An essay in universal history


THE SORROWS OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH



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4. THE SORROWS OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH

The only real resistance to Stalin’s rule in the 20s and 30s had been the Russian Orthodox Church. From 1927 his task in destroying and/or subduing the Church had been made much easier when the senior hierarch, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) of Nizhni-Novgorod, who later became Patriarch of Moscow in 1943, more or less surrendered the freedom of the Church into the hands of the Bolsheviks in his notoriously pro-Soviet “Declaration”. However, the battle was not over; for many hierarchs and priests, and several hundreds of thousands of believers fled into the catacombs to form the so-called Catacomb or True Orthodox Church. After very severe persecutions their numbers had been decimated; but in 1945 the Church still survived, living in the conditions of the greatest secrecy. Moreover, they were supported by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), with its headquarters in Munich and then New York, which became a beacon of anti-communist resistance for Orthodox Christians in the free world and a lodestone of hope for all true believers inside the Union.


The lot of the True Russian Church inside Russia was, if possible, even more difficult in the post-war years than before the war. Pastors were now even rarer, and they had to hide even deeper in the underground. As Archbishop Lazarus (Zhurbenko) said: “The catacomb believers feared the Moscow Patriarchate priests even more than the police. Whenever a priest came for some reason or other, he was met by a feeling of dread. The catacomb people would say, ‘A red detective has come.’ He was sent deliberately, and he was obliged to report everything to the authorities. Not infrequently, hierarchs and priests told the people outright, directly from the ambon, ‘Look around, Orthodox people. There are those who do not come to church. Find out who they are and report to us; these are enemies of the Soviet regime who stand in the way of the building of Socialism.’ We were very much afraid of these sergianist-oriented priests.”49
Only in the central regions of Tambov, Lipetsk, Tula, Ryazan and Voronezh was there a certain increase in catacomb activity; many young people took leading positions in the movement.50 And in the 1950s there were still quite a few wandering catacomb priests and a few holy bishops, such as Anthony (Galynsky), Peter (Ladygin) and Barnabas (Belyaev). Many more were released by Khruschev’s 1956 amnesty.
ROCOR now entered a very difficult period of her existence as bishops and communities joined Moscow in the throes of a pseudo-patriotic passion. One of those who resisted this temptation was Bishop John of Shanghai, the famous wonderworker, who led his Russian émigré flock to safety out of Mao’s China. Ajay Kamalakara writes: “As the winds of change blew across civil war-ridden China in 1948, the community of ‘White Russians,’ emigrants who fled Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, grew increasingly uneasy over the political developments in their adopted country. Forces loyal to the Communist Party of China were winning the civil war against Kuomintang-led government.
“The Russian community, comprising mainly of the members of the intelligentsia, thrived for more than 25 years in cites such as Harbin Beijing and Shanghai. As the Chinese communists, backed by the Soviet Union, started defeating the government forces, they began to forcibly repatriate Russians to the USSR. 40,000 Cossacks were sent back to the Soviet Union, only to be marched off to labor camps in the Russian Far East.  The community of 6,000 ‘White Russians’ in China appealed to several countries for help through the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which later became the United National High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“Many countries, including the U.S., responded sympathetically, but only one gave the reply they desperately needed—the then very new Republic of the Philippines, led by President Elpidio Quirino,” says Kinna Kwan, Senior Researcher at the President Elpido Quirino Foundation.  Close to 6,000 anti-Communist refugees left China on rusty ships to land in the small Philippine island of Tubabao (a four-hour boat ride away from the city of Guiuan).  They were evacuated with the help of the IRO, according to Kwan. For the next four years, the community lived on the Philippine island.

“For the locals on the island,  ‘these four years comprise a very interesting period they fondly refer to as the Tiempo Ruso, or the Time of the Russians,’ Kwan wrote in an article titled ‘The Philippines and Asylum: A Historical Perspective lecture by UNHCR Representative to the Philippines entitled Tiempo Ruso.’
“The typhoon-ravaged island, which was a receiving station for personnel working for a U.S. Naval base during the Second World War, had a small population of fishing families and a handful of concrete structures.

“The ‘White Russian’ community had an active social life. According to Kwan, the resourceful refugees comprising of teachers, doctors, engineers, architects, ex-military officers, lawyers, artists, performers, and priests, used their professional skills and knowhow to improve living conditions and even achieve a sense of normalcy on the island.


“’The camp eventually grew to be a thriving “little Russian city,” divided into 14 main districts with democratically-elected leaders, and with organized communal kitchens, power stations, Russian schools, a hospital and a dental clinic, an arbitration court, a police force and a little jail, and several churches for different faiths—including a wooden Russian Orthodox church built from an abandoned church left by the Americans,’ Kwan wrote in the article for the UNHCR.

“’Through sheer hard work, they converted the settlement into a very livable town,’ says Larissa Goncharova, a historian who is writing a book on ‘White Russians.’  The refugees even set up an open-air cinema, a theater company and conducted piano and dance lessons, Goncharova adds. ‘These people were among the first to spread Russian culture in the Philippines.’

“The locals on the island hold Russian Orthodox Bishop John Maximovitch in high reverence. ‘He is remembered to this day not only by former Tubabao refugees but also by the Tubabao natives as the holy man who blessed the camp from four directions every night to ward off typhoons and other potential dangers,’ Kwan wrote in the UNHCR article.

“In October 1949, Philippine President Quirino visited the camp and ordered that the barbed wire around the camp be taken down.

“Over the next three years, the refugees were eventually resettled in different countries. Around half the population went to the United States, and large numbers moved to Australia and South America. ’There are still around 40 families living in and around Manila, says Goncharova. ‘The camp was closed in 1953.’”51

It was not only St. John’s Chinese flock that fled to the United States. In 1948, as Archbishop Averky (Taushev) writes, “a vigorous migration of Russians to the United States of North America began, and many began to ask [ROCOR’s] Vladyka Metropolitan [Anastasy] to move there also together with the Hierarchical Synod. People in America also asked him to come; there a sad schism had just taken place (in 1946) after the so-called ‘Cleveland council’, at which it was decided [by four out of eight bishops] to move to the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarch Alexis. At the beginning Vladyka Metropolitan wavered, but Munich was becoming more and more empty, and the refugee camps and the parishes in them were gradually closing down. And finally Vladyka President decided to move to where most of his flock had moved and where they were urgently inviting him to come.


“Vladyka Metropolitan Anastasy’s departure for America took place on November 10/23, 1950. The next day he arrived at the airport in New York and was triumphantly received in the Ascension cathedral.
“The next day after his arrival, on November 12/25, Vladyka Metropolitan went to the Holy Trinity monastery in Jordanville, where he carried out a triumphant consecration of the just completed stone monastery church in honour of the Holy Trinity, after which a Hierarchical Council took place in which 11 hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad took part.”52
At this Council holy myrrh was sanctified for the first time in ROCOR’s history. Previously, myrrh had been received from the Serbian Church.53 This act had an important symbolical significance as being normally the act of an autocephalous Church. The Bishops also “adopted a resolution on the issue of the ecumenical movement. It was composed by Archbishop John of Western Europe and Bishops Nathanael of Brussels and Nicon of Florida. This document forbade members of ROCOR any form of participation in the ecumenical movement, and relegated all contacts with non-Orthodox Christians to the sphere of cooperative social activities.”54
The ROCOR Synod’s move to America was timely, because, as indicated by Archbishop Averky, her position in that vital country had been shaken in recent years. “On October 26-27 [1944] the hierarchs of the Church Abroad in North America Archbishop Vitaly, Bishop Jerome and Bishop Joasaph took part in the Hierarchical Council of North America, in which the election of Metropolitan Sergius to the Russian patriarchal throne was discussed. A resolution was passed recognizing the election and indicating that the Patriarch Sergius of Moscow should be commemorated at Divine services – without, however, removing the commemoration of Metropolitans Anastasy and Metropolitan Theophilus of North America. Following this conciliar decision, Metropolitan Theophilus issued an ukaz on the commemoration of all three hierarchs in all the parishes of North America. This resolution was signed also by the ROCOR hierarchs Vitaly (Maximenko), Tikhon (Troitsky), Joasaph and Jerome.”55
On May 31, after the death of Patriarch Sergius, a Council of the North American Bishops under Metropolitan Theophilus and with Archbishop Vitaly’s participation issued an ukaz on the commemoration of the patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitan Alexis, in all the churches.56 Meanwhile, Bishops, Alexis of Alaska and Macarius of Boston, joined Moscow, as did Bishop Nicholas (Ono) of Tokyo in November, 1946.57 In the same month, at a clergy-laity council in Cleveland, with the agreement of Metropolitan Theophilus but without the agreement of the other bishops, the council was recognized as the supreme legislative and administrative organ of the American metropolia – an act that reduced the power of the bishops to almost nothing. Four out of the nine bishops voted to return to the MP. Metropolitan Theophilus then wrote to the five dissenting bishops that they were excluded from his metropolia. The five dissenters returned into submission to ROCOR.58
“In preparation for the council,” writes Ivan Andreyev, “it was very interesting and characteristic that the same persons who fought for the Moscow jurisdiction and the split from the [ROCOR] Synod and ‘helped’ Metropolitan Eulogius in Europe, moved from Paris to America and began to ‘help’ Metropolitan Theophilus [the leader of the American Metropolia]. With unusual knowledge of church matters, these professors of engineering and other fine arts began to state authoritatively that ‘the Moscow Patriarchate has not deviated from the dogmas, canons and rites of Orthodoxy in any way, and the politics conducted by its head, even though it is condemned today by many, cannot have a decisive influence on its canonical position.’ In this way the Cleveland council prepared itself by only a formal cooperation with the Synod Abroad, and then, completely backing down from its position, pronounced this resolution: ‘We are passing the resolution to request His Holiness, the Patriarch of Moscow, to reunite us to his bosom and be our spiritual father, under the stipulation that we preserve our full autonomy, which exists at the present time. Since the hierarchical authority of the patriarchate is incompatible with the hierarchical authority of the Synod Abroad of the Russian Orthodox Church, the American Church is discontinuing any administrative subordination to the Synod Abroad.”59
In 1947 Metropolitan Gregory, Patriarch Alexis’ ambassador, brought a draft Statute of “the autonomous administration” of the Russian Orthodox Church in North American and Canada. In it, as Alexander Bogolepov writes, “the Moscow Patriarch attempted to make subject to his own confirmation the election of any American Metropolitan, as well as the elections of the diocesan bishops. Patriarch Alexis, in his Ukase of February 16, 1945, recommended two candidates of his own (Metropolitan Benjamin and Archbishop Alexis) to the All-American Sobor for election as Metropolitan. The Patriarch’s Ukase wen to on to say that this imposed no limitation on the right of the All-American Sobor to nominate and elect its own candidate, but at the same time it was pointed out that the Moscow Patriarchate had the canonical right to refuse to confirm the candidate so elected for any reason whatsoever. According to Metropolitan Gregory’s Draft Statute, the Metropolitan and the Bishops of the American Church were subject to approval by the Moscow Patriarch and could be deposed by him. This would make possible the gradual replacement of the entire episcopate; diocesan bishops would all be replaced by bishops agreeable to Moscow. According to the same draft, the decrees of the All-American Sobor would be subject to confirmation by the Bishops’ Sobor, and, by the same token, its entire activity would be subordinated to an episcopate faithful to Moscow.”60
Such a degree of subordination to Moscow proved unacceptable to the American Metropolia, and the union did not take place for the time being. However, neither did the Metropolia return to ROCOR… In spite of the defection of the American Metropolia, ROCOR in America continued to grow. Moreover, as Archbishop Vitaly (Maximenko) of Jordanville pointed out, “a normal relationship to the question of Americanisation has been found. Instead of completely renouncing the Russian Church style of life and complete Americanisation, even in the ecclesiastical and Divine services sphere, an American Orthodox Mission attached to the Synod has been organised, headed by an American Archbishop, James (Iakov). He has American clergy, and does missionary work among Americans, organising American parishes out of them.”61
This missionary aspect of ROCOR’s activities became particularly important in the post-war period as most of “World Orthodoxy” fell into the heresy of ecumenism and into communion with the Sovietized Moscow Patriarchate. ROCOR with its scattering of parishes around the world became a light for the world, almost the last true witness to God’s truth in an age of increasing secularization and atheism.
*
In 1948 the MP celebrated the 450th anniversary of its foundation. The celebrations were attended by representatives of the Ecumenical, Antiochian, Alexandrian, Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, Polish and Georgian Churches.62 Only Jerusalem and Cyprus, among the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, were not represented. Immediately after the celebrations, a Church Council took place. Only the East European Churches within Moscow’s orbit and Antioch attended. The Churches of Constantinople, Alexandria and Greece boycotted it, ostensibly on the grounds that only Constantinople had the right to call such a conference, but more probably because they did not wish to involve themselves in the inevitable adulations of Stalin.63
When KGB Colonel G. Karpov, head of the Department for the Affairs of the Russian Church and her real master, learned that Metropolitan Germanus of Thyateira and Great Britain, the representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch Maximus, was not arriving in Moscow until after the working days of the Council, he said: “He is well-known to be an English spy”. And about Patriarch Maximus, who had given Metropolitan Germanus this order, he said: “he has long been ill with schizophrenia and must in the near future go into retirement”.64 This was no idle threat: the next year Patriarch Maximus was forced into retirement by his Synod on grounds of mental illness, although he was completely sane.65 However, this was a mistake of the Kremlin politicians; for Maximus’ place on the ecumenical throne was taken by the 33rd degree Mason Athenagoras, who arrived in Constantinople from America on the private plane of the American President Truman…
It is now known that all the decisions of the Moscow council of 1948 were planned a year and a half before by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.66 Consequently it is not surprising to see from the hierarchs’ special epistle that their motives were purely political: “The world is going through a stormy time in which the irreconcilable differences between the Catholic and rationalist-Protestant West, on the one hand, and the Orthodox East, on the other, are clearly manifest… We servants of the Orthodox Church have been painfully impressed by the fact that those who are stirring up a new war are children of the Christian Catholic and Protestant world. We are deeply grieved that from the stronghold of Catholicism, the Vatican, and the nest of Protestantism, America, instead of the voice of peace and Christian love we hear blessing of a new war and hymns in praise of atomic bombs and such-like inventions, which are designed for the destruction of human life. All Christians, regardless of nation and creed, cannot help blaming the Vatican for this policy. We fervently beseech the Chief Pastor, our Lord Jesus Christ, that He enlighten the Catholic hierarchy with the light of His Divine teaching and help it to realize the abyss of its sinful fall.”67
The most theological contribution to this council came from Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), formerly of ROCOR. He prepared three reports: against the ecumenical movement, on the old and new calendars, and on the Anglican hierarchy. Seraphim expressed a "particular opinion" on the calendar question, considering the council's resolution on this question to have been inadequate. In his report against Ecumenism he stressed that the presence of Orthodox representatives at ecumenical conferences, even as observers, constituted apostasy from Holy Orthodoxy.
Protopriest G. Razumovsky also spoke well: "The Russian Orthodox Church," he said, "had always taught and still teaches that Pentecost, or the descent of the Holy Spirit, has already taken place and that the Christians do not have to wait for a new appearance of the Holy Spirit, but the glorious Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The diminution of the significance of the single sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the prophecy of a future 'third hour', in which the expected Kingdom of the Holy Spirit will be revealed is characteristic of the teaching of the Masons and the heretics; while the newly revealed prophecy of the expected Ecumenical Pentecost can be nothing other than an old echo of the false teaching of these deceived heretics." 68
On July 15, 1948 a feast in honour of the participants in the Council was laid on by the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church. About 200 people were present. The representative of the Bulgarian Church proposed a toast to Stalin for the communist Prime Minister of Bulgaria. Karpov declared that the guests had become personally convinced in Moscow that the Russian Orthodox Church was completely free and independent of the State. Metropolitan Germanos of Thyateira praised Stalin and called Karpov a minister who “aids the strengthening and flourishing of Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union”. Metropolitan Elias of the Lebanon said that it was only thanks to Stalin that the flourishing of the Russian Orthodox Church had been guaranteed throughout the world.69
In July, 1951 the heads of the Churches of Antioch, Russia, Georgia, Romania and Bulgaria gathered in Zagorsk and issued a purely political statement in favour of “peace” and against the USA.70 The “theology of peace” – that is, the removal of all obstacles to the communist domination of the world – was becoming the major content of top-level ecclesiastical meetings in the eastern bloc.
For the moment pro-communism was combined with anti-ecumenism (for purely political reasons); but the time would shortly come when the communist masters of the East European Churches would compel the patriarchs to change course and embrace ecumenism – for the sake of giving their pro-communist message a wider audience and deeper penetration…

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