RUSSIA: Russian Orthodox Church Abroad's Struggle for Church Property./TITLE> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="MicroVision Development / WebExpress"> </HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="#004080" TEXT="BLACK" LINK="#7F0000" VLINK="#7F7F7F" ALINK="#7F0000"> <P> <TABLE WIDTH="100%" CELLPADDING="4" CELLSPACING="0" BORDER="0"> <TR> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP> <P> <IMG SRC="buffer.gif" WIDTH="23" HEIGHT="1" VSPACE="0" HSPACE="0" BORDER="0" LOOP="0"></TD> <TD WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="WHITE" VALIGN=TOP> <P ALIGN=CENTER> <B><FONT FACE="Book Antiqua"><FONT SIZE="4"><FONT COLOR="#7F007F">RUSSIA: Russian Orthodox Church Abroad's Struggle for Church Property.</FONT></FONT></FONT></B></TD> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP> <P> <IMG SRC="buffer.gif" WIDTH="23" HEIGHT="1" VSPACE="0" HSPACE="0" BORDER="0" LOOP="0"></TD> </TR> <TR> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP></TD> <TD WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="WHITE" VALIGN=TOP> <P ALIGN=CENTER> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua"><FONT COLOR="#7F007F"><B>by</B></FONT></FONT><B><FONT FACE="Book Antiqua"><FONT COLOR="#7F007F"> Geraldine Fagan</FONT></FONT></B><FONT FACE="Book Antiqua"><FONT COLOR="#7F007F"><B>, Keston News Service, </B></FONT></FONT><B><FONT FACE="Book Antiqua"><FONT COLOR="#7F007F">17 April</FONT></FONT></B><FONT FACE="Book Antiqua"><FONT COLOR="#7F007F"><B> 2001</B></FONT></FONT></TD> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP></TD> </TR> <TR> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP></TD> <TD WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="WHITE" VALIGN=TOP> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">Of the ROCA’s approximately 100 parishes in Russia, Fr Sergi Kiselyov of the Moscow parish of the Holy Royal Martyrs told Keston on 28 February, ‘almost all do not have a church building.’ Those that do appear to be concentrated in the church’s only registered diocese of Ishim and Siberia, where, according to its bishop, Yeftikhi (Kurochkin), the situation is better than in the European part of Russia: ‘Eight parishes have church buildings.’</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">When registration became possible for the ROCA in the early 1990s, according to Fr Vladimir Tsukanov of the Parish of the Nativity of the Virgin in Kursk (350 miles south of Moscow), ‘the plenipotentiary [for religious affairs] said he would never allow us to exist legally.’ Once the parish nevertheless managed this, he told Keston on 30 January, ‘he said he would never allow us to get a church. There are a lot of closed church buildings in Kursk, we asked for any of them, but whenever we made an official request for one, we were told that it had been given to the Moscow Patriarchate.’ According to Fr Tsukanov, there are at least 15 church buildings in Kursk city belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate, while the ROCA’s two parishes of some 30 people each currently meet in private homes.</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">Speaking to Keston on 10 April, Aleksandr Shapavalov, who is currently in charge of religious affairs in Kursk region, at first maintained that the ROCA had never attempted to claim a church building. He then recalled that they had requested the city’s Upper Church of the Holy Trinity, which had been part of a convent, in around 1990, but that this was refused them: ‘I don’t remember the reason.’ The convent, he said, was now functioning and belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate. </FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">When Keston asked whether Kursk local authorities automatically regarded closed church buildings as the property of the Moscow Patriarchate, Shapavalov replied that the problem never arose in which ‘a ROCA community forms and says, “we are ROCA and we want a church”.’ He pointed out that there was no shortage of church buildings, since there were many ruined churches in the villages, ‘but no one tries to claim them, not even the Russian Orthodox Church.’</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">In Moscow, Fr Sergi Kiselyov told Keston that his approximately 50 parishioners currently meet in a hall in a private school building, where they have ‘all the attributes of a church’, including an iconostasis. As a result, he maintained, the ROCA goes largely unnoticed in the capital, ‘although if we had just one church building and could have regular services we would have very many parishioners.’ Since such details relate to the period before he became parish priest, Fr Kiselyov did not know which church buildings the parish had tried to claim, or when they had done so, but only that every attempt had been rejected: ‘The main reason cited was the Russian Orthodox Church’s disagreement with the ROCA.’ He was also under the impression that by law all Orthodox church buildings should be returned either to the Moscow Patriarchate or to the Old Believers.</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">Contacted by telephone on 12 April, a representative of Moscow’s Property Allocation Committee gruffly told Keston that only written requests for information would be considered. In an interview with Keston in Moscow on 4 April, Bishop Yeftikhi commented that there was much discord within the Moscow parish, and that if this were not the case, ‘we would have an ancient church building here in no time.’</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">In St Petersburg, the parishes of St John the Theologian and the New Martyr Elizabeth currently meet in an art studio and a private flat, Fr Valentin Solomakha told Keston on 10 March. ‘It is just not possible to get a church in St Petersburg,’ he commented. ‘There is an understanding between the state and the [Russian Orthodox] church authorities.’ Although there were many ruined churches in the city, he explained, every attempt to claim one – the details of which he was not aware for the same reason as Fr Kiselyov - had been rejected by the authorities: ‘They were quite strict about it, and everyone lost hope.’ </FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">However, claimed Fr Solomakha, since the ROCA’s approximately 120 parishioners in the city meet in spacious elderly buildings, there is sufficient room for them. He added that the ROCA had once had ‘a real church building’ attached to a hospital in the city, but its priest, Fr Aleksandr Zarkov, had been murdered three years ago, after which the church passed to a group which has now left the New York synod. ‘We joke that if you do have a church building, it’s dangerous,’ quipped Fr Solomakha. ‘That’s our black Russian humour.’</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">On 11 April, Svetlana Andreichenko of St Petersburg Property Allocation Committee told Keston that legally buildings of religious significance must be returned to those within their same confession. Although all church buildings in St Petersburg diocese belong to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) according to its charter, she said, the ROC and the ROCA would definitely be given ‘equal consideration’ if they were both to claim a church building. </FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">Due to the massive number of claims dealt with by her department, Andreichenko could not recall details of the hospital church. However, she did volunteer the information that, approximately ten years ago, an ROCA parish was given a church building at 100 Moskovsky Prospekt, but it subsequently turned out that the parish had been incorrectly registered, ‘so the registration department cancelled their registration and we had to break our agreement with them because they didn’t have legal personality status.’ </FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">Curiously, this closely resembles an incident at the other end of the Russian Federation related to Keston by Fr Anatoly Surzhik of the ROCA’s St Eusebius parish in Vladivostok on 14 March. When the parish changed jurisdiction in the mid-1990s, he told Keston, ‘the authorities took away our registration so that the Moscow Patriarchate could take the church.’ According to Fr Surzhik, no law was invoked or formal reason given: ‘When I asked the department of justice why, I was told, “We don’t consider it necessary to inform you why”.’ The parish of 176 parishioners currently rents a former kindergarten, he told Keston, and was re-registered in 1999 as part of Ishim diocese.</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">The 1997 law on religion allows only those centralised religious organisations ‘which have been active on the territory of the Russian Federation on a legal basis for no fewer than 50 years as of the moment when the said religious organisation files its application for state registration’ (Article 8, Part 5) to use the words ‘Russia’ (‘Rossiya’) or ‘Russian’ (‘Rossiisky’) in their title. This is in striking contrast to legal entities in other walks of life – the confectionary giant Nestlé, for example, sells its chocolate bars in Russia operating under the name ‘Rossiya’. Since the pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church was known as the ‘Orthodox Russian Church’ (‘Pravoslavnaya Rossiiskaya Tserkov’), Keston wondered whether this provision of the law might have affected attempts by the ROCA to claim inheritance to the pre-revolutionary church – and its property.</FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">While Fr Sergi Kiselyov thought that the name ‘Pravoslavnaya Rossiiskaya Tserkov’ must have had some legal basis before it was changed under Stalin, he pointed out that there was no legal precedent of the ROCA claiming inheritance rights in Russia, unlike in the USA, where ‘independent specialists – they weren’t even Orthodox’ had ruled that the ROCA was the historical heir to Russian Orthodox church property in a case in Los Angeles. While Fr Vladimir Tsukanov had no view on the effects of the 50-year rule, he did think that the Moscow Patriarchate’s overriding concern with respect to the ROCA was ‘to persuade the international community that they [the Moscow Patriarchate] are the legal church in order to claim its entire heritage.’ </FONT></P> <P ALIGN=JUSTIFY> <FONT FACE="Book Antiqua">Bishop Yeftikhi agreed with Fr Tsukanov that the Moscow Patriarchate could not tolerate the ROCA’s presence in Russia despite its insignificant numbers, since it ‘is of the same confession, only without the deficencies brought by Soviet power’ (both Fr Tsukanov and Fr Kiselyov made particular mention of ecumenism and the inadequacy of canonising the royal family as merely passion-bearers). However, Bishop Yeftikhi did not think that the 1997 law’s 50-year-rule was aimed at the ROCA. Although he emphasised that he was ‘100 per cent certain’ that the Holy Synod created in 1927 constituted a ‘usurpation of church power by Soviet power’, Bishop Yeftikhi maintained that the ROCA had so far made a conscious decision not to claim inheritance rights. ‘You can’t go too fast,’ he explained to Keston, ‘ and our church organisation is still very weak.’ (END)</FONT></TD> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP></TD> </TR> <TR> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP></TD> <TD WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="#DDDDDD" VALIGN=TOP> <P ALIGN=CENTER> </TD> <TD WIDTH="23" VALIGN=TOP></TD> </TR> </TABLE></P> <P>  </P> <P>  </BODY> </HTML>