Monday, 1 September 1997
PATRIARCHATE DELAYS ANNOUNCING POSITION ON COMPROMISE  
  
by Lawrence A. Uzzell, Keston News Service  
  
A spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate told the Keston News
Service on 29 August that the Patriarchate will not reveal until
1 September, the day scheduled for a key meeting of the Yeltsin
administration's Council for Cooperation with Religious
Associations, whether it supports compromise legislation on
church-state relations circulated by the administration last
week.  Fr VSEVOLOD CHAPLIN of the Patriarchate's Department for
External Church Relations said that the Patriarchate wants to
preserve the basic points of the legislation passed by the
Russian parliament and vetoed by President Yeltsin in July.  
  
To Keston's suggestion that the Patriarchate's delay in
announcing its position will probably make it too late to reach
a final compromise with other religious confessions by Yeltsin's
1 September deadline, Fr Vsevolod replied that the Patriarchate
has become reluctant to endorse specific legislative texts as a
result of its experience during the last month of Kremlin-led
negotiations.  After the Patriarchate's representatives have
agreed to specific amendments, he said, too often additional
changes have been made retroactively without the Patriarchate's
knowledge or consent.  (Keston has heard the same complaint from
Protestant and Catholic participants in the negotiations.)  
  
Fr Vsevolod said that he personally believed the proposed
compromise to be basically reasonable on two points: the
religious rights of non-citizens, and the retention of the July
bill's 15-year probationary period for new religious bodies.  (At
a 28 August session of a presidential human-rights panel, Fr
Chaplin had said that new religious organisations should be
'fully subject to state taxes, just like the Moscow branch of
Pepsi-Cola'.)  He told Keston that the latest version of the
preamble is also acceptable.  
  
Fr Vsevolod defended the legislation's controversial provision
barring churches from attracting children without the consent of
both their parents.  Since Soviet law required that the passports
of both parents had to be presented when a child was baptised,
he said, critics are wrong when they claim that this requirement
would be even more restrictive than the Soviet state's.  
  
With regard to the Old Believers, who like the major Protestant
groups oppose the late-August compromise text, Fr Vsevolod told
Keston that it would be difficult to find a mutually acceptable
formula for the preamble.  Since the Old Believers do not
consider the Patriarchate to be truly 'Orthodox', a phrase such
as 'Orthodoxy, including the Old Belief' would not work, he said. 
On the issue of property disputes between the two confessions,
he said that a great deal depends on when, and from whom, the
Soviet state confiscated a church bell or other item.  Would you
not agree, asked Keston, that if an item was manufactured by the
Old Believers themselves after the 17th-century schism, and
confiscated from them by the Communists, it should be regarded
as their property today? In principle, yes, replied Fr Vsevolod. 

  
Keston asked why the Moscow Patriarchate does not make its formal
policy consistent with its practice: since it already is seeking
and getting de facto status as Russia's state church, should it
not seek to amend the Russian constitution so as to legitimise
this status?  Fr Vsevolod denied that the Patriarchate is in fact
a state church, and offered several reasons why it should not
seek such status.  For example, he said, half the Patriarchate's
parishes are located outside the boundaries of the Russian
Federation, and it would complicate relations with those parishes
if the Patriarchate were part of the Federation's state
structure.  
  
Keston asked Fr Vsevolod to comment on a position taken by
METROPOLITAN KIRILL OF SMOLENSK during the legislative
negotiations on the sharply contested issue of the state's power
to define a Russian religious body's territorial sphere of
activities.  When pressed by Catholic and Protestant negotiators
to drop his support of this provision, according to a source who
was present, Metropolitan Kirill cited the example of a priest
from one Orthodox diocese who travels to another Orthodox diocese
within Russia and begins preaching or other religious activities
there without the local bishop's knowledge or consent.  A
Catholic representative rejoined that such problems should be
matters of internal church discipline rather than state
regulation, but Kirill held to his position.  Fr Vsevolod agreed
with the metropolitan, insisting that the state can help maintain
'order' in the church.  He compared the situation to that of a
secular newspaper which has state registration in one province,
but which he said would not have the right to publish in another.
(END)