The Ecumenical Contribution of the Russian Orthodox Church

Abstract

The Orthodox Church within the Soviet Union has so far made no direct contribution to the ecumenical work which has been done in the World Council of Churches since its constitution in 1948 and before that in the ecumenical movement which led up to its constitution. The political situation has so far prevented this—just as the autocephalous Orthodox Churches of the Balkans, which shared in the ecumenical work before the Second World War, have found it impossible to do so since they have been in the Communist sphere of influence. There is, to be sure, a negative contribution from the Moscow Patriarchate, namely the ‘Resolution on the question of “The Ecumenical Movement and the Orthodox Church”’, passed in July 1948 in connexion with the jubilee celebrations of the Russian Orthodox Church on the occasion of the fifth centenary of its independence, and in accordance with this the refusal on 1st August 1948 of the invitation from the general secretariat of the World Council of Churches to participate in the Conference of Churches in Amsterdam. In this connexion, however, it must be borne in mind that at that time and as a result of many years of isolation it was hardly possible for the Russian Orthodox Church to take an objective view of the World Council, inasmuch as the Council's understanding of itself before the Amsterdam Conference could in fact only be discerned imperfectly from written documents alone, and in particular the important Toronto declaration clarifying this understanding was not made until 1949.