How Could the Russian Church Break Free of its Soviet Past?

Save me, O Lord, for there is no longer any that is godly; for the truth fails from among the sons of men.

Psalm 11, 2 (Septuagint) /12, 1

 

The title ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ was ‘Made in the USSR’, under Stalin just over eighty years ago. The title refers to the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has been involved in a great many divisive scandals from the outset. These have involved every level of lack of Christianity, from ignorance, financial corruption, theft, alcoholism and moral depravity, from Russia to Budapest, from London to Paris, to, more recently, the bullying narcissistic schismatic and the international poker-playing Metropolitan. In the first case, all the ROCOR bishops supported the schism, whereas in the second case, Moscow removed him.

In the last fifty years we have seen the Russian Church destroyed by one Russian nationalist bishop after another, and this with an old flock that utterly rejected atheist Communism and chose Church independence outside Moscow’s jurisdiction. And today the same has happened, but with a flock which was more recently assembled from Kazakhstan, the Baltic States and, above all, from the Ukraine and Moldova, who as Non-Russians were treated like third-class citizens. Will they too reject Moscow’s jurisdiction, just like the post-1917 emigration?

Is it all a deliberate attempt at suicide, or just the nightmarish incompetence of choosing the worst possible episcopal candidates? How can the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church reform and revert to being quite simply the administration of the Orthodox Church of Russia, as it historically was? We suggest eight stages:

 

  1. Abandon the Soviet legacy and rename itself ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’. The Patriarch and his administration could move physically to the New Jerusalem Monastery, founded by Patriarch Nikon in 1656 near the River Istra outside Moscow, and which I visited in 2007. On founding it, Patriarch Nikon recruited a number of monks of non-Russian origin as monks for the monastery, as it was intended to represent the multinational Orthodoxy of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Here is the true vocation of the Russian Orthodox clergy, not in corruption, depravity, nationalist politics and war, but in pastoral care, in love for all Orthodox people. For why else did God grant the Orthodox world the potential protection of by far the largest and richest country in the world? Was it so that it could become a bastion of racist nationalism? Or to become atheised and militarised Stalinist State puppets? Or to become a clerical caste of bureaucrats obsessed with protocols and ritualism? Or to become greedy, grasping capitalists and mini-oligarchs?
  1. It restores communion with all other canonical (therefore not the present fake Church in the Ukraine, known as the OCU) Local Churches and refrocks all the clergy, who had been uncanonically ‘defrocked’ for purely political and nationalistic reasons since January 2022.
  2. It grants Autocephaly to the Church in the New Ukraine (that is, to the Church for Ukrainians in the Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine) and to the Church in Belarus, and founds the Baltic Orthodox Church (for Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland) and the African Orthodox Church for Sub-Saharan Africa. (This would leave mainly Muslim North Africa to the jurisdiction of the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Coptic Church and the Churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea).
  3. It grants permission to all Orthodox in Moldova the right to join the Autonomous Bessarabian Metropolia of the Romanian Orthodox Church, and to all Moldovans in the Diaspora to join the Romanian Church, if they so wish.
  4. It reaffirms the Autocephaly given in 1971 to American Orthodox of the OCA, modifying its name to the NAOC (Northern American Orthodox Church), defining its territory as the USA, Canada, Greenland and the offshore islands of Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon. It then invites all other Orthodox in that territory to join it, unless they are still much attached to their countries of origin.
  5. It sells all other property belonging to the Patriarchs of Moscow and uses the receipts for missionary work in these new Local Churches, especially in poor Africa.
  6. It defrocks all financially, sexually or ecumenically corrupt bishops and priests.
  7. It closes the ecumenist DECR (Department of External Church Relations, in Russian OVTsS) and replaces it with a Department of Inter-Orthodox Relations (DIOR, or in Russian, OMPO).

 

If only one of these suggestions were followed, it would be a miracle. The implementation of any of them would in any case be to take one step closer to the long-awaited Great Council of the whole Church. There the Catholicity of the Church could at last be affirmed, instead of being denied by narrow nationalism, Russian, Greek or any other.