c. 1998 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ When the World Council of Churches’ assembly convenes next month in Harare, Zimbabwe, the specter of losing its biggest member _ the 80 million-member Russian Orthodox Church _ will loom large over the proceedings.

But for the token delegation from the Russian Orthodox Church there will be a far more ominous threat back home: schism.

Leaders of the church here are faced with an increasingly insistent conservative movement that threatens to break apart the church along a deepening generational and philosophical fault line, with participation in the WCC a key symbolic issue.

Conservatives denounce participation in the WCC _ with its discussions of alien concepts like homosexual clergy and feminist theology _ as sullying Russian Orthodoxy with the heresies of the West.”If you don’t want a schism, then you can’t maintain involvement, you can’t stay in the ecumenical movement,”said Yevgeny Nikiforov, who heads the Radonezh Orthodox Brotherhood which operates two radio stations, publishes a newspaper and is among the leading conservative forces in Russian Orthodoxy today.”I am being invited to have relations with people who call God `It’ as they do in the Episcopal Church in America … with people who recognize homosexual marriages,”said Nikiforov, a dapper man with a small ponytail and a persuasive manner.”You must understand, it is not even a matter of theology. We just don’t want to associate with that kind of people.” The man leading the three-person delegation to the WCC assembly, Hieromonk Hilarion Alfeyev, is often pilloried for his ecumenism in Nikiforov’s newspaper, and while there is no love lost between the two, one thing they do agree on is the power of the issue to divide the 1,000-year-old church.

Alfeyev, 32, acknowledged the danger of schism and the dicey nature of his mission to Harare and the WCC assembly which opens Dec. 3.”I feel very strong pressure because obviously it is very difficult to represent a church where very many people have an anti-ecumenical attitude,”the softspoken Alfeyev, head of his church’s secretariat for inter-Christian relations in the department for external church relations, said in an interview.”We must try to be a true representation.” Along with a husband-and-wife team of lay workers from his department who will round out the delegation, Alfeyev is under orders not to take part in voting, ceremonies or prayers as part of an agreement reached at a pan-Orthodox meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece in May. Other Orthodox delegations are expected to follow suit and present a common position in Harare.

In recent years, two Orthodox churches _ the Georgian and the Bulgarian _ have dropped out of the WCC.

The Georgian Orthodox Church, headed by Catholicos-Patriarch Ilya II, a past president of the WCC, is often cited as a cautionary tale for the much larger Russian Orthodox Church. Rebellious monks threatened schism over the issue of ecumenism in the spring of 1997, prompting Ilya to take his church out of the WCC in May 1997.

Yakov Krotov, a church historian and acerbic critic of its leadership, said predictions of schism over ecumenism are overblown and underestimate the power of its leader, Patriarch Alexii II, himself a veteran of ecumenical dialogue as a leading Soviet-era hierarch.”The patriarch is not interested in ecumenism or non-ecumenism. He is interested in power,”said Krotov, adding that Alexii has flexed his muscle of late by, for example, successfully lobbying for a restrictive Russian law on religion.”The patriarch has the money, the power and the political will to kill any schism.” After a letter from the northern Russian monastery of Valaam attacked both ecumenism and the patriarch, Krotov said, Alexii traveled there in October, dressed down the monks and eventually reassigned their spiritual director to Greece’s Mount Athos.

Opposition to ecumenism, however, is not confined to isolated monasteries or Orthodox brotherhoods, as shown by a visit last winter by the Rev. Konrad Raiser, WCC general secretary, to the prestigious Moscow Theological Academy and Seminary.

There, after delivering a talk to the church’s future priests and theologians, Raiser was greeted with cries of”heretic”and accused of never having read the Bible and of heading an organization that promotes homosexuality.

The debate in Russia over whether the Russian Orthodox Church should remain in the WCC often divides over generational lines. Pro-WCC clergy, including the ruling apparatus, tend to be those who rose through the ranks at a time when involvement in the WCC was a way to bring international pressure on the Soviet government to preserve a limited amount of religious freedom.

Other, often younger, Russian Orthodox see the church’s 1962 joining of the WCC as evidence of how much control the KGB wielded over the church. This is the position of Nikiforov, who characterizes the church’s department for external church relations as having always been”a department of the KGB.”Through the people in that department, the KGB maintained its influence on the church,”he said.

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The charge has particular resonance in Russia because it is well-known that many of the leadership cooperated with the KGB. That includes Alexii, who was known to his handlers by the code name”Drozdov,”or”Blackbird”.

Alfeyev counters that the church itself had long pushed for membership in the WCC as a means of ensuring its survival on the eve of a new wave of persecutions in the 1960s under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Today, too, Alfeyev argues, Russian Orthodoxy could benefit from maintaining engagement with world Christianity.”It is our duty and our vocation to be a witness for Orthodoxy,”said Alfeyev, an Oxford-educated man who speaks English with greater fluency than many Americans.”Secondly, we are not living in isolation. The world is more and more integral.” Through dialogue with other faiths, Alfeyev argued, Russian Orthodoxy will have more of a say in issues ranging from mixed marriages to the behavior of Protestant missionaries evangelizing Russia. Russian Orthodoxy, in turn,”enriches”other faiths, Alfeyev said, citing the popularity of icons as an example.

Nikiforov scoffed at this idea.”Let them show me one member of the WCC with whom we have associated who has become Orthodox. It is all fruitless.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In Harare, Alfeyev said, he will propose that the Russian Orthodox be granted something other than WCC membership _ a framework under which Russian Orthodox can discuss points of mutual interest with other faiths and avoid subjects”that are profoundly alien, like the treatment of sexual minorities.” Neither Alfeyev, nor Nikiforov, nor Krotov were willing to make a prediction about what would happen in Harare. Nor would they venture a guess as to what the Holy Synod, Russian Orthodoxy’s ruling body, would decide on the issue of WCC involvement once Alfeyev’s delegation returns to Moscow.”This is a sort of swamp,”said Krotov, referring to the choice facing the metropolitans and bishops who sit on the Holy Synod.”I don’t think they themselves know what will happen.” DEA END BROWN