MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Dmitry Shusharin) - A landmark in the history of Eastern Christendom is timed to the Ascension, which falls on May 17 this year.
The Russian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia are signing an Act of Canonical Communion.
The long-awaited event will prolong Easter festivities, Patriarch Alexy II said. Metropolitan Laurus, the First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the clergy accompanying him to Moscow, and clerics of the Moscow Patriarchate will take their Communion wine out of a common cup for the first time ever at Moscow's principal shrine, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, with open altar doors for the congregation to join in the reunion.
The upcoming event has been actively discussed from many points of view, which occasionally clash, and forecasts are being made concerning the impact of the Communion Act on the parish life of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, which is also known as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Both names, and two respective abbreviations, ROCOR and ROCA, occur on its official website.
Certain experts are wary of a schism in the ROCOR. The act grants it autonomy among the Local Russian Churches, but how long will such autonomy last?
The more optimistic opinions (which I share) find expression in high rhetoric, such as "historic" and "epoch-making."
The event is a real landmark, whatever one might think of it, and as such deserves sober and unbiased evaluation. It certainly opens a new chapter in the history of Russian Orthodoxy, and its meaning crosses by far the boundaries of church administrative and even canonical affairs. In a sense, it starts a new stage in the life of the Russian Diaspora, which thus formally recognizes the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia itself as the heart that has a magnetic power to all who see Russian culture as their own and the Russian language as their mother tongue. So secular authorities have every reason to pay great attention to the Church reunion. To all appearances, President Vladimir Putin sees it as his mission. Many regard it as a presidential project. I think they are right. It is really a worthy mission for a head of state to make peace between recently irreconcilable enemies.
True, the ROCOR clergy and laity have an indisputable right to their own opinions on all ecclesiastical and secular matters - but then, the ROCOR has never been the one and only spiritual and cultural center for Russians abroad. More than that, people to whom it was hostile account for the most important part of the theological and cultural heritage of the Russian Diaspora. Then, the emigre Church is thoroughly monarchist in its political convictions. In a word, the ROCOR cannot claim to speak up for the entire Diaspora, and has never claimed it, for that matter.
All that makes the restored canonical communion a real stride forward. A rapprochement between Russia and the Diaspora began fairly long ago. Now, the cause attracts even the people who bitterly opposed the Moscow Patriarchate and Russian secular authorities as late as the 1990s. Now, Russian secular leaders must withstand the temptation of giving the Church reunion a political coloring. Those leaders have completed their mission, whatever you may consider it - a national cause, religious or humanitarian. It has never been a political mission.
However, politics permeates all current affairs as well as history. Some people among the present-day Russian political elite regard clericalism as an ideology which can be made instrumental for ruling the country - clericalism, mind you, not Christian Orthodoxy, which by its very nature cannot be an ideology. They find the political and cultural heritage of the ROCOR extremely attractive. Despite all that, the Russian Orthodox Church within Russia will never tolerate treating any Church as a political tool. As for the ROCOR, the present generation of its clergy will not necessarily cling to its past political traditions. These priests are not pursuing any political goals as they return to Russia.
As for attitude to the two Churches' historical heritage, it needs an open discussion. On May 19, Patriarch Alexy II and Metropolitan Laurus will together consecrate the Church of the New Russian Martyrs and Confessors, whose foundation stone they laid three years ago in Butovo, an outlying Moscow neighborhood on the site of mass executions by the Cheka and Stalinist NKVD. The new shrine rises as a material response to appeals to the Russian Orthodox Church to denounce Bolshevik atrocities. Such appeals came for many years from the Russian Church Abroad.
But then, Russia has many political forces beside those represented by the Kremlin. They, too, often regard the Church, including the ROCOR, as a political instrument. So now, the ROCOR must explicitly determine its stance on Nazi collaborators from among its clergy and laity.
The matter is especially painful after a Moscow act of vandalism on the eve of the VE Day, when a churchyard slab was smashed to pieces. The Church of All Saints at Sokol has a Whiteguard memorial, which people of communist convictions have tolerated for years. After all, many countries commemorate civil war fighters of either side. Now, a rather prominent public organization intended to lay flowers on May 9 to a controversial slab that bore the names of war criminals, some of whom were executed in 1947, and their posthumous rehabilitation was turned down 50 years after. Those were White generals Krasnov and Shkuro, and General von Pannwitz, who led a Cossack volunteer division against the Allies. In particular, the 15th SS Cossack Cavalry Corps was known for blood-curdling atrocities in Serbia. The slab also bore the names of General Vlasov's soldiers, who fled to the West after the war, and Soviet officer defectors.
The slab was destroyed to thwart the remembrance ceremony. The vandals' motivation might be understandable but the effect was nevertheless a shock. It started a heated Internet debate in which many demanded that the slab should be restored, appealing for support to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
The matter certainly concerns not the ROCOR past but national history, and history demands responsible attitudes. The two parts of the Russian Church are reconciling and reuniting at a time when too many have not "their senses exercised to discern both good and evil", as St. Paul said in his Epistle to the Hebrews. The dullness of those senses alone can explain why the SS memorial slab had lain safe since 1994, and certain minds now tie its restoration to national reconciliation.
That is the context in which the Communion Act will be signed on the Feast of the Ascension. We can expect opinions to clash on the Church reunion. There is no way to avoid attempts to politically privatize it. But will those attempts reduce the inspiring meaning of the reunion?
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
