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Reviving Orthodoxy in Russia: Four Factions in the Orthodox Church

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Reviving Orthodoxy in Russia: Four Factions in the Orthodox Church TITLE: REVIVING ORTHODOXY IN RUSSIA: FOUR FACTIONS IN THE ORTHODOX CHURCH AUTHOR: RALPH DELLA CAVA, Queens College, CUNY THE NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN RESEARCH TITLE VIII PROGRAM 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 PROJECT INFORMATION:1 CONTRACTOR: Queens College, CUNY PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Ralph Della Cava COUNCIL CONTRACT NUMBER: 810-02 DATE: December 6, 1996 COPYRIGHT INFORMATION Individual researchers retain the copyright on work products derived from research funded by Council Contract. The Council and the U.S. Government have the right to duplicate written reports and other materials submitted under Council Contract and to distribute such copies within the Council and U.S. Government for their own use, and to draw upon such reports and materials for their own studies; but the Council and U.S. Government do not have the right to distribute, or make such reports and materials available, outside the Council or U.S. Government without the written consent of the authors, except as may be required under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 5 U.S.C. 552, or other applicable law. 1 The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract funds provided by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, made available by the U. S. Department of State under Title VIII (the Soviet-Eastern European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended). The analysis and interpretations contained in the report are those of the author(s). CONTENTS Abstract 1 The Ultranationalists 3 The Ecumentists 4 The Institutionalists 5 Intra-Orthodox Division & External Religious Threat 6 Symbolic Responses 8 Organizational Responses 9 The Four New Departments 11 The Pastoralists 15 Conclusion 20 Endnotes 22 REVIVING ORTHODOXY IN RUSSIA: FOUR FACTIONS IN THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH Ralph Delia Cava Abstract Orthodoxy today is Russia's numerically largest confession and has for more than a millennium remained one and indivisible with the culture of the Eastern Slavs (including Byelorussians and Ukrainians). But, the Russian Orthodox Church, that credo's most expressive and representative institution, faces a crisis of faith and institutional organization unparalleled in its history. The causes of that crisis are just as complex as are the strategies and tactics which the Church has adopted during the past five years to restore its ascendancy over believers and reestablish its credibility as a social force at home and abroad. In many ways, this challenge mirrors that of the Russian state and society. In this respect, the Church also finds itself no less rent by internal divisions. Four major ecclesial factions have emerged. Identified here as Ultra-nationalists, Ecumenists, Institutionalists and Pastoralists, each is examined separately and in relationship to one another. The perspective is largely from within the church universe proper, while at the same time church ties to political and social changes occurring inside post-Communist Russia are kept in sight. Data for this account are based on scores of personal interviews with clergymen, scholars, journalists and lay persons conducted in the Spring of 1995 and 1996 in nine cities of European Russia and, for the first time in such an inquiry, on a close reading of the Orthodox and specialized religious press in Russia and abroad. There are many mansions in the house of the Lord. John 14: 2. Orthodoxy today is Russia's numerically largest confession and has for more than a millennium remained one and indivisible with the culture of all the Eastern Slavs (Byelorussians and Ukrainians included). But, the Russian Orthodox Church, that credo's most expressive and representative institution, faces a crisis of faith and institutional organization unparalleled in its history.1 The crisis, of course, did not come about overnight. Rather, it has been forged during nearly eight decades of state-supported de-christianization. It has been further aggravated by the post- communist onslaught of consumerist-driven secularization (that rivals any in advanced capitalist economies). Lastly, under the new "democratic" order and the sudden opening of a "free market" in religious goods, it has been exacerbated by wide-spread conversions to other faiths and sects from among not only agnostics and atheists, but also hundreds of thousands of nominal Orthodox.2 With this cyclonic uprooting of transcendent belief from contemporary society, a process that in Western Europe took place over centuries instead of decades, and in the aftermath of Orthodoxy's manifest reduction, begun under Communist rule, as a living credo and decisive social actor, no effort has been spared to restore the faith to its historic ascendancy. Indeed, church leaders have commanded this undertaking with considerable skill and can boast of several remarkable achievements. But, they have been unable to secure within the church either a consensus of ideas about the Church's present course or an uncontested field of maneuvre for themselves. From among the rank and file of the clergy, differences over innumerable issues keep coming to the fore and clashes between factions are continually erupting. Whenever these conflicts have touched on critical political and economic issues of the day, as they are often wont to do, they have been brought swiftly to the public's attention and have just as swiftly come under the scrutiny of the press and experts alike. Largely for its xenophobic. anti-Semitic and nationalist stand, an Ultra-nationalist wing of the clergy has dominated the headlines. It alone has largely given shape to the currently dominant view of the Russian Church as a proponent, ally or pawn of broader conservative and nationalist forces.3 In contrast, other internal church currents go largely unnoticed or have gotten short-shrift. Moreover, "in-house" debates, especially those which on the surface seem to deal strictly with "religious matters," go for the most part unreported — in the erroneous belief that quarrels over doctrine and practise have little relationship or bearing on society as a whole. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the current reality of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its chief marks are complexity and conflict -- with regard to both the diversity of opinion within the institution and the various societal and world forces with which the Church is now obliged to dialogue if its very survival and revival are to be secured. Even its strictly religious discourse (often in a kind of code - albeit a sacred code, but a code nonetheless) is not devoid of political implications, whether for members of the ecclesiastical institution and the faithful, or quite often for society as a whole. In the following pages, both the reality of the church and its discourse will be examined from within the religious universe itself by describing and analyzing, for the first time as a cohesive whole, the four main tendencies that make up the Russian Orthodox Church today.4 What emerges from this overview — based on extensive interviews conducted in 1995 and 1996 and a close reading of the usually neglected religious and specifically Orthodox press in Russia and abroad — is a far more nuanced picture of the Church, one that has not only endured for the past millennium, but is engaged in a Herculean enterprise to assure itself of a major role in the next. The Ultra-Nationalists: At least three factions, and possibly a fourth-in-the-making, are today clearly discernible within the church, each proposing a rather distinct route "to reverse God's misfortunes in Russia." As was noted, the extreme rightist, ultra-nationalist contingent has received the lion's share of press and scholarly notoriety. In a sense, that is merited, since so many of its positions run contrary to the best values of a pluralistic world. Consequently, its defense of the restoration of Russian state control over Belarus and Ukraine in some new, post-Soviet re-creation of a one-time tsarist pan- Slavism; its hostility to certain ethnic and religious minorities, particularly Jews and Roman Catholics; its interpretation of nationality as synonymous with the profession of Orthodoxy; and several other untenable positions — that are, of course, not entirely without resonance within the church and society at large — have also been given wide publicity at home and abroad.5 But the death in November 1995 of its ostensible leader and noted anti-Semite, Archbishop Ioann, Metropolitan of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga, and his replacement by a decisively more moderate, urbane, and, in intra-religious affairs, highly experienced prelate was a critical turning point. In effect, that change irreversibly deprived the faction of its one-time legitimacy within the hierarchy, which from today's vantage point appears unquestionably to have been much more apparent than real.6 It lost further credibility during the 1996 presidential election campaign. In flagrant opposition to the public stand against "a return to the past" by His Holiness, Alexei II, Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias, and Russian Orthodoxy's supreme ecclesiastical authority, one Moscow cleric enthusiastically took to stumping for the Communist Party candidate. Echoing a broadly-based anxiety over the loss of Russia's prestige and the annihilation of its traditional culture, this parish priest and head of the "Public Committee For the Moral Revival of the Motherland" went so far as to avow that the party's return to power was worthy of Orthodox believers' votes and the sole antidote to the nation's further political and economic decline.7 But, preempted as they were by the Patriarch's obvious support for incumbent Boris Yeltsin and, on the whole, by his moderated partisanship on most other issues, the ultra-nationalists can no longer play their political cards in the public arena as openly as before. In contrast, that is not the case with respect to the current, heated, "in-church" dispute over Orthodoxy's ties to Christians in the West (particularly to Roman Catholic and Protestant centers of ecumenism in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy).
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