Giddy Days for the Russian Church

By Richard N. Ostling

Under crystal skies and a brilliant sun, temperatures in Moscow soared near 100 degrees F last week. The exceptional climate was an appropriate accompaniment to the unprecedented warmth that emanated from Mikhail Gorbachev's Kremlin during the celebrations marking the country's 1,000th year of Christianity. Church bells, so rarely heard in the land of Lenin, pealed joyously as rituals unfolded in the gilded Russian Orthodox sanctuaries. Some 500 spiritual dignitaries from 100 nations were in attendance. Among them: Anglican Leader Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, American Evangelist Billy Graham, and no fewer than nine Cardinals and 27 bishops, the largest and clearly the most estimable Roman Catholic assemblage ever to visit the Soviet Union. In a remarkable display of glasnost, night after night the officially sanctioned events of the Christian millennium were featured on the 9 o'clock newscasts and on television specials after midnight.

For one giddy moment, at least, belief seemed almost respectable. "It's like a honeymoon. We feel drunk and hope we don't ever wake up," enthused Father Viktor Petluchenko, a teacher from Odessa assigned to shepherd the international church guests. "From our TV screens we heard that the church is the heart of our nation and we need it. Can you imagine? It's wonderful."

Moscow kitchen workers, soldiers and maids waited in long lines at hotels to snap up costly and usually unavailable religious books, medals and icon reproductions. At the celebrated 14th century monastic center at Zagorsk, 40 miles northeast of Moscow, the crowds and food stalls lent a carnival air. An aged woman who had come from Leningrad said, "I'm no longer afraid to tell people I'm a Christian," as tears streamed down her cheeks. A young mother held the hands of her two youngsters and remarked, "I hope they can wear their crosses with pride."

So intent was the Communist regime on honoring the occasion that it consigned the Bolshoi Theater, that secular holy of holies, to be the site of one of the major celebrations. The curtain, emblazoned with hammer and sickle, parted to reveal not ballet sets but black-robed churchmen, representatives from numerous faiths, state officials and, wonder of wonders, Raisa Gorbachev. "Your presence here is more than symbolic," New York's Rabbi Arthur Schneier told her.

The Bolshoi highlight was a carefully hewed speech by Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, the brilliant diplomat who years ago fashioned the Vatican outreach to the Communist world and is now the Secretary of State (prime minister) of Pope John Paul's Vatican. Religion, Casaroli asserted, is an "uncontestable reality" in daily life and "cannot be neglected" by authorities. Some of the Bolshoi festivities were carried to a nationwide TV audience, a fact that impressed one visiting churchman: "What do you think it says to millions of faithful in the Soviet Union? It means the government thinks religion is not 'the opium of the people.' It's a clear break with classic Marxist ideology."

This week the Vatican representatives hoped to meet with Gorbachev. Casaroli was hand-carrying the Pope's first personal letter to the party leader, a three-page missive written in Russian that referred to the human rights claims of Catholics and other minorities. The dialogue may continue face-to-face if Gorbachev includes a papal visit in his anticipated trip to Italy later this year.

Negotiations with the Kremlin are part of a larger Vatican strategy aimed at closing the 900-year-old schism between Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox, the bulk of whom live in Communist countries. For years the Vatican has been quietly working with world Orthodoxy, including the Russians, to settle various long-standing obstacles to reconciliation. One of the nastiest is the existence of pockets of Catholics loyal to Rome within countries in which the Orthodox predominate. The newest round of discussions on these Eastern Rite Catholics will be held next week at the New Valamo monastery in Finland.

The Soviet Union contains the biggest of these disputed churches, made up of millions of Catholic believers, mostly in the western Ukraine, who were forced into the Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin in 1946. Since then, many of these Ukrainians, who still consider the Pope their leader, have led an illegal underground existence. Despite Vatican overtures on their behalf, the Russian Orthodox Church resists having the Kremlin give legal recognition to the Catholics, arguing that they belong within Orthodoxy.

Alongside this long-range ecumenical battle, the Russian hierarchy last week held its first council since the Communist Revolution that was summoned for purposes other than to elect a new Patriarch. The four-day assembly was attended by 74 bearded bishops behind the fortress-like walls of the Trinity- St. Sergius Monastery in Zagorsk. Nearly 1,000 of the faithful stood for hours in the withering heat to catch a glimpse of the gathering holy men. With the church's head, Patriarch Pimen, 78, so ill from diabetes that he made only brief appearances at most of the millennial events, speculation hovered over the sessions about which of the younger Metropolitans would be elected his eventual successor. "I'm waiting for the Gorbachev of the church," said Suzanne Massie of Harvard's Russian Research Center, who was in Moscow for the celebrations.

The council resolved the Russian Church's most bitter internal problem: control of local parishes. According to Orthodox canonical tradition, the priest is the head of his parish. In 1961, however, during the height of Nikita Khrushchev's antichurch campaign, the Orthodox hierarchy was forced to accept a ruling that gave Communist Party-approved lay delegates full control over each parish, making the priest a mere salaried functionary who presides at worship. In a major concession from the Gorbachev regime, the much hated regulation was revoked at last week's council. The new church charter also provides for regularly scheduled national-level and parish meetings, rather than special sessions that require state consent.

In the weeks leading up to the millennial celebration, the government of Mikhail Gorbachev made an effort to signal its tolerance and even show some enthusiasm for Christianity. The General Secretary has, for instance, taken to lacing his speeches with references to the lives of Jesus Christ or John the Baptist. And in a remarkable pronouncement, the Soviet news agency TASS declared on June 4 that Russian Orthodoxy "expounds love and mercy and denounces idleness and money grubbing and inculcates in people high moral standards, which are needed in our socialist society."

More significantly, on April 29 Gorbachev held a meeting with Patriarch Pimen and other members of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. The encounter, which "deeply impressed" the Patriarch, was the first public reception of Orthodox leaders by a party Secretary since 1943, when Stalin revived the church to win popular support during the worst days of World War II. In another act of conciliation, the regime this month returned to the church a section of its holiest shrine: the 11th century Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, which had been seized in 1961. Now monks will again live there, and the church will control the ancient caves where monks were buried. The first | Eucharistic service is to be held on the grounds this week.

Despite this giveback and the return of another 325 Orthodox sites over the past three years, church activities remain sharply restricted in the Soviet Union. Only 7,000 churches are functioning in the country today, compared with 70,000 in pre-Revolution days. Formal religious instruction is banned. And the 17 church-control laws instituted by Stalin in 1929 even forbid charitable work, although bit by bit some Christians are being allowed to help at clinics, mental hospitals and homes for the aged. There is no word as yet on the fate of the long-promised revision of Stalin's laws. Cautions Alexander Ogorodnikov, an ex-prisoner and lay activist who ran a seminar on past persecution last week: "A positive tone can easily become negative again after the celebrations. What counts is what is written in law." A member of the Vatican retinue also warned, "There is no evidence that this process in the Soviet Union is irreversible. Everyone knows there is a struggle in the Kremlin, and no one is sure who will win."

Other analysts point out that Gorbachev vitally needs the support of his country's 50 million Orthodox Christians in order to succeed in his far- reaching reforms. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest organized body in the Soviet Union, far exceeding the Communist Party in membership. Says one Western expert on the Soviet Union who attended the millennium: "This is a society facing social disintegration. They have a youth that is disaffected, an intolerable abortion rate and a serious alcohol and drug problem." Religious believers, points out this observer, "tend to be constructive members of society. I don't think any Soviet leader now can pit himself against the church." One of the Vatican delegates described Gorbachev's situation a bit more bluntly: "He realizes he needs more than the party. He needs the people."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow and Cathy Booth/ Zagorsk