 The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov' Zagranitsey), also called the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, ROCA, or ROCOR) is a semi-autonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church.
It was formed as a jurisdiction of Eastern Orthodoxy as a response against the policy of Bolsheviks with respect to religion in the Soviet Union soon after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and separated from the Russian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1927 after an imprisoned Patriarch Sergius I of Moscow pledged the church’s qualified loyalty to the Bolshevik state. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia officially signed the Act of Canonical Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate on May 17, 2007 restoring the canonical link between the churches. Critics of the reunification argue that the issue of KGB infiltration of the church hierarchy has not been addressed by the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Church has over 400 parishes worldwide, and an estimated membership of over 400,000 people. Within the ROCOR there are 13 hierarchs, and also 20 monasteries and nunneries in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom and South America.
Formation and early years
In 1920 near the end of the Russian Civil War, after the White Russian Army under Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak was crushed and the Bolsheviks occupied Siberia, a mass exodus of Russian refugees moved into Manchuria. Over ninety thousand refugees settled in Harbin, Shanghai, Dairen, Hailar and the smaller towns along the Chinese branch of the Trans-Siberian Railway within three years. Lacking adequate lodgings or employment many migrated to America, Europe or Australia.
Also in 1920 the Soviet government revealed that it was hostile to the Russian Orthodox Church. Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, issued an ukase (decree) that all Orthodox Christians currently under the authority and protection of his Patriarchate seek protection and guidance elsewhere.
Among some Russian Bishops and other hierarchs, this was interpreted as an authorization to form an emergency synod of all Russian Orthodox hierarchs to permit the Church to continue to function outside Russia. To add urgency to the synod's motives, in May of 1922, the Soviet government proclaimed its own "Living Church" as a "reform" of the Russian Orthodox Church.
On September 13, 1922, Russian Orthodox hierarchs in Serbia met in the town of Sremski Karlovci and established a Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad, the foundation of ROCOR. In November of 1922, Russian Orthodox in North America held a synod and elected Metropolitan Platon as the primate of an autonomous Russian exarchate in the Americas. This led to a three-way conflict in the United States among the Exarchate, ROCOR (sometimes known as "the Synod" in this period), and the Living Church, which asserted that it was the legitimate (Soviet-government-recognized) owner of all Eastern Orthodox properties in the USA.
The church of the refugees (1922–1991)
At first the Russian Orthodox Church's hierarchy within Russia had resisted Bolshevik rule. After arrests and persecution of much of the Church’s leadership, Metropolitan Sergiy Stargorodsky (one of the Assistant Deputy Patriarchs) agreed in 1927 to negotiations with the State Political Directorate from his prison cell. Sergiy pledged the church’s qualified loyalty to the Bolshevik state (an act his defenders claim saved the Church from total liquidation). This pledge caused a deep schism that prompted many disillusioned believers to go underground where they formed what became called the Russian True Orthodox Church. Sergiy’s accommodation also alienated the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
Despite distancing itself from both the Bolsheviks and Sergiy, in 1927 ROCOR declared "The part of the Russian Church that finds itself abroad considers itself an inseparable, spiritually united branch of the Great Russian Church. It doesn't separate itself from its Mother Church and doesn't consider itself autocephalous", indicating that ROCOR considered itself to speak for all of the Russian Orthodox outside Russia.
During World War II, when the Church of England requested the right to pay a high level visit to the Russian Orthodox Church, General Secretary Joseph Stalin met with its metropolitans. Though it's sometimes stated that Stalin needed the Church to win the war, this is inaccurate as by that point the victorious battles of Stalingrad and Kursk had already put the USSR and its allies in a superior position. Stalin’s move was on the eve of the Teheran Conference and he wanted the ROC to impress the Anglican delegation and convince them that there was no religious persecution. He hoped that this would sway British public opinion and cause them to pressure their government to support an early invasion of Normandy to divert Nazi efforts away from his front. Stalin was told by Metropolitan Sergii that the most pressing needs of the Church was to convoke a sobor, elect a patriarch, and restore the Synod (which had been dissolved in 1935). Stalin approved everything and used military air transport to bring the bishops to Moscow allowing the sobor to open four days from his meeting with the metropolitans. He appointed Georgii Karpov (a major general in the NKVD) as the Council for the Russian Orthodox Church Affairs and all matters concerning Church-State relations were to go through him. Sergii turned down Stalin’s offer to fully subsidize the sobor and his offer of financial aid. He succeeded in obtaining Stalin’s permission to reopen the seminaries and theological schools "in as many eparchies as the Church would see fit". He also allowed the reopening of churches and the return of the monthly Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate to publication. Upon Metropolitan Alexii’s suggestion Stalin allowed a list of imprisoned priests and bishops to be handed over to Karpov for consideration of release (unfortunately many of those on the list had been executed in the persecution of 1937-38). The former German Embassy was requisitioned to serve as the official residence of the Patriarch and as his offices. Despite Stalin’s remarks at the meeting that Karpov would only be a liaison between the Church and the government his CROCA interfered into many internal Church affairs. Karpov was the decisive voice in the creation of the Church Statute of 1945, its main author being one of his assistants. He also ignored protests of the Patriarch when the USSR began liquidating monasteries again in 1946 and forced the hierarchy to submit. While churches were opened relatively quickly in land conquered from the Nazis, a long bureaucratic process was needed to open a church on Russian soil (taking up to three years and instantly derailed by anyone in the bureaucratic chain).[5] The hierarchs of the ROCOR condemned this new arrangement with Stalin, saying that the Moscow patriarch had “made an alliance with Satan.”
After the end of World War II, the Patriarchate of Moscow broached the possibility of reunification between Moscow and ROCOR, presumably at the behest of the Soviet government, which had adopted a more conciliatory attitude towards religion during the war and was presumably trying to capitalize on its wartime alliances to win a more respectable position internationally. This wasn't deemed possible at that time by the ROCOR, given that the USSR was still a communist state.
Movement towards reconciliation
In 2000 Metropolitan Laurus became the First Hierarch of the ROCOR and expressed interest in the idea of reunification. The sticking point at the time was the ROCOR's insistence that the Moscow Patriarchy address the slaying of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 by the Bolsheviks. The ROCOR held that "the Moscow Patriarchy must speak clearly and passionately about the murder of the tsar's family, the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik movement, and the execution and persecution of priests."[2] The ROCOR also accused the leadership of the ROC as being submissive to the Russian government and were alarmed by their ties with other denominations of Christianity, especially Catholicism.
Some of these concerns were ended with the jubilee Council of Bishops in 2000, which canonized Tsar Nicholas and his family, along with more than 1,000 martyrs and confessors. This Council also enacted a document on relations between the church and the secular authorities, censoring servility and complaisance. They also rejected the idea of any connection between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
In 2001, the Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow and ROCOR exchanged formal correspondence. The Muscovite letter held the position that previous and current separation were purely political matters. ROCOR's response is that they were still worried about continued Muscovite involvement in ecumenism as compromising Moscow's Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, this was far more friendly a discourse than previous decades had seen.
In 2003 Vladimir Putin met with Metropolitan Laurus in New York. This event was later hailed as an important step by Patriarch Alexy II who said that it showed the ROCOR that "not a fighter against God, but an Orthodox Christian is at the country's helm."
In May 2004, Metropolitan Laurus, the head of the ROCOR, visited Russia participating in several joint services. In June 2004, a contingent of ROCOR clergy meeting with Patriarch Alexey II. Committees were set up by both the Patriarchate and ROCOR to begin dialogue towards rapprochement. Both sides decided to set up joint commissions, and determined the range of issues to be discussed at the All-Diaspora Council, which met for the first time since 1974.
The possibility of rapprochement has however led to schism within ROCOR; a small group led by a suspended bishop, Bishop Varnava (Prokofiev) of Cannes, left the ROCOR, taking with them ROCOR's self-retired former First Hierarch, Metropolitan Vitaly Ustinov. In 2006, Bishop Varnava asked for forgiveness and was received back into the ROCOR.
Reconciliation talks
After a series of six reconcilitation meetings, the ROCOR and the Patriarchate of Moscow, on June 21, 2005, simultaneously announced that rapprochement talks were leading toward the resumption of full relations between the ROCOR and the Patriarchate of Moscow; and that the ROCOR would be given autonomy status. In this arrangement the ROCOR "will now join the Moscow Patriarchate as a self-governed branch, similar to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It will retain its autonomy in terms of pastoral, educational, administrative, economic, property and secular issues." While Patriarchate Alexy said that the ROCOR would keep its property and fiscal independence and stated that its autonomy would not change "in the foreseeable future", he added that "Maybe this will change in decades and there will be some new wishes. But today we have enough concerns and will not make guesses.”
On May 12, 2006, the general congress of the ROCOR confirmed its willingness to reunite with the Russian Orthodox Church, which hailed this resolution as:
"an important step toward restoring full unity between the Moscow Patriarchate and the part of the Russian emigration that was isolated from it as a result of the revolution, the civil war in Russia, and the ensuing impious persecution against the Orthodox Church."
In September 2006, the ROCOR Synod of Bishops approved the text of the document worked out by the commissions, an Act of Canonical Communion, and in October 2006, the commissions met again to propose procedures and a time for signing the document. The Act of Canonical Communion[24] went into effect upon its confirmation by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, based the decision of the Holy Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church on the Relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, held in Moscow in October 3–October 8, 2004; as well as by decision of the Synod of Bishops of the ROCOR, on the basis of the resolution regarding the Act on Canonical Communion of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, held in San Francisco in May 15–May 19, 2006.
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