Materials setting forth in detail the position of the Russian Orthodox Church on proselytism and Orthodox-Catholic relations sent to the Catholic side

MATERIALS SETTING FORTH IN DETAIL THE POSITION OF THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH ON PROSELYTISM AND ORTHODOX-CATHOLIC RELATIONS SENT TO THE CATHOLIC SIDE

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, sent to Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, a letter stating that, in view of the repeated statements made by official representatives of the Roman Catholic Church that the Russian Orthodox Church allegedly has no concrete evidence on the proselytic activity of the Catholics in Russia, the Catholic side is presented with information concerning this issue.

Along with a commentary on the problem of proselytism, this information contains concrete examples of that activity of the Catholic structures in Russia which darken relations between the two Churches. The authenticity of the examples cited in the document is confirmed by that fact that they all have been either taken from Russian Catholic sources or reported by diocesan bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church and verified.

The text of the background information on proselytism is placed as a separate report on the official site of the Russian Orthodox Church (www.russian-orthodox-church.org.ru).

In his letter, Metropolitan Kirill has expressed hope that this material will contribute to a realistic conception of the position taken by the Russian Orthodox Church and will ultimately help find a solution to the problems faced by the both Churches.

A copy of the letter, the text of which is given below, has also been sent to Archbishop Taddeusz Kondrusiewicz, the head of the Russian Catholics.

THE MOST REVEREND ARCHBISHOP TADDEUSZ KONDRUSIEWICZ

Your Eminence,

I would like to present to you the position of our Church on the questions mentioned in your letter of February 13, 2002, and partly in the statements by Cardinal W. Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

By the decision of Pope John Paul II of Rome, in Russia, without any preliminary consultations or negotiations with the Orthodox – in violation of the agreements reached by our two Churches to hold such consultations – in an atmosphere of secrecy, a decision was prepared and adopted to transform the apostolic administrations into dioceses and unite them in a unified structure, a Moscow-based “church province”. This action was presented to the public as something concerning minor changes in the organizational structure of the Roman Catholic Church in Russia, having exclusively internal significance and pertinent only to the Catholics themselves. At the same time, it was also noted that the Vatican’s decision did not contradict the international agreements and law of the Russian Federation. It was recommended that the Russian Church remember her dioceses in Western Europe and thus treat the Vatican’s decision with understanding.

Roman Catholic Church representatives, including Your Eminence, have expressed indignation at the “inadequate” reaction of the Russian Orthodox Church. They have even declared that the freedom of conscience is threatened in Russia when her citizens, exercising their rights and freedoms in full compliance with the Constitution and legislation of the country, express publicly their disagreement with the Vatican’s actions.

What has happened however raises the question of the ethics of dialogue and inter-Christian relations, the norms of which have been grossly violated by the Catholic side. We do not challenge the right of the Catholic Church to reform or change its own structures. But saying that what has happened in Russia is exclusively an internal affair of the Catholics appears to be profoundly wrong. If the so-called internal affairs directly affect others, infringing on their interests and insulting their dignity, they cease to be internal affairs.

The changes in the Catholic Church’s structure affect the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church directly, as they have not been made “in general” or “somewhere”, but specifically in Russia and directed to extend the Catholic presence in our country. To say to a partner in dialogue – and our Churches were such until recently – “what I do in your home should not concern you” means to profane the dialogue itself and to refuse in fact to settle matters of mutual concern on the bases of mutual information and discussion. I will repeat that the decision to establish Catholic dioceses in Russia was prepared in secret, without any preliminary discussions with the sister Church.

I would like to remind you that we met twice, sharing two Christmas dinners in the end of December 2001 at your place and in January 2002 at my place. Nevertheless, you did not deem it necessary to use our personal meetings to discuss the planned decision.

On January 25, 2002, members of the Russian Orthodox delegation to the meeting in Assisi, Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokolamsk and Bishop Hilarion of Kerch, were received by Pope John Paul II. Among other things, they discussed the unsatisfactory state of relations between our two Churches, but again no word was said by the Catholic side about the planned actions to be taken in the territory of Russia.

I would like to refute your statement that in the last three years there have been no official visits of representatives of the Vatican to Russia. The latest meeting between official delegations of our Churches took place on June 13, 2000. The Vatican delegation was led by Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of the then president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Representatives of the Holy See were received by Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia and later there were official negotiations at the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations entrusted to my care.

Thus, serious problems in relations between the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches exist not because of the absence of dialogue between us. Nor because “we meet seldom in general”, as you said in your interview to Izvestia on March 25, 2002.

The principal problem of dialogue between the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches lies in the fact that all good intentions expressed by the Catholic side at various official meetings and negotiations have not been substantiated by concrete actions. The Catholic side stands up for dialogue with our Church in its public statements, but, unfortunately, acts in Russia in such a way as if no dialogue had ever existed. For us this position means an actual refusal of the Catholic Church to use dialogue as a means of settling concrete problems. In this connection, there was no point in my meeting with Cardinal W. Kasper in the end of February, that is, several weeks after the Rome decision to establish Catholic dioceses in Russia.

This attitude of the Catholic side to dialogue really ruins this dialogue and, with it, cooperation between our Churches and pushes them back to the level that existed before Vatican II. In Russia, this negative development calls into question the work of the Christian Interconfessional Consultative Committee (CICC).

The newly-formed Catholic dioceses in Russia are united in a “church province”. According the RCC canon law, a church province is formed “to promote joint pastoral work of various neighboring dioceses in conformity with personal and local circumstances and to favor due relations between diocesan bishops” (Canon 431, Par. 1). This is quite understandable in case of countries with a large Catholic population and, accordingly, large number of dioceses, like in France, Poland, Italy, USA. But in Russia where the number of Catholic parishes is fewer than it is in an average European diocese, the establishment of as many as four dioceses united in a whole province provokes natural bewilderment. This bewilderment is dispelled when one looks at the situation from the missionary point of view and assumes that this new structure has been created “with a room for growth” in mind, in hope for a considerable increase in the number of Catholics, that is, in hope for the good fruit of missionary work. But we consider the Catholic mission in Russia to be unambiguously proselytism, for it is carried out not among some savage tribes who have never heard of Christ, but in a country with a millenium-old Christian culture and a major Orthodox Church.

An attempt to go deep into the historical aspect of the present problem will hardly draw our Churches’ positions closer together, but we have to resort to it for a final clarification of this issue.

Concerning your assumption about the antiquity of the Catholic presence in Russia, it is necessary to note the following. The Catholic diocesan structures were really established in the 20s and the 50s of the 19^th century in Russia, but it was done for missionary purposes. Catholic bishops themselves still stayed in Poland at that time. An evidence to not at all good intentions that the Catholics had for the Orthodox was the fact that Pope Gregory XI, in his 1375 Bull on establishing a Lvov-based Latin metropolitanate, ordered that Orthodox bishops be removed from its territory.

One cannot agree with you that the official center of the Mogilev metropolitanate, which existed from the 18^th to the early 20^th century, was St. Petersburg. It was precisely Mogilev, while St. Petersburg was only a place for an unofficial residence of the Catholic metropolitan. He resided there with the permission of the authorities. But under Emperor Paul I, for instance, this permission was refused.

Anyway, before the 1917 Revolution, there were only two Catholic dioceses in what it is the Russian Federation today, with official centers outside that territory, namely the dioceses of Mogilev and Tiraspol, whereas now, when the Catholics are incomparably fewer in Russia, there are four dioceses (!).

To prove your assumption that branched Catholic structures existed in Russia before, you mention the Vladivostok diocese of the Catholic Church, which was founded in 1923. I will remind you, however, that it operated in the territory of a temporary state entity, the so-call Far-East Republic, which was actually outside the limits of what was the Russian Federation at that time. The establishment of that diocese, just as the work of the Pro Oriente Commission set up under the Congregation for Eastern Churches in 1925 and led by Jesuit Michel d’Herbigny, is a vivid example of how the Vatican in its “Eastern policy” used both the tragedy of civil war (in the Far East) to build up the Catholic presence in Russia and flirted with the Bolshevicks (d’Herbigni) who cracked down on the Russian Church.

Your citing the present Kaliningrad Region as one of the historical centers of Catholicism, in my opinion, is wrong. Before World War II, this territory belonged to Prussia, a part of Germany where Lutheranism was the dominant confession.

References to the Russian Orthodox dioceses existing abroad do not appear right either. We have not divided any country into dioceses, as the Catholics have done to Russia. For instance, the Bishop of Korsun exercises jurisdiction over Russian Orthodox parishes in several countries – France, Italy and Spain. The Metropolitan of Vilnius and Lithuania takes care of the flock of the Russian Orthodox Church in Lithuania, but does not carry out mission to the Luthuanian people, nor does he create any parallel Local Church with a branched structure. The same applies to the Archbishop of Brussels and Belgium. The example of the Archbishop of Berlin and Germany you cited is not quite correct, because in Germany there is no traditional predominance of a particular confession, while Berlin has never been regarded as one of the historical centers of the Roman Church.

The titles of Orthodox bishops in Great Britain and France, namely Bishops of Surozh, Korsum, Sergievo, Kerch, have been designed exactly to avoid doubling the title of local non-Orthodox bishops.

Besides, the parishes and dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church in other countries have been created to take care of the Russian-speaking diaspora, not for missionary work with local population, as is officially declared by Roman Catholic representatives in case of establishing Catholic structures in Russia. An evidence to it is the article by Cardinal Walter Kasper published in Italian Civilta cattolica on March 16, 2002, in which he consistently advocates the right of the Catholic Church to mission in Russia.

In confirmation of what I have stated and in reply to your repeated statements that the Russian Orthodox Church allegedly had no concrete facts about the Catholic proselytism, I send you a copy of the background information on this issue. This document gives facts concerning the activity of Catholic church structures, clergy and monastics, which we unequivocally qualify as proselytism towards the traditionally Orthodox population. It is this problem that presents one of the most serious obstacles on the way of developing Orthodox-Catholic dialogue.

I have consciously delayed my reply to your letter so that we all had an opportunity to reflect seriously on the consequences of what has happened and in order to set forth the position of our Church without emotional polemics, which accompanied the initial reaction to the developments in press reports.

Nevertheless, since this letter is a reply to the statements you made both in a letter to me and in public, I believe it possible to make this text public.

Praying for an improvement in relations between our two Churches, I regret that the developments today only move this prospect away.

Respectfully,

Kirill

Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad

Chairman Department for External Church Relations

Moscow Patriarchate