Domesticating Orthodoxy

As priests and lay leaders of the million-member Orthodox Church in America gathered in Montreal's gray stone Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul to choose a new primate last week, the tensions between the church's old-country past and New World present were plain. The cathedral's choir insisted on singing in Old Church Slavonic, eschewing the English now used in most O.C.A. parishes. When it came time for the creed, however, one of the visiting priests began chanting hesitantly in English, "I believe in one God ..." Joyously, the entire congregation joined him. Soon after, in a major break with tradition, the church chose its first American-born leader.

His full title is His Beatitude, the Most Reverend Theodosius, Archbishop of New York, Metropolitan of All-America and Canada. Theodosius, 44, was born Theodore Lazor, the son of a Slavic immigrant who worked in a steel plant in Canonsburg, Pa. (pop. 11,400), for half a century. The election of the last primate, Russian-born Metropolitan Ireney, in 1965 exposed a division between Russian speaking elders and younger members anxious to Americanize the church.

Delegates from the 410 O.C.A. parishes in the U.S., Canada and Mexico nominate a new Metropolitan. If no one candidate receives a two-thirds majority on the first ballot, a second vote is held to propose two contenders; the church's rune ruling bishops then choose one of them to be the primate. In 1965 a U.S.-born candidate got the most votes, but failed to gain the necessary two-thirds majority, and the predominantly elderly, Russian-born bishops turned instead to runner-up Ireney, a bishop in New England. In choosing a successor to Ireney, now 85 and ailing, the delegates in Montreal nearly gave a first-ballot victory to Hartford, Conn.'s, popular Bishop Dmitri, a Texas-born, former Baptist who converted to Orthodoxy as a teenager. But the bishops instead chose Theodosius. He comes from an Orthodox family in the church's Pennsylvania heartland and thus would be easier for older members to accept than a convert like Dmitri.

Theodosius, who graduated from Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pa., and St. Vladimir's, the church's growing seminary in Crestwood, N.Y., is not fluent in Russian. An open, easy man, whose main passions besides the church are music, gardening and cars, he is more a pastoral than an intellectual churchman. Among other assignments, he revived once-flagging Orthodox parishes in Alaska, where the Russian mother church set up its first North American outpost in the 18th century.

One block to Orthodox growth remains ethnic rivalries, especially between the Russians and the larger, New York-based Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. It does not recognize the self-government granted to the Orthodox Church in America in 1970 by the Orthodox patriarch in

Moscow. "Orthodoxy has found a new and permanent home" in America, said Theodosius--in English--at his installation last week, but it must overcome ethnic barriers and form a united church if it is to survive and prosper here. -

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