Plight of Russians who are Catholic

Sacred Mysteries: Russians who sought reunion with Rome felt the pinch



Vladimir Soloviev understood the harm of the subordination of the Church to the state Photo: Culture Club/Getty Images

By Christopher Howse
7:00AM BST 14 Jun 2014

Vladimir Putin hardly seems a pattern of holiness, but he has aligned himself with the Orthodox Church as an institution. The Orthodox Church in Russia had a bad time of it under Soviet rule: mass executions, imprisonment in the Gulag, destruction of churches – a brutal history. Yet when the state has been friendly to the Church, the dangers have been different. Under the thumb of Caesar, or a tsar, the function of the Church is distorted.

Someone who felt the harm of that Erastianism, the subordination of the Church to the state, was Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900). Realising that the universal Church must be unified, he went as far as saying that, just as the Christianity that came to Kievan Rus in 988 was in full communion with the see of Peter in Rome, so Russians could continue to be Orthodox while restoring their own communion with the Bishop of Rome. He himself was received into such communion in 1896, by Fr Nicholas Tolstoy.

Fr Tolstoy had, three years earlier, sought and found communion with Rome. In Canon Law, I think he then came under the Melkite clergy, who follow a Byzantine liturgy and have historically lived in the Middle East. Tolstoy persevered in his ideal of a Byzantine rite Catholic Church in Russia, and was shot in 1938 after the NKVD secret police arrested him.

The bishops, priests and people who came after Soloviev and Tolstoy can best be called Russian Byzantine Catholics, or Russian Catholics for short. They still exist, against tremendous odds. They were encouraged by Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius X, who in 1909 famously (to them) insisted that they should follow the traditional Russian liturgy: “No more, no less, no other”. It has been said that, in the Eastern rites, doctrine is conveyed in liturgy, though I think this is seen more widely, too.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10899178/Plight-of-Russians-who-are-Catholic.html