Supreme hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA), Metropolitan of New York & East America Laurus, has arrived on the first-ever visit to Russia.
He came to Moscow at the invitation of the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Alexis II, handed over to him personally by Russian President Vladimir Putin during one of his previous visits to the U.S.
The goal of the visit is to get closer knowledge of how the Russian Orthodox congregation lives in its historical homeland, as well as to have talks with Alexis II and members of the Holy Synod of the Russian Church.
This visit crowns years of efforts to bring about a rapprochement between ROCA and the Russian Church reporting to the Patriarch of Moscow.
ROCA is a branch-out of a once united Russian Orthodox Church. It was formed by the clerics and lay who had to flee from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the ensuring Civil War.
The Russian Church Abroad [also known in history as the Russian Church in Exile] severed ties with the Orthodox Church in the USSR in the mid-1920’s, disapproving of the compromises with the Bolshevik government that the hierarchs remaining in the Fatherland were compelled to make.
For almost six decades, relations between the two branches of the Church were almost non-existent, and a gradual thawing that began at the end of the 1980’s has been rather slow.
Last year, a ROCA delegation including the bishops of three different dioceses visited Russia and had extensive contacts with the hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate. An agreement that Metropolitan Laurus would come to Moscow was reached then.
Talks between Alexis II and Metropolitan Laurus have been scheduled for Tuesday, May 18. The heads of the two Churches will be joined by members of the Holy Synod of the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church and ROCA delegation.
Right after the talks, their participants will address a news conference at the Danilovski hotel in Moscow close to Alexis II’s official residence, the St Daniel’s Monastery.
Father Nikolai Balashov, a spokesman for the Patriarchate’s department for external relations, whom Itar-Tass interviewed Thursday, declined to specify the forms that the rapprochement between the Churches might take. “It’s part of an agenda of the talks in Moscow,” he said.
According to Father Nikolai, their talks will center on the general problems impeding the rapprochement between the Churches. “As for the details, they will be taken care of by special workgroups and commissions, set up on both sides,” he indicated.
“We hope that, following His Beatitude’s visit, the joint commissions set up to attain practical unity of the two Churches will meet in session,” Father Nikolai said.
“Reunification has, first and foremost, spiritual and symbolic significance for the two Churches,” said he. “In the first place, it will signal a recovery from the aftershocks of the fratricidal standoff that Russia plunged into at the beginning of the 20th century”.
“In terms of practical effects, reunification could be important for pastoral activity abroad,” Father Nikolai said.
He recalled that the Russian Orthodox Church reporting to the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCA had an almost identical number of parishes outside the Commonwealth of Independent States.
“Fraternal relations could help both Churches provide better attendance of the spiritual needs of Russian believers living in many parts of the globe,” Father Nikolai said.
Metropolitan Laurus (secular name Vassily Shkurla) hails from the ethnic group of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenians or Rusins living in Ukraine, Slovakia and Hungary west off the Carpathian Mountains.
He was born in 1927 in Slovakia and moved to the U.S. in 1946, where he later took the monastic vows at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.
In 1967, he was consecrated to the Bishop of Manhattan. His accession to the supreme post in ROCA took place October 25, 2001, when the ROCA Council of Bishops proclaimed him Metropolitan of New York & East America.