The activities of Priest Peter Nortamo on the reunification of the Finnish and Russian Orthodox Churches

Abstract

Russian Orthodox Diocese of Finland, taking advantage of the church and international policy, illegally transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1923 and its relations with the Russian Church were interrupted for two decades. At the end of the Great Patriotic War, a movement for the reunification of the two churches began, but there was no unity within the Finnish Church on this issue, and the efforts of the Moscow Patriarchate’s hierarchy led to limited results. The article reveals the history of the participation of Petter Nortamo, a Finnish pastor who converted to Orthodoxy and tried to speed up the process of the return of the Finnish Archdiocese to the Russian Orthodox Church, unknown to Russian scientists. One of the characteristic features of his activity was the active involvement in this process of political parties and associations of socialist orientation, as well as the press (in particular, the Democratic Union of the People of Finland). The article disputes the reading of this story by the Finnish historian Juha Riikonen, who sees this primarily as a political background. Nortamo’s active contacts with Metropolitan Grigory (Chukov) and Patriarch Alexy I, his ordination to holy orders in Leningrad indicate that the church component was decisive in his activities. However, Nortamo’s efforts were not enough to solve the problem of the relationship between the Finnish and Russian Orthodox Churches, and his death coincided with the end of such attempts. The Patriarchate of Constantinople played a significant role in freezing the process of church reunification. To this day, the figure of Nortamo remains unknown in Russian historical science.