A HISTORY OF THE FALL OF ROCOR

The return of the Russian Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) to Russia in 1990 after almost seventy years’ exile was undoubtedly one of the most significant events in Church history, comparable to the return of the Jews to Jerusalem after the seventy-year exile in Babylon. And yet this momentous step was taken almost casually, without sufficient forethought or a clearly defined strategy. Hence difficult problems arose, problems that had their roots deep in ROCOR’s past history. These problems can be divided into three categories: (A) ROCOR in relation to her own flock at home and abroad, (B) ROCOR in relation to the Catacomb Church, and (C) ROCOR in relation to the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) and the post-Soviet Russian State. A. ROCOR in relation to herself. The problem here is easily stated: how could the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad continue to call herself the Church Abroad if she now had parishes inside Russia? After all, her Founding Statute or Polozhenie stated that ROCOR was an autonomous part of the Autocephalous Russian Church, that part which existed (i) outside the bounds of Russia on the basis of Ukaz № 362 of November 7/20, 1920 of Patriarch Tikhon and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, and (ii) temporarily until the fall of communism in Russia. 1 With the fall of communism and the creation of ROCOR parishes inside Russia in 1990-91, it would seem that these limitations in space and time no longer applied, and that ROCOR had ceased to exist as a temporary Church body existing outside Russia in accordance with her own definition of herself in thePolozhenie . The solution to this problem would appear to have been obvious: change the Polozhenie ! And this was in fact the solution put forward by ROCOR’s leading canonist, Bishop Gregory (Grabbe). However, the ROCOR episcopate declined that suggestion, and thePolozhenie remained unchanged. Why? Although we have no directevidence on which to base an answer to this question, the following would appear to be a reasonable conclusion from the events as they unfolded in the early 1990s. A change in the Polozhenie that removed the spatial and temporal limitations of ROCOR’s self-definition would have had the consequence of forcing ROCOR to define herself as the one true Russian Orthodox Church, and therefore to remove the centre of her Church administration from America to Russia and enter into a life-and-death struggle with the MP for the minds and hearts of the Russian people.