The perils of accommodation: Russia and John Paul II

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Long, but interesting article concerning Catholic relations with the Russian Orthodox, as well as the extent to which Russian Catholics have suffered for the sake of ecumenism:

Issue Date: September 17, 2004
The perils of accommodation: Russia and John Paul II

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Moscow

Russia has haunted Pope John Paul II, from the confrontation
with Communism during his first decade to his push for reconciliation with
the Russian Orthodox in the last. This first Slavic pope has long dreamed,
so far fruitlessly, of a Russian voyage that would be the emotional
capstone of his pontificate.

Russia may haunt his legacy as well.

The great irony of John Paul’s “Russia policy,” according to observers
here, is that the pope who began by rejecting John XXIII’s and Paul VI’s
Ostpolitik – a policy of softening tensions with the Soviets, which a
young Karol Wojtyla saw as lacking nerve – is today recycling that
Ostpolitik in an ecumenical key. The Soviets are gone, but the “don’t rock
the boat” mentality survives. Replace “socialism” with “Russian
Orthodoxy,” and the picture is the same: a strategy of de-escalation
through soft policies and softer speech.

There is a consensus that John Paul has gone to extraordinary lengths
to advance relations with the Russian Orthodox, whose doctrinal and
liturgical traditions he obviously reveres – so much so, in fact, that
some Catholics fear the local church is being sacrificed in the bargain.
Protestantism in Russia is growing by leaps and bounds, they say, while
the Catholic church sits on the sidelines for the sake of a murky
ecumenical moment that never seems to arrive.

continued…
 
Make no mistake: Russian Catholics are fiercely loyal to the papacy,
and they feel a special bond with John Paul. At the same time, however,
some wonder if the approach to Catholic/Orthodox relations in John Paul’s
Vatican doesn’t end in the same stance Wojtyla himself once
abhorred: accommodation.
The peril and promise was thrown into relief Aug. 27-30 by a
Vatican delegation to Moscow whose ostensible mission was to return to the
Russian Orthodox a copy of the Icon of Kazan, a famous 16th-century image
believed to have miracle-working powers. The delegation’s other assignment
was to get relations with the Orthodox back on track.

The icon was presented to Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow Aug. 27, at the end
of the Orthodox celebration of Mary’s Dormition (Assumption) in a Kremlin
cathedral named for the feast.

Someone unschooled in ecumenical politics would have been puzzled,
since normally one would expect the Orthodox to make a big deal out of an
icon and the Roman Catholics to not quite understand the fuss. The
Orthodox, after all, base their sense of ecclesial tradition on the first
seven councils, the last of which was devoted to anathematizing people who
went around smashing icons. Orthodox churches are dominated by icons; they
are a quintessential _expression of Orthodox spirituality. Roman
Catholicism does not have the same tradition.

Yet on this occasion, it was the Catholics who played up the significance
of the icon, and the Orthodox who minimized it. Alexy said the icon was
simply “one of many copies” of the famous Kazan image, while the
eight-member Catholic delegation treated the object as a priceless
treasure. (Debate over this icon’s provenance is a subject in itself;
one Russian magazine, New Eyewitness, recently carried a long piece
suggesting it may once have belonged to the Czarist Romanov family.)

The two sides also had different evaluations of the impact of the pope’s
gesture.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the 10-member Vatican delegation
that presented the icon to Alexy, told NCR Aug. 28 that sessions with
their Orthodox counterparts had been “very friendly, very positive,”
and that the climate was much improved over the last time he was in Moscow
in February.
 
continued…

Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Moscow agreed.

“I see a new climate now,” Kondrusiewicz told NCR Aug. 31. “There’s a new
sensitivity from all people, and everyone’s speaking to one another.”

Orthodox officials, on the other hand, expressed much less
enthusiasm, always adding that they’re looking for more.

“We would like this gift to symbolize the beginning of a new policy from
the Vatican in Russia,” Fr. John Lapidus, the official in charge of
relations with Catholics for the Moscow patriarchate, told NCR Aug. 30.

“With this step, we hope that the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church
will take more concrete, real steps for resolving all the problems that
exist among us.”

Such ambivalence ran through all the public statements from the Orthodox,
including a written message from Alexy II to John Paul Aug. 30. The tone
was positive, with Alexy thanking the pope for a gesture of “good will,”
but twice Alexy referred to “problems” in Catholic/Orthodox relations. He
pointedly called for “sensitivity in carrying out any actions in
territories where another Christian tradition has existed for centuries.”

These were not just official attitudes. One finds them among
Orthodox believers.

Veta Uspenskaya, who teaches English at a Moscow-area school, said she was
“sort of suspicious” of the pope’s motives. “Good relations are better
than bad,” she said, “but without a hidden agenda.”
When Russian Orthodox spokespersons refer to “problems,” they generally
mean “proselytism,” the accusation that Catholics in Russia are soliciting
converts from the Orthodox despite officially regarding them as a “sister
church.”

It’s a charge that Catholics emphatically reject.

“Let me put it this way,” Kondrusiewicz told NCR. “If we have this policy
of proselytism, if it’s the policy of the Vatican, the Holy Father should
remove me immediately from Moscow because I’ve not done anything!”

Lapidus, however, ticked off example after example: a church
in Novosibirsk that advertised lectures about God and Christianity without
identifying the lecturer as a Catholic priest; Spanish nuns who
catechized while teaching Spanish; Catholic orphanages where Orthodox
children are raised as Catholics.

continued…
 
continued…

Trying to establish the truth is an exercise in frustration, given
the lack of reliable statistical data on religious adherence. (The Russian
census does not ask the question.) Even as basic a piece of information as
the number of Russian Catholics is almost anyone’s guess. Official Vatican
numbers say there are 600,000, but Kondrusiewicz told NCR it could be as
much as 1.5 million, based on polls that say Catholics are 1 percent of
the national population.

Yet local Russian Catholics, who conducted a study two years ago
by calling all 250 parish priests in Russia and asking them to take a
count on Sunday, say the real number is more like 200,000. Even that may be
too high, according to sociologist Nikolai Mitrokhin, who directs the
Institute of the Study of Religion in the Commonwealth of Independent
States and Baltic Countries.

“If you want to talk about really practicing Catholics, meaning going to
church at least once a week, it could be as low as 20,000 or 30,000,”
Mitrokhin told NCR Aug. 30. “You couldn’t find a single Catholic parish in
Russia that draws more than 500 people.”

Perhaps more relevant for the question of proselytism is the number
of converts to Catholicism from Russian Orthodoxy. Here, too, the numbers
are up for grabs.

Local Catholics say that the same 2002 study found that the number of such
converts for the entire decade of the 1990s was a mere 800.
Kondrusiewicz agreed: “I’d say in these 13 years [there have been] maybe
several hundred,” he said.

Lapidus sees a much bigger phenomenon.

“In Moscow, there are big numbers of converted people from Orthodoxy to
Catholicism,” he said. “If we take the data from all Russia, there’s a big
number.”

More than 800?

“Yes, of course, more. … In the beginning of the 1990s, they said there
were about 300,000 Roman Catholics in the Soviet Union and neighboring
countries. Currently, they say now we have over 600,000 Roman Catholics.
You should also remember that during the last 20 years many
Roman Catholics went back to Germany.”

The growth, Lapidus said, is being driven by converts from
Orthodoxy. Mitrokhin, however, said conversions to Catholicism are
extremely rare.

Earlier in the year, a special mixed commission was established, composed
of three Orthodox priests and three Roman Catholic priests, to look
at each allegation of proselytism. It met for the first time in May and
will meet again in September.

The second issue that looms large in Orthodox complaints is the
Western Ukraine, where following the collapse of Communism many parishes
that had been under the aegis of Moscow were claimed by the Greek Catholic
church, a 5.5 million strong body that follows Eastern traditions but is
loyal to Rome.

continued…
 
The Greek Catholics were suppressed under Stalin, so they
went underground, with many members appearing to be regular Orthodox
faithful. When they resurfaced in the early 1990s, they took huge chunks
of the Orthodox church in Ukraine with them. Since the Western Ukraine
supplied one-third to one-half of the vocations and income of the entire
Russian Orthodox church, its loss was an enormous blow, from which
Catholic/Orthodox relations in some ways have never recovered.

Lapidus was fiercely critical of the Greek Catholics, especially
their current push to declare their leader, Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, a
patriarch.

“The Ukrainian situation may in any moment slip out of control,” Lapidus
said. “The Greek Catholic conviction that they should establish a
patriarchate at any cost witnesses to a separatist tendency. If they
achieve patriarchal status, they may declare their complete independence
of any outward authority.”

Lapidus warned that the Greek Catholics are conspiring with two breakaway
factions of the Orthodox church to create a pan-Ukrainian national church
that will answer to no one, either in Rome or Moscow.

Vatican officials told NCR Sept. 1 that while the project of a Ukrainian
patriarchate has been put on hold out of deference to Orthodox
sensibilities, they regard the idea of a split from Rome as “fantasy.”
continued…
 
Russia has always been a rather dreamy place, where reality is perennially
subject to reinterpretation. Hence it is perhaps no surprise to learn that
the Russian Orthodox, by making the Roman Catholics the object of their
complaints about proselytism, seem to be ignoring that the real proselytism
on Russian soil these days is coming from the Protestants.

“The most important religious trend in Russia today is the growth of
Protestantism,” Mitrokhin said. “I expect that in 25 or 30 years, Russia
could become a predominantly Protestant country.”

Even if other analysts aren’t prepared to go quite that far, all agree
that the growth has been dramatic. Downtown Moscow is dotted with
Protestant churches, and there are small villages in rural Russia where
among 150 residents, 50 are Seventh Day Adventists, 50 are Jehovah’s
Witnesses, and perhaps 50 are nominally Orthodox.

The top three new religious movements in Russia, according to conventional
estimates, are the Pentecostals, the Baptists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
By one count, Protestantism grew throughout the 1990s at a rate of 20 to
25 percent per year. Even if that rate has slowed, growth continues. (It’s
not just Russia. According to official statistics issued by the
Belorussian government, Pentecostals are now the second largest religious
group in the country, surpassing Catholicism, based on the number
of registered communities.)

Though reliable figures in Russia are once again difficult to find,
by consensus there are some 1 million Protestants in Russia, the vast
majority active. Since only about 3 percent of Russians baptized as
Orthodox attend church once a year, and only about one-third of that
number goes once a week, Mitrokhin says the number of practicing
Protestants in Russia may actually be more or less the same as the number
of practicing Orthodox.

continued…
 
Protestants are especially present in Siberia, the Far East and the Urals
as well as in the major cities. Their congregations tend be unusually young.

The result has been a changed religious landscape.

“In general, the Protestants are more dynamic, they’re moveable, they have
new tactics of preaching and communicating with people,” said Alexei
Yudin, assistant professor at St. Andrew’s Biblical Theological College
and an observer of the religious scene in Russia. Yudin, a Catholic, spoke
to NCR Aug. 30.

“They have drive. Catholics and Orthodox prefer to speak to people from
the churchyard, because they have a ritualistic mentality. The
Protestants meet with people face to face,” Yudin said.

Moreover, Mitrokhin said, they’re good at meat-and-potatoes pastoral care,
helping Russian men get off vodka and hold down a job. Often they promote a
dress-for-success approach to life that fits well with the
new entrepreneurial spirit of Russia.

“If we want to talk about proselytism in Russia, we have to talk about the
Protestants,” Mitrokhin said.

continued…
 
For the most part, however, the Orthodox don’t talk about the Protestants
when they complain about proselytism. Why not?

Lapidus provided the official answer.

“From our side, there is no objection to the proselytism by Protestants,”
he told NCR. “But we perceive the Catholic church as a sister church, a
term which has become common in theological conversation since the Second
Vatican Council. The Catholic church started to treat the Orthodox church
as a sister church, and that’s how we see them. …. So we have a higher
expectation of the Catholics.”

While that response undoubtedly has merit, few observers find it
wholly convincing.

Many say that historical resentments in Russia against Poles
and Lithuanians is an important factor, especially given that Pope John
Paul is Polish and Kondrusiewicz is from a Polish family. More broadly,
Rome has been the principal “enemy” of Orthodoxy for so long that, as the
saying goes, old habits die hard.

Politically, this view elevates the patriarch of Moscow, who heads
a church that at best can claim no more than 200 million followers, to be
seen as the main sparring partner of the pope, whose official following is
over a billion. Some Orthodox leaders also believe that the growth in
Protestantism in Russia is ephemeral, while if the Catholics are allowed
to gain a toehold they will be around for the long term.

Orthodox journalist Andrei Zolotov told NCR Aug. 26 that in some ways
criticism of the Catholic church is a compliment.

“If tomorrow someone were appointed supreme bishop for the Pentecostals in
Russia, few Orthodox would care, because they don’t understand who these
people are,” Zolotov said. “With the Catholic church, on the other hand,
they understand that this is a real bishop.”

Finally, some observers believe that the recent difficulties in
the Western Ukraine, because of their impact on the income and vocations
of the Moscow patriarchate, have poisoned the relationship in a way that
colors everything else.

Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is that the Russian
Orthodox response to the Catholic church seems at times to be influenced
by factors beyond rational analysis of the threat it actually poses.
In turn, this raises the question: To what extent should the mission
of Catholicism in Russia be put on hold in an effort to accommodate
potentially exaggerated or irrational Orthodox sensibilities? Local
Catholics point to ways large and small in which they fear too much ground
is being given away.

For one thing, these Catholics note, the Russian Orthodox like to
deal directly with the Vatican, almost pretending that the local Catholic
community does not exist.

For example, when previous Vatican delegations have come to
Russia, Kondrusiewicz has not been invited to take part. This time, he was
added to the delegation at midday on Aug. 25, some 36 hours before the
flight from Rome arrived. Similarly, when the moment came to present the
icon to Alexy, four members of the delegation from the outside ascended
the sanctuary: Kasper; Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington;
Archbishop Renato Boccardo of the Pontifical Council for Social
Communications; and Bishop Brian Farrell from Kasper’s office.
Kondrusiewicz remained off to the side.

continued…
 
To add insult to injury, a group of local Catholics had asked to be
able to pray in front of the icon in the Cathedral of the Immaculate
Conception Friday night, before it was handed over on Saturday. They were
told, however, that out of respect for Patriarch Alexy, his should be the
first eyes to see the icon. (As things turned out, the first eyes to see
the icon in Russia belonged to a young female customs officer who insisted
on inspecting it.)

Sensitivity to the Orthodox is pushed to an extreme, local
Catholics complain. They say their church is “on hold,” locked into a
ghetto made up mostly of Poles, Germans and Lithuanians, because it’s
official Vatican policy not to grow.

“We do not take much care of catechism, proper catechism,” one local
Catholic leader told NCR. “Worse still, we do not have evangelization at
all. Can you imagine a church without evangelization?”

In fairness, there is a Catholic radio program in Russian and a
wide variety of Catholic publications, some published by the dioceses and
many by religious orders. Still, local observers say these offerings are
directed largely to existing Catholics rather than to introducing the
church to the broader Russian culture.

Kondrusiewicz denied that sensitivity to the Orthodox is preventing
the Catholic church from living its normal life.

“We are preaching the Gospel, we are catechizing children and
young people, our commissions are working as they worked before,” he said.

Still, the slow-growth policy seems real. One sign: If a Russian
of Orthodox background shows up at a Catholic parish to express interest
in joining the Catholic church, nine times out of 10 the priest’s
first response, according to local observers, will be: “Why don’t
you return to the Orthodox church?”

Similarly, Kondrusiewicz told NCR he is currently concerned that a number
of Orthodox young people have expressed an interest in attending
the Catholic church’s next World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany, in
2005. He’s trying to invite Orthodox clergy to attend, lest this seem like
“proselytism.”

Another wrinkle is financial. Because of John Paul’s abiding interest in
improving relations with the Orthodox, local Catholics sometimes find
themselves in the surreal position of watching funds from
international Catholic donors flow to Orthodox causes rather than their
own. For example, in the coming weeks a delegation from the mammoth German
Catholic foundation Renovabis will arrive in Moscow to discuss supporting
Orthodox seminaries. The lone Catholic seminary in Russia, meanwhile,
struggles to pay the bills.

“The rest of the world must not forget that there are Catholics in this
country who need resources,” said Vladimir Merkulov, a Catholic layman who
works for the state gas company. “We should not be set aside for the sake
of ecumenism.”

All this, of course, raises the question about John Paul’s policy of
ecumenical dÎtente: Is it worth it?
The aims are undeniably lofty.

Defenders say it is the will of Christ that the church be one,
hence ecumenism is an indispensable commitment for Christians. Divided
Christianity offers a compromised witness to the world, which badly needs
its moral and religious message. In Europe, the pressures of secularism
and the privatization of religion will only grow, and together Catholics
and Orthodox will be better positioned to resist them. The challenges to
European cultural identity posed by growing religious pluralism,
especially Islam, also might benefit from joint Catholic/Orthodox reflection.
 
continued…

Certainly the architects of the policy understand its cost. Kasper
spoke to the local Catholic press before he left, making it explicit.

“I ask the Catholic believers in Russia to sacrifice, to understand that
there is no forgiveness, no reconciliation without sacrifice,”
Kasper said. “This is the life of the church.”

In its own time, of course, strikingly similar arguments were made
in favor of the Ostpolitik of John XXIII and Paul VI with regard to
socialism, and that historical debate is far from settled. Defenders
believe it lowered international tensions. Among other things, it may have
helped avert a nuclear war over Cuba during the missile crisis. Critics,
however, say it gave the Soviet system legitimacy at a time religious
believers were being brutally oppressed.

The reality is that both arguments may have merit.

John L. Allen Jr. is NCR Rome correspondent. His e-mail address is
jallen@natcath.org.
National Catholic Reporter, September 17, 2004
 
I realize now that it would have been much easier to simply post a link to the article instead of copying and pasting the whole thing into numerous posts. I apologize for the wasted bandwidth :o .

In Christ,

Chris
 
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Thepeug:
I realize now that it would have been much easier to simply post a link to the article instead of copying and pasting the whole thing into numerous posts. I apologize for the wasted bandwidth :o .

In Christ,

Chris
Click to expand...
I do think I would have been better if you posted a summary of the article and a link to the whole thing.
 
Thepeug:

Normally, to “link” is to go the original source.

You are linking to a discussion board whose (anti-Catholic) poster lifted the article from National Catholic Reporter, the publisher of the article written by its Rome correspondent.

OC.net cannot guarantee its authenticity while NCR Online can.

At any rate, here is the link to the article as published:

natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives2/2004c/091704/091704a.php
 
Amadeus,

Thanks for the correction, and thanks for finding the original source. I’ll be sure to link to the original source in the future 🙂 .

God bless,

Chris
 
Patriarch Aleksei commented,“Devotion to Mother of God is an inseparable part of spiritual life of Russian Orthodox Church, as Roman Catholic Church. Veneration of this icon (Kazanskaya)reminds us of the antiquated time of the undivided church.” However, Patriarch has decided to keep the icon in his working residence in Moscow rather than to return the Icon to Kazan’ city. In fact both Orthodox and Muslim citizens of that city have been preparing the Petropavlovskiy sobor to receive the icon since 2000. These people of Kazan’ hope to restore the Novodevichiy Monastery (where icon was venerated before Communists but which had been factory in Soviet times). Does Patriarch Aleksei feel really that spiritual life of Orthodox Russians will be helped better by icon in his residence than icon in major Sobor in Kazan’? This treatment of icon is sad both for Catholics and for Orthodox Russians who cannot enter into Patriarch’s residence to venerate icon.
 
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Thepeug:
I realize now that it would have been much easier to simply post a link to the article instead of copying and pasting the whole thing into numerous posts. I apologize for the wasted bandwidth :o .
Click to expand...
Wow! A string of T–E–N posts. :eek:

I once sent a seven-string post with a wonderful article about the annual miracle of the Holy Fire in Jerusalem, and I received a stern private message from Karl Keating that it was an infringement of the Forum’s policy and he deleted the whole lot.

We wait to see how your string fares, dear Thepeug 😃
 
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