Russian Orthodox Church

MOSCOW--The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has repeated his fierce opposition to a visit to Russia by Pope John Paul, citing Roman Catholic activity in the region. He said he won't meet the pope if the pontiff decides to visit. Patriarch Alexy II said "the Vatican continues to proselytize on the territories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, trying to convert people christened as Orthodox or rooted in Orthodoxy," ITAR-Tass reported last week.

Nearly 90 years after the Russian Revolution, should the Russian Orthodox Church be forgiven for collaborating with an atheist police state? Only 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, can the church reportedly led by former KGB agents be trusted? For hundreds of anti-communist parishes in exile, those questions have triggered a lot of soul searching.

In a dramatic sign of the Soviet leadership's increasingly relaxed attitude toward religion, Russian Orthodox priests Friday conducted a service in the Kremlin's Uspensky Cathedral, the first religious rites in the historic church since 1918, 71 years ago. Dozens of church leaders from around the world came to the service, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Moscow patriarchate and honored the canonization of two saints, Tikhon and Iov.

The Russian Orthodox Church on Thursday formally ended an 80-year global schism triggered when overseas exiles refused to accept the church's subservience to the Soviet state. In a ceremony at Christ the Savior Cathedral, which was rebuilt in the 1990s after it had been torn down decades earlier by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, leaders of the domestic and overseas Russian Orthodox hierarchies signed an act of "canonical communion."

Nearly 78 years after Bolsheviks executed Czar Nicholas II and his family, the relics of Russia's last royal family retain the power to haunt. A government commission appointed to identify and inter the remains of the Romanovs has become fearful of declaring the bones--unearthed in 1991 near the execution site in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg--those of the slain imperial family.

Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church announced Friday that they have defrocked the controversial head of their Ukrainian branch, accusing him of "slander and blackmail." The drastic decision by the synod, meeting at Moscow's 13th-Century Danilovsky Monastery, threatens to deepen a schism between the central church and its rebellious Ukrainian see.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II, the iconic religious leader who restored the church from a post-Soviet shell to an institution of privilege and power, died at his Moscow home Friday. He was 79.

The Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches will open talks next month on the status of the long-suppressed Ukrainian Catholic Church in an apparent bid by Moscow to establish relations with the Vatican. Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev said Saturday that the two delegations will meet next month at a monastery in Finland for their preliminary discussions of the religiously and politically sensitive issue.

The largest and most historic of the Kremlin's cathedrals was reconsecrated by the Russian Orthodox Church on Sunday in a joyous celebration that Patriarch Alexei II declared marked the revival of the country's spiritual and moral ideals.

More than a thousand years ago, a Slavic prince ordered his subjects into the Dnieper River that slices through the Ukrainian capital to baptize themselves in his newly adopted faith. Now the powerful Russian Orthodox Church that emerged is losing control over its Ukrainian birthplace. Having broken free of Russia's political grip in last year's Orange Revolution, many Ukrainians are turning their nationalistic impulses toward religion.