When Christian Groups Reunite
Posted by John Malloy on 10/20/2008
ON THE southern rim of Moscow, where the din of traffic gives way to a silent forest, three steeples shimmer over the trees. On closer inspection, these belong to a magnificent new church. Inside it, and in a much cosier wooden edifice next door, every inch of wall commemorates people who were massacred in this area 60 years ago. Many are depicted in icons, celebrating them as martyrs whose prayers in the afterlife protect the church.
This memorial to victims of Stalin’s purges (albeit mainly recalling one category, Christian believers) sends a timely message to a Russia where reflection on the perils of an over-mighty state is rare. Its construction is one reason why, last year, most of the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) agreed to unite with the Patriarchate of Moscow, which “White” anticommunist exiles long saw as tainted by red links.
As one condition for reunion, ROCOR had insisted that due honour be shown to the so-called “new martyrs” who died for their faith under the Soviet regime. Visiting the memorial near Moscow, it seems hard to deny that this demand has at least in part been fulfilled. To many people, reunion seemed irreversible after Moscow’s Patriarch Alexy joined the late head of ROCOR, Metropolitan Laurus, in laying foundations for the Butovo church.
But for a passionate minority of ROCOR clerics and believers, dotted across North and South America, Europe and Australia, the Moscow-based church hasn’t gone nearly far enough to justify coming together. For these dissidents, it matters a lot that hierarchs in Moscow still approve the accord made with the communists in 1927 by Sergius, an Orthodox bishop who signed a statement accepting the Soviet Union as a “civil motherland”. By justifying Sergius, the dissidents insist, the Moscow church implicitly condemns others who went underground or remained defiant and paid with their lives.
The dissenters’ argument is that by defending deals made under the Soviet regime, today’s church is endorsing a Soviet-era episcopate which not only obeyed Stalin but fawned on him. Supporters of the reunion retort that most of today’s Russian episcopate was elevated after the Soviet period; they also hope that the reunion will help along a continuing reassessment of all eras of Russian history. Across the Russian diaspora, the dispute has divided parishes and formerly close-knit communities. Priests have broken with bishops, theology students with their professors.
The intra-Russian dispute is only one example of a paradox in the recent history of the world’s largest religion. Almost every time two Christian communities—split by politics, race, culture or doctrine—decide to reunite, a new division is created by those who cannot accept the merger.
In Christendom as a whole, most recent merger activity has been among schools of Protestantism which now feel that doctrinal differences between John Calvin (1509-1564) and Martin Luther (1483-1546) shouldn’t be a make-or-break matter in the 21st century.
The Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC), an association of about 350 Christian groups, has counted 50 “reunited” churches (all involving varieties of Protestantism) and 40 churches that are engaged in talks that could lead to further mergers. But not even the WCC’s keenest enthusiasts are sure that the movement towards unity is stronger than the trend towards fragmentation.
In any case, for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians the idea of a “reunion” between churches is paradoxical, if not contradictory; they speak of the Church as a mystical reality of which they are the main or sole representatives, and which almost by definition cannot be divided. For Protestants, the idea at least of “uniting churches” is not so problematic. A dozen intra-Protestant mergers have been modelled on one that occurred in Canada in 1925. India is one of the few countries where Christians who defer to bishops managed to merge with those who don’t.
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