Orthodox Tour

The rumors of reunion in the ecclesiastical air--Pope John's forthcoming Ecumenical Council, the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent jaunt to the Middle East and to the Vatican--seem to have twanged Russian nerves. As the Russians see it, the Church of England is preparing to cozy up to the Vatican and is sounding out the Eastern Orthodox churches outside Russia to join in the party. Once they get together, the Western Christian churches would unite against Communism and the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long managed to maneuver a peaceful coexistence with the Soviet state. So the Russians put their own man on the road --Patriarch Alexei of Moscow and All Russias, who traveled with an entourage of bishops, laymen and priests in a turboprop Ilyushin 18. Alexei's assignment: to remind the Orthodox churches outside Russia that Orthodox blood is thicker than ecumenical holy water.

Last week His Beatitude Alexei, 83, wound up a monthlong string of formal visits to the Greek Orthodox centers of Istanbul (where he no-showed his press conference), Jordanian Jerusalem (where his plane caused more stir than he did), and Athens (where the air force band greeted him with the march usually reserved for three-star generals). Most important was his Istanbul meeting with Athenagoras I, Archbishop of Constantinople, who received the Russian correctly but coolly. Moving through the grind of receptions, banquets and patriarch-level tete-`a-tetes, Alexei made it clear that the only kind of unity he was interested in was Orthodox unity.

"Reunion is a wonderful trend," said his young (31) spokesman, Bishop Nikodim. "But the 1,000-year rift has left many, many problems that must be studied seriously. Coordination among Orthodox churches is needed for such study. If reunion comes, Orthodoxy must be protected from distortion . . . The Russian church has no intention whatever of participating in any kind of union with the Roman Catholic Church, unless the Vatican renounces in advance certain pretensions, such as the infallibility of the Pope."

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