Excommunication in Moscow

The tough, bulletheaded little atheist who calls on God to witness that his hands are clean and his heart is pure has recently been giving the church in Russia a hard time. A more flexible kind of anti-Christian than Stalin, Khrushchev put new life into Russian atheism, began recruiting renegade churchmen instead of party hacks to wean Russians away from the temptations of religion.

K. has good reason to be concerned. Members of the World Council of Churches delegation who visited Russia last Christmas were astonished to find religious life open and active, and the outward signs of material support thoroughly visible (priests are paid mostly from church collections). Reported one delegate: "We saw people putting 25-ruble notes in the collection plate. In major cities the priests earn between 4,000 and 6,000 rubles a month--equal to the pay of a university lecturer. Some of them drive ZIMs. The churches are in beautiful shape."

Religion is by no means limited to oldsters: Russian Orthodoxy's two theological academies and eight seminaries receive about 1,000 new students each year--almost more than they can cope with--and many young members of the Communist Party are electing to be married in church and have their children baptized. (The government's answer is to set up more and more plush secular "wedding palaces.")

Western churchmen last week had striking new evidence that Moscow's Patriarch Alexei has far more leverage against the government -- and willingness to use it --than most Westerners realize. The latest issue of the Journal of the Moscow Pa triarchate carries the terse announcement that the Holy Synod has excommunicated a prominent professor of theology at Leningrad Theological Academy, Archpriest Alexander Ossipov, as well as Archpriest Paul Darmansky, Father Nicolai Spassky, and "other servants of the Church" for having "publicly blasphemed the Name of God" and having "published against their church articles or pamphlets issued by newspapers and the atheist press in the U.S.S.R." (i.e., Pravda and Izvestia). The important point : although the Russian Orthodox Church often seems totally sub servient to the government, it now feels strong enough to excommunicate priests simply for preaching Communism.

The Moscow Patriarchate had its hand strengthened in the U.S. last week by a unanimous Supreme Court decision that Manhattan's Orthodox St. Nicholas Cathedral, completed in 1903 as the seat of Russian Orthodoxy in North America, should be returned to the control of the Russian hierarchy. In 1924 a majority of Russian Orthodox parishes in the U.S. seceded from the Moscow Patriarchate on the ground that it was a tool of the Communist state and in 1945 the schismatic group, known as the Metropolitan District, won a suit in the New York Court of Appeals to take over the cathedral.

Last week's ruling was the Supreme Court's second reversal of the original New York finding in favor of the schismatics, established a strong precedent restricting U.S. state or federal courts from interfering in a hierarchy's control of church property, regardless of the desires of the church membership.

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