The Schism in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Part 3: Under The Second Union of Democratic Forces Government, 1997-2001

Abstract

The schism in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church which started in 1992 had still not been resolved at the millennium. The first Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) government was dominated by the urbanised, secularised, technologically wellqualified intelligentsia and middle class who were responsible for the overthrow of Todor Zhivkov's government in 1989. They were in a hurry to dismantle the last vestiges of the system which they regarded as an anachronism incompatible with Bulgaria's progress towards freedom, pluralism and democracy, and were mainly atheist or agnostic in practice, even if they claimed to profess their nation's traditional Orthodox faith. Decades of unavoidable alienation from any sort of normal church life left them deficient in their understanding of basic theology and of how this faith worked, unable to distinguish between what was acceptable to most committed believers and what infringed its time-hallowed canons. Though in 1992 85 per cent of Bulgarians claimed to be Orthodox, a mere 10 per cent admitted to deep religious convictions and regular religious observance, and this figure included the much more committed Muslim minority. Partly as a result of pressure from a mix of people, some genuine church activists who despaired of what they regarded as a deeply compromised, corrupt and procrastinating church leadership and others who had their own agendas and religiopolitical ambitions, cloaked under reformist credentials, the government's Board for Religious Affairs under Metodi Spasov interfered disastrously in church affairs. It declared Patriarch Maksim's election under communism invalid and the Holy Synod illegitimate and replaced it with a Provisional Synod headed by one of Maksim's former colleagues, Metropolitan Pimen of Nevrokop. In reply the government of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP, the recycled Communist Party) which succeeded the UDF government from late 1992 until 4 February 1997 endorsed Maksim and the Holy Synod. By then the original impetus for Orthodox renewal had long been dissipated by the schism (raskol) and other churches, local Catholic and Protestant as well as a plethora of unfamiliar churches, cults and sects from abroad, had made advances, usually at the expense of the Orthodox. The Holy Synod had still not convened the Tsurkovno-naroden Subor