San Francisco, USA - The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia said Friday it will move toward reconciling with the Moscow-based parent church it split from after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
The two churches would still have separate administrations, but would bond spiritually and allow their followers to worship in each other's churches.
The move was announced after a meeting of the 11 bishops of the New York-based exile church.
For only the fourth time since it split with its parent church, the emigre church convened a special 134-member All-Diaspora Council, which met in San Francisco. The council, made up of clergy and lay people, voted last week to recommend the bishops rejoin the Russian Orthodox Church, also known as the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate.
The emigre church split from the Patriarchate three years after the Bolshevik Revolution and cut all ties in 1927, after Patriarch Sergiy declared the church's loyalty to the Soviet Union's communist government.
The Russian Orthodox Church had said that Sergiy's move was aimed at saving the church. It recently disavowed the declaration.
The emigre church and its parent began discussions about re-establishing ties after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the two churches recently set up working groups to ease the process.