MOSCOW – As bells pealed and worshippers wept, Russian Orthodox leaders signed a pact Thursday to heal an 80-year schism between the church in Russia and an offshoot set up abroad following the Bolshevik Revolution.
“A historic event awaited for long, long years has occurred. The unity of the Russian church is restored,” Moscow Patriarch Alexy II said before signing the agreement with Metropolitan Laurus, head of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. That branch split off in anger when the Russian church declined to defy the Communist government.
The lavish, nationally televised ceremony was watched by President Vladimir Putin and a throng of worshippers in Moscow’s vast Christ the Savior Cathedral and underscored the resurgence of Russia’s dominant faith in the post-Soviet era.
The two elderly, bearded clerics, in sparkling headgear, bent to kiss each other’s cheeks. Worshippers crossed themselves and shed tears – a few snapped photos on cell phones – and incense wafted from a censer swung by one of the dozens of white-robed clerics gathered along the cathedral’s central aisle.
Reunification talks began after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and gathered momentum in recent years. The Moscow Patriarchate last year disavowed Moscow Patriarch Sergiy’s 1927 declaration of loyalty to the Communist government.
Laurus has said that the reunion pact – the Canonical Communion Act – does not mark a merger, and that his branch would maintain administrative control over its 400-plus parishes worldwide. The New York-based church reports 480,000 U.S. members.
The Moscow Patriarchate counts about two-thirds of Russia’s population of 142 million as members and controls branches in other former Soviet republics.
The pact makes the church abroad “an inalienable, self-governed part” of a common Russian Orthodox Church, according to the Kremlin. Each church will maintain its own leader and council of bishops, but clergy will be able to lead services and parishioners take communion in both churches.
“We will pray together even if we are at different ends of the Earth,” Archbishop Mark of the church abroad said Wednesday.
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