Missed Opportunities

He took the reins of governance of the Church at a difficult time: the clergy could not keep up with the rapid changes in public consciousness. And then there are the threats of schism, the unpreparedness of the clergy for urgent changes... Did the late His Holiness Alexy II manage to respond to the challenges of the time? This question again arose in the public consciousness in connection with the death of the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church MP.

In the early nineties, it seemed that the patriarch was cracking the pressing issues like nuts. Thousands of churches and hundreds of monasteries, many Sunday schools and Orthodox gymnasiums opened. New sisterhoods and brotherhoods emerged. Church life was revived.

At this time, as a correspondent for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, I quite often saw the patriarch from the most unexpected angles. I remember his trip to Valaam.

He arrived on the island in the company of an honorary member of the Valaam Revival Foundation, Mrs. Koivisto, wife of the President of Finland. Apparently, I wanted to show her myself the reigning abomination of desolation and what had to be done and restored. For the patriarch, these places were associated with childhood memories. Here it is again - Vsesvyatsky, Nikolsky, Forerunner monasteries. We are walking along a forest road with potholes. Local mushroom pickers come across them, stop and watch in surprise as the bishops, picking up their robes, carefully maneuver, go around the puddles, and the patriarch himself, supported from the side by a subdeacon, cheerfully overcomes obstacles.

On the island, as the writer Zaitsev says in a famous essay, there are wooden crosses in the most unexpected places. It's amazing how quickly they were restored. As you walk, either the cross is looking at you, or you are looking at it. We stopped at one of them in a rare pine forest near a steep cliff. We sang “Eternal Memory” to everyone who labored here. In the evening, the patriarch flew by helicopter to Petrozavodsk. The crew commander contacted the airfield. It turns out that the leaders of Karelia have been waiting for more than an hour for the arrival of their dear guests. The Patriarch, when he told his fellow travelers this news, smiled softly. Indeed, just recently it was necessary to stand in line to see the commissioners for religious affairs, but now these same commissioners, along with other “navels of the earth,” are scraping around and assuring of devotion to the grave.

After a hard day, you want to crawl to bed and fall. But there is a long service ahead. And the next day there is another one, in which Bishop Manuil, the head of the newly established Olonets diocese, is elevated to the rank of bishop. Then the patriarch meets with the leaders of the republic, with participants in the meeting of authorized representatives of the Union of Cities of North-West Russia, and gives a press conference. And you have to be everywhere. The program is very intense, as during any primate visit. The subdeacons fall off their feet, but the patriarch does nothing. And this, of course, is surprising.

Patriarch Alexy II began his ministry with speeches about conciliarity, about the renewal of all aspects of life. However, it soon became clear that society was not evolving towards democracy. And within the church there are powerful forces that do not accept renewal. The time of the patriarchate of Alexy II can be called a time of missed opportunities. In the early 90s, the Church enjoyed unparalleled moral authority and could attract a huge number of our compatriots into the church fold. This required active preaching of the Gospel, the widespread creation of missionary parishes, where converts would be engaged, directing their energy into spiritual and social service. But evangelization did not happen.

An attempt to make Orthodox worship more understandable and to Russify it ended in failure. Brilliant translations of “Six Psalms” by S.S. Averintsev, the works of other translators were not in demand, and missionary parishes were destroyed. As an example, we can cite the fate of the priestly community. Georgy Kochetkov, as a result of the provocation of fundamentalists, deprived of the Church of the Assumption in Pechatniki. Until now, this largest Moscow community does not have its own parish. The consequences of the anti-missionary policy, by the way, could be observed at the funeral service of His Holiness. Prayers were heard in the temple in Greek, Georgian, Romanian and other languages. But in Russian - not a single prayer, not a single line of Scripture.

Gradually, the fundamentalists, hiding behind crafty formulations about the preservation of traditions, reoriented the Church from a mission to a counter-mission, to a fierce and not at all Christian struggle with other believers. And it didn't stop there. Active people intent on dialogue with the world began to disappear from the patriarch’s entourage. They were replaced by functionaries who also shared many of the fundamentalist myths - about the Masonic conspiracy, about the hated West, etc. So one should hardly be surprised by Diomid’s demarche: its reasons are rooted, in particular, in the personnel policy of church managers. Let us recall that Diomede himself was ordained bishop by Patriarch Alexy II.

The Patriarchate systematically began to build the church as an army team of bishops-administrators and obedient clergy. At the same time, business interests in making certain decisions often outweighed considerations about the “benefit of the church.” How can one not remember Marfo-Mariinskaya

, where Mother Elizabeth and her sisters were shown the door, and the orphans under her care were actually thrown out onto the street. A tidbit in the center of Moscow became not just a stone of contention: what happened to the monastery was a moral defeat for Chisty Lane.

The domes were gilded throughout the patriarchate of Alexy II. But spiritual life took a strong turn. For example, hopes for a revival of monastic life did not materialize. Yes, quite a few monasteries have opened in Russia now. But they play almost a smaller role in the lives of believers than the several miraculously surviving monasteries played in the USSR.

Let's not talk about politics here. However, the Church, which has verbally abandoned it, is increasingly serving the interests of those in power every year. Is the patriarch to blame for this? Of course, he could not cope alone with the difficulties that the Russian Orthodox Church faced. But it was he who set the tone. Many people were guided by the strategy of his personal behavior, which resulted in support for the party in power and indulgence of church radicals. And yet, those in power and church radicals are not the Lord God. This inspires hope that under the new patriarch the dilapidated body of the Russian Orthodox Church will still find strength for renewal.

Now the Russian Orthodox Church is actively preparing to hold a Local Council with the only item on the agenda - the choice of a new primate. Of course, one could complain that the council is meeting at a “Bolshevik pace,” and that in such a hurry it is difficult to identify truly worthy candidates, and not representatives of church communities appointed by diocesan administrations. But even in six months (the deadline for convening a meeting to elect the first hierarch), it is unlikely that anything will change radically. Conciliarity faces the Church today as a problem, as a challenge to which an answer must be sought.