on the church," he said.