From a Russian root": ways of American Orthodoxy

The article contains a historical survey of the development of the Russian Orthodox mission in America from its Alaskan period to our days. This process is being analyzed on both conceptual and institutional levels: the evolution of ideas about the nature and purpose of this mission and their reflection in the Russian Orthodox Church activities. It is demonstrated that already by the end of Alaskan period the mission leaders (first of all bishop St. Innokenty) began to realize that it was necessary for the Russian Orthodox Church to take root in the indigenous American soil, and mapped out the main directions of this adaptation. The actual transformation of a diaspora church into a native American one took place in the late 19th - early 20th centuries when the Russian Church in America became truly multinational and multiethnic while preserving its canonical unity and subordination to the Mother-Church in Moscow. This model of national diversity within a single Orthodox Church was articulated by Archbishop Tikhon, who was first to advocate a greater autonomy for the North-American diocese up to granting it an autocephaly status. It was anticipated that the Russian-supported missionary diocese would gradually evolve into a self-supported American Orthodox church which would be united while culturally and linguistically pluralistic. But the Revolution of 1917 and subsequent upheavals in Russia interrupted this organic development and brought the Russian Orthodox Church face to face with the problem of self-preservation in the new inhospitable environment. The decline of the North-American diocese, now left alone, coupled with the surge of nationalistic feelings after World War I led to the breakup of American Orthodoxy into separate ethnic jurisdictions. This split was accompanied by a political / ideological schism within the Russian Orthodox Church itself, which by the mid-1930s was divided into three competing jurisdictions -that of the Moscow Patriarchate, the North American Metropolia that distanced itself from the Soviet regime and the strongly anti-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). The article then traces the main turning points in their relations in the second half of the 20th - early 21st centuries: the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America (OCA, 1970), establishment of canonical unity between the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR (2007), and the resumption of eucharistic communion between OCA and ROCOR. The author's final conclusion is that both branches of Russian Orthodoxy in America, each making its own contribution to the Orthodox tradition, have moved toward each other while achieving liturgical and eucharistic unity with the Mother-Church.

Keywords

Authors

References