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Article Excerpt
THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH, OR ROC, IS THE LARGEST CENTRALIZED religious organization in the post-Soviet space. According to the Patriarch Aleksy II, the late leader of the ROC, the Church in Russia as of June 2008 had 14,290 parishes, which is approximately 50 percent of all Russian-registered religious organizations. In this paper we will examine the principal social developments that have been taking place within the Church in the first years of the twenty-first century.
The number of people actually involved in the activities of the Church in contemporary Russia is debatable. Some Church representatives and activists from sympathetic social and political organizations say that more than 80 percent of Russia's population is Orthodox Christian. This is sometimes followed with the qualification that these people might not have been christened but are considered Orthodox Christians on the basis of culture.
Recording all representatives of Orthodox culture in Russia as members of the ROC is not that convincing. Sociological surveys and polls conducted in the past two decades by various polling services-Yuri Levada Analytical Center (Levada-Center), Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), and the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM)--present a clearer picture. About 55-60 percent of Russian citizens considered themselves Orthodox Christian when asked about their religious identity. In all likelihood, this is the approximate percentage of people christened into Orthodoxy in the country, but the particular question of christening has not been examined by the polling services and the Church itself does not have this statistic. Some people who have been christened into Orthodoxy do not consider themselves Christians; on the other hand it is not rare that a person who has not been christened considers him- or herself Orthodox. (In Russia, christening as a rule takes place in infancy before a person becomes fully conscious.)
However, considering oneself an Orthodox Christian does not necessarily mean that the person somehow participates in Church activities or knows its basic dogma. In Russia it is widely held that it is enough to be christened and believe in one's heart, including having a Bible and icons at home, while regarding the Church as an institution and priests as its organizers as unnecessary extras. According to data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, only 3.3 percent of the population attends Easter service, the most important Church holiday. Moreover, in major cities this figure fluctuates somewhere around 1 percent. According to our calculations, about 0.5 percent of the population attends church services on a regular basis--at least once a month. Less than 7 percent of the population periodically attends church services and participates in some mass formal expressions of Orthodox Christian religiosity, such as the veneration of relics and icons that travel around Russia, collection of holy water at Epiphany, or the purchase of religious literature. Judging by polls of clergymen conducted by my colleagues and I, less than 10 percent of couples marry in a church and only approximately 30 to 40 percent of the deceased depart into the next world with an Orthodox Christian burial service. Even then, the burial service is often administered without the body being present, which is convenient from the relatives' point of view but contradicts the official position of the clergy, which insists on having the deceased brought to church or a priest attending the burial.
THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION
Formally, the ROC has a hierarchical structure. At the bottom of the pyramid are the parish community and monastery. From the point of view of secular law, they are legal entities officially registered with the state and in this capacity may engage in independent activities. From the point of view of the ROC Statute, which adopted a stricter approach in 2000, parishes may not independently control their assets. The assets as well as the conduct of religious ceremonies, content of church sermons, missionary work, and social service are under the watchful control of a bishop. The bishop has the right to intervene in operational issues of parish management, such as appointing or dismissing priests at his discretion, without having to explain his decisions to anybody. As a rule, a single bishop and the diocesan administration under his control manage all of the parishes and monasteries of one Russian region. In especially large regions a bishop may have assistant bishops, who do not, however, have autonomy.
The meeting of all Church bishops, the Archbishops' Council, is the supreme body of Church power. Until 2000 it was a Local Council--that is, a meeting of bishops and representatives of the clergy, monasteries, and laymen. However, despite the ROC Statute it did not convene in 2000 and was abolished as a mandatory body. In periods between Archbishops' Councils, which meet quarterly, the routine management of the Church is taken up by the Holy Synod, a nonelected entity that includes on a permanent basis the Patriarch, seven leaders of the largest dioceses, and chairmen of the most important departments (including external relations, chancellery, and others). Several regional bishops attend two or three Holy Synod meetings in turn as temporary members, but have no power to influence its decisions. The synod gathers for two days every three months, although not without significant disruptions in meeting schedules.
Remarkably, the geographically Russian part of the Church, which accounts for approximately half of the ROC parishes, does not have its own independent governing body. This makes it different from the Ukrainian, Belarnssian, and Moldovan parts, which are governed by their own synods. For this reason, two-thirds of the Holy Synod's agenda is taken up by questions concerning appointments of dozens of abbots of Russian monasteries and rectors of seminaries as well as by bureaucratic confirmation of the results of meetings between the synod's members and Russian officials.
Moreover, within the Church there is an informal parallel hierarchy based on personal relationships of active believers with priests who alleviate their "spiritual needs" or, in other words, help them psychologically. These priests are called "confessors," "spiritual advisers," or "monastic elders" (startsy), and usually serve in monasteries or remote parishes. The idea of monastic elders is part of the "folk Orthodoxy" phenomenon--noninstitutionalized religious practices that exist in opposition to the official Orthodoxy dictated by the theologically educated Church hierarchy. Networks of worshippers led by monastic elders are interregional in character, in contrast to the diocesan infrastructure. Unlike the great mass of believers, followers of the monastic elders are actively interested in Church life as well as religious and political issues. As a result, some especially popular monastic elders or spiritual advisers enjoy real power within the Church comparable to that of bishops, thanks to the support of their followers. Furthermore, they can have unofficial control over a significant part of the clergy and even episcopate, who chose them as their spiritual advisers during their youth or while in seminary.
THE MOST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENT OF THE 2000S: THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER AND PROPERTY IN THE HANDS OF THE EPISCOPATE
If Russian social, political, and economic life in the 1990s was characterized by intensive reorganization of spheres of influence in the transition from the Soviet period, in the 2000s power and properties that had been effectively appropriated were legally implemented and formalized. This development did not bypass the Church. In the 1990s, in the guise of returning to the Church property illegally appropriated by the Bolsheviks and to address the vital needs of believers, Church buildings and parcels of land were given or returned to parishes that were being established at that time. Before the revolution, Church buildings were owned not only by the ROC but also by the royal (czar's) court, state institutions, owners of private estates, or others. In the 1990s this fact was forgotten and the Church acquired sole ownership. Orthodox communities were created near former Church buildings and the Church demanded those buildings for itself.
In the 2000s the amount of property given to the Church sharply decreased. However, within the Church the process of redistributing property in favor of high-ranking managers of the episcopate began. Even in the early 1990s, the largest group of Church members--the laity--was kept at a remove from issues concerning the disposal of property. Mainly, it was priests who became parish wardens--that is, managers of legal entities in charge of property and funds. The priests were free of control of either parish council meetings (the parish council being a body within each parish, composed of the parish priest and several parish members)--which, at the initiative of the clergy as a professional group, became a complete fiction--or the diocesan administration, and sometimes had difficulty distinguishing between personal pockets and parish funds.
Changes in the ROC Statute adopted at the Archbishops' Council in 2000 that stripped parishes of the right to dispose of property were aimed at putting an end to the absolute rule of the priests. At the same time, these changes effectively gave property rights to the bishops above them. Furthermore, fully conforming to the spirit of the age in which state property was privatized by a small group of people through unethical means, the most important decisions concerning property were made with blatant legal violations. Decisions of the Archbishops' Council regarding changes in the Statute legally had to be approved by the superior body (the Local Council), but these very changes in fact abolished the Local Council. And the state which, through the Ministry of Justice, was obliged to respond to such violations, pretended not to notice anything.
This trend was most vividly manifested in the cases of patriarchal representation churches. The "representation church" in the Russian Orthodox Church is a nonterritorial representative mission or office. Most often it is a Church that is situated in a city but which is a representative mission of a large but peripheral monastery. Revenue from such churches goes to support the monastery, and...
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