Russian Orthodox Church Beliefs

1. What the Russian Orthodox Church Is

The Russian Orthodox Church is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church governed by the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus together with a Holy Synod, and it is the largest single Church in the Orthodox communion by population. Its formal name is the Russian Orthodox Church, and it is also called the Moscow Patriarchate, the name used when the institution is meant rather than the people. It holds the same faith as every other Eastern Orthodox Church, and its distinctive marks are Church Slavonic worship, the old Julian calendar, an unusually strong monastic and eldership tradition, and a canonical territory that reaches far beyond the Russian Federation.

The Church traces itself to the baptism of Kyivan Rus in 988 under Prince Vladimir, and it was raised to the rank of patriarchate in 1589. Its territory as Moscow defines it takes in Russia, Belarus, Moldova, several central Asian states and, in its own reckoning, Ukraine, along with dioceses and parishes across western Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. The Patriarch since 2009 has been Kirill, formerly Metropolitan of Smolensk and for two decades the head of the Church's Department for External Church Relations.

How Many Russian Orthodox Christians There Are

Counting is genuinely hard here, because in Russia religious identity and religious practice separate more widely than in most countries. The Pew Research Center estimated roughly 101 million Orthodox Christians in Russia in its 2017 study of global Orthodoxy, the largest Orthodox population anywhere. The same study reported that a small minority of Russian Orthodox identifiers attend services weekly, so a figure in the tens of millions describes an inherited identity for a large part of that number rather than a churchgoing habit. Any single number you see quoted for this Church should be read with that gap in mind.

Population and attendance figures above are from the Pew Research Center report Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century (2017). The Moscow Patriarchate publishes its own counts of dioceses, parishes and clergy; those are institutional counts and are not comparable with survey estimates of adherents.

What It Is Not

Three confusions are worth clearing at once. The Russian Orthodox Church is one Church within Eastern Orthodoxy and is not the whole of it, a point covered from the other direction in our guide to Eastern Orthodox Church beliefs. It is not part of the Oriental Orthodox communion, the Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Syriac and Malankara Churches, which separated over the Christological language of Chalcedon in 451 and are treated in our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches. And it is not an Eastern Catholic Church: the twenty-three self-governing Churches that keep Eastern rites while in full communion with Rome are a different body altogether, described in our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches.

2. What Russian Orthodox Christians Believe

Russian Orthodox belief is Eastern Orthodox belief, held without variation from the other autocephalous Churches, because doctrine in Orthodoxy belongs to the whole communion and no local Church defines on its own. A Russian Orthodox Christian confesses the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as the councils left it, one God in three persons, the Son consubstantial with the Father, the Incarnation, the Virgin Mary as Theotokos, the bodily resurrection and the life of the world to come. There is no Russian doctrine that a Greek or Serbian Orthodox Christian would not recognise as his own.

The Seven Councils and the Rule of Faith

Moscow recognises seven ecumenical councils as the standard of the faith: Nicaea I in 325, Constantinople I in 381, Ephesus in 431, Chalcedon in 451, Constantinople II in 553, Constantinople III in 680 to 681, and Nicaea II in 787. Later Western councils, including Trent and the two Vatican councils, are regarded as local Latin assemblies with no authority in the East. Behind that judgment sits the Orthodox principle of reception: a council is ecumenical when the whole body of the Church has received it, so authority is confirmed from below as well as declared from above.

The Sacraments, Called Mysteries

Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate the same seven sacraments Catholics do, usually called mysteries, and administer several of them differently. Baptism is by triple immersion, followed immediately by chrismation, the Eastern form of confirmation, so infants are chrismated and receive Holy Communion from the day of their baptism. Confession in Russian practice is often made standing at an analogion beside the priest, before the Cross and Gospel book, and is normally expected before communion. Parish priests may be married if they married before ordination, and bishops are drawn from monastics. Divorce and remarriage are permitted in limited cases under oikonomia, the pastoral discretion the Eastern canons allow, with a penitential second rite.

Theosis, Ancestral Sin and the Last Things

Salvation is described as theosis, real participation in the life of God, drawn from the promise in 2 Peter 1:4 that believers become partakers of the divine nature. Russian theology speaks of ancestral sin: from Adam humanity inherits mortality and a will bent toward sin, without inheriting personal guilt. Prayer for the departed is constant, at every Divine Liturgy and at the memorial services called panikhidas, and Russian Orthodoxy declines the Latin framework of purifying fire and satisfaction for temporal punishment while praying for the same souls. That difference is set out in our guide to purgatory and the Eastern objection to it.

Sobornost and the Russian Theological Voice

Russian theology contributed one term to the wider Orthodox vocabulary that is worth knowing. Sobornost, given currency by the nineteenth-century lay writer Aleksey Khomyakov, names the unity of the Church as a free organic communion in love, held together by the Holy Spirit rather than by external authority. Khomyakov used it polemically, arguing that Rome had unity without freedom and the Reformation freedom without unity, and later Russian writers built on it. The twentieth-century emigration produced the theologians most read in the West: Georges Florovsky, who called for a return to the Fathers, Vladimir Lossky, who wrote the standard modern account of Orthodox mystical theology, and Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff in America. Sergius Bulgakov's sophiology, by contrast, was censured by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1935, which is a useful reminder that Russian theology argues with itself.

Moscow as the Third Rome

The phrase "Third Rome" turns up constantly in writing about Russian Orthodoxy, and it deserves an accurate description. It comes from letters written around 1510 by the monk Filofei of Pskov to the Grand Prince, arguing that Rome had fallen through heresy and Constantinople through the union of Florence and the conquest of 1453, and that Moscow now stood as the third and last Rome. Filofei's letters were the opinion of one monk, they were never conciliar teaching, and no Russian synod has defined them. The phrase acquired most of its political weight in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when writers outside the hierarchy pressed it into service. Treat it as an important idea in Russian cultural history rather than as an article of Russian Orthodox faith.

3. Worship: Slavonic, Icons, Fasting, the Jesus Prayer

Russian Orthodox worship centres on the Divine Liturgy, usually the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, with the longer Liturgy of St Basil the Great on ten days of the year and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts on Lenten weekdays. The service is sung throughout in unaccompanied harmony, the congregation stands, and the liturgy is understood as the earthly assembly joining worship already going on in heaven. A visitor's first impressions, the length, the incense, the standing, the repetition, all follow from that understanding.

Church Slavonic

The liturgical language is Church Slavonic, the literary language developed from the ninth-century mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs and refined over centuries of use. It is not modern Russian, and Russian speakers understand parts of it and not all of it. Proposals to translate the services into modern Russian have surfaced repeatedly since the early twentieth century and have met strong resistance, on the argument that Slavonic carries a precision and a register that ordinary speech would lose. Many parishes read the Epistle and Gospel in Russian and sing the rest in Slavonic, and diaspora parishes commonly use English, French, German or Japanese.

Icons and the Russian School

Icons are integral to Russian worship because of a doctrinal decision, settled at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 after the iconoclast crisis. The council taught that images of Christ and the saints may be venerated with honour while adoration belongs to God alone, and it grounded the argument in the Incarnation: the invisible God has taken a visible human face, so he can be depicted. The Catholic Church holds the same council and the same distinction, treating sacred images in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1159 to 1162. Russia developed the tradition into a school of its own, from the Novgorod and Moscow workshops to Theophanes the Greek, Andrei Rublev, who painted the icon of the Trinity, and Dionisius. The icon screen, the iconostasis, developed in Russia into the tall multi-tiered form seen in Russian churches today.

The Old Calendar

The Russian Orthodox Church keeps the old Julian calendar for fixed feasts, which is why Russian Orthodox Christmas falls on 7 January in civil reckoning rather than 25 December. Serbia, Georgia, Jerusalem and the monasteries of Mount Athos keep the same reckoning, while most other Orthodox Churches moved to the revised Julian calendar for fixed feasts in the twentieth century. Pascha, the Orthodox Easter, is calculated by the Julian reckoning across almost the whole Orthodox world, which is why it usually falls after the Western date.

Fasting

Russian fasting discipline is stricter and far more frequent than the modern Latin one. There are four fasting seasons, Great Lent, the Apostles' Fast, the Dormition Fast and the Nativity Fast, along with most Wednesdays and Fridays through the year, and the traditional rule abstains from meat, dairy, eggs, fish, oil and wine on the stricter days. Confessors adjust the rule for the sick, the young, the pregnant and the travelling, and the point of it is stated plainly in Russian spiritual writing: the body is trained along with the soul, and fasting without mercy toward the poor is worth nothing.

The Jesus Prayer and the Elders

The Russian spiritual tradition is dominated by the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner", repeated until it settles into the heart. The practice came north through the hesychast tradition of Mount Athos, and its Slavonic vehicle was the Dobrotolubiye, the anthology Paisius Velichkovsky translated in the late eighteenth century from the Greek Philokalia. Theophan the Recluse produced the fuller Russian version in the nineteenth century, and the anonymous nineteenth-century book known in English as The Way of a Pilgrim carried the practice to ordinary readers. Around it grew the institution of the starets, the spiritual elder: Sergius of Radonezh in the fourteenth century, Nil Sorsky in the fifteenth, Seraphim of Sarov in the nineteenth, and the elders of Optina monastery, whom Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy all went to see. Catholics may pray the Jesus Prayer freely, and Pope John Paul II commended the Eastern contemplative tradition to the whole Church in his 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen. Our prayer collection carries prayers with the same shape for anyone who wants to start today.

4. How the Moscow Patriarchate Governs Itself

The Russian Orthodox Church governs itself through a patriarch, a permanent Holy Synod, a periodic Bishops' Council and, at longer intervals, a Local Council that includes clergy and laity. Autocephaly is the underlying principle: the Church elects its own primate and answers to no bishop outside itself, which is what distinguishes Orthodox polity from the Catholic one. There is no Orthodox curia with authority over Moscow, and there is no appeal from Moscow to Constantinople that Moscow accepts.

The Four Organs

The Local Council, the Pomestny Sobor, is the fullest assembly, made up of bishops, clergy, monastics and lay delegates; it elected Patriarch Tikhon in 1917 and Patriarch Alexy II in 1990. The Bishops' Council, the Archiereysky Sobor, gathers the whole episcopate and is the ordinary highest authority in doctrine and canon law between local councils. The Holy Synod, a standing body of permanent and rotating members chaired by the patriarch, runs the Church day to day. The patriarch himself is first among the bishops of his own Church, presides over the synod, and is accountable to the councils; his title is Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus.

Departments and Structures

Below the synod sit synodal departments, of which the Department for External Church Relations is the one the outside world meets, since it handles relations with other Churches, with other religions and with foreign states. Patriarch Kirill chaired that department for twenty years before his election, which is why he was already a familiar figure in ecumenical circles by 2009. The Church also runs its own theological academies and seminaries, most prominently at Moscow and St Petersburg, and a publishing and monastic infrastructure rebuilt largely since 1988.

The Church Abroad

One division inside Russian Orthodoxy healed within living memory. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, formed among emigres after the revolution and broke administrative communion with Moscow in the Soviet period, on the ground that a Church supervised by an atheist state could not speak freely. Negotiations after the fall of the Soviet Union ended in the Act of Canonical Communion signed in Moscow on 17 May 2007, under which ROCOR became a self-governing part of the Moscow Patriarchate. Some ROCOR parishes rejected the act and remain outside it. There are also several small Russian Old Calendarist and catacomb groups with no communion with Moscow, and a Russian Greek Catholic Church, tiny in numbers, in communion with Rome.

5. From the Baptism of Rus to the Patriarchate

Russian Christianity begins with the baptism of Kyivan Rus in 988, when Prince Vladimir of Kyiv received baptism and had his people baptised in the Dnieper, after a period in which his grandmother Olga had already become Christian. The new Church was organised as a metropolitanate of Kyiv under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, and its Greek metropolitans were sent from there. Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians all trace their Christianity to that event, which is one reason the modern jurisdictional argument runs so hot.

Kyiv, Vladimir, Moscow

The Mongol invasion of the 1240s destroyed Kyiv as a centre, and the metropolitan see moved north, to Vladimir in 1299 and to Moscow in 1325 under Metropolitan Peter, while keeping the title of Kyiv for a long period afterwards. The rise of Moscow as a principality and the rise of its Church went together. Sergius of Radonezh, who founded the Trinity Lavra north of Moscow in the fourteenth century, is the pivotal figure of the period and is venerated as the patron of Russia.

1448 and 1589

Two dates make the Russian Church what it is. In 1448 a council of Russian bishops elected Metropolitan Jonah without reference to Constantinople, in reaction to the union with Rome agreed at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439, which the Russian Church rejected outright. That act was the beginning of Russian autocephaly in practice. In 1589 the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II, then travelling in Russia, consecrated Metropolitan Job as the first Patriarch of Moscow, and the other Eastern patriarchs confirmed the new patriarchate shortly afterwards, placing it fifth in the order of honour after Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. Moscow has held fifth place ever since.

Florence, and Why It Failed in Russia

The Council of Ferrara-Florence deserves a paragraph here because it shaped the Russian attitude to Rome for centuries. The council produced an agreement in 1439 on the Filioque, purgatory, the Eucharist and papal primacy, signed by nearly all the Greek delegates. Metropolitan Isidore of Kyiv signed it, returned to Moscow proclaiming the union, and was arrested; he left Russia and later became a cardinal. Russia read the union as a betrayal made under political pressure from a Byzantium seeking military help, and when Constantinople fell in 1453 that reading looked confirmed to Russian eyes. Our guide to the Great Schism of 1054 covers the wider sequence of failed reunions.

The Synodal Period

In 1721 Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate. His Spiritual Regulation replaced it with a Most Holy Governing Synod, a collegiate body under a lay official called the Ober-Procurator who represented the emperor, and the Church was administered as a department of state for nearly two hundred years. Russian churchmen of the period, and Russian historians since, have described the arrangement as a captivity. The synodal period nonetheless produced Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina elders, Philaret of Moscow, the Russian translation of the Bible and a vast missionary effort reaching Siberia, Alaska and Japan. The patriarchate was restored by the Local Council of 1917 to 1918, which elected Tikhon patriarch in November 1917, weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power.

6. The Old Believers and the Raskol

The Old Believers are Russian Christians who refused the liturgical reforms imposed by Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s and were anathematised for it by the Great Moscow Council of 1666 to 1667. The split is called the raskol, the schism, and it has never fully healed. Understanding it explains a great deal about how Russian Orthodoxy treats ritual.

What Nikon Changed

Nikon set out to correct Russian service books and usages against contemporary Greek practice, on the argument that Russian texts had drifted through centuries of copying. The changes look small on paper: making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two, spelling the name of Jesus as Iisus rather than Isus, singing alleluia three times rather than twice, processing counter-sunwise rather than sunwise, and numerous textual corrections. Their opponents, led by the Archpriest Avvakum, held that the received Russian rite was holy and that a Church which alters what it received from the Fathers cannot be trusted about anything else. Persecution followed the anathemas, Avvakum was burned in 1682, and communities fled to the forests, to Siberia and abroad. Some Old Believer groups kept priests obtained from the official Church and eventually acquired their own hierarchy; others, the priestless bezpopovtsy, concluded that valid priesthood had ceased and organised around lay readers.

The Anathemas Lifted

The Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1971 revoked the anathemas of 1667 against the old rites and those who use them, declaring the old rites equally honourable and salvific and the earlier condemnations to be as though they had never been. The Moscow Patriarchate now has parishes that use the old rite in communion with it, called Edinoverie parishes, an arrangement that dates from 1800. Most Old Believers remain outside the Patriarchate, chiefly in the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church centred at Rogozhskoye in Moscow and in the priestless communities.

7. The Soviet Century and the New Martyrs

The Russian Orthodox Church was subjected to sustained state persecution for most of the twentieth century, beginning within months of the 1917 revolution and continuing in waves until the late 1980s. Bishops, priests, monastics and laypeople were shot, imprisoned and sent to camps; monasteries and seminaries were closed; churches were demolished, including the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, dynamited in 1931. Nothing about the Church's present condition, its instincts or its politics can be understood without that century.

The Sequence

Patriarch Tikhon opposed the seizure of church valuables in 1922 and was arrested. The state promoted a rival body, the Renovationists, in an attempt to split the Church from within. In 1927 Metropolitan Sergius, the acting head of the Church, issued a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state, which secured a limited legal existence and divided the Church deeply, since many held that it conceded too much and the emigre hierarchy rejected it outright. The persecution intensified in the late 1930s. During the Second World War Stalin permitted a partial restoration, with a patriarch elected in 1943 and some churches reopened, and Khrushchev launched a fresh anti-religious campaign around 1959 to 1964 that closed thousands of parishes again. The turn came with the millennium of the baptism of Rus in 1988, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, after which parishes, monasteries and seminaries reopened in very large numbers.

The New Martyrs

The Jubilee Bishops' Council of 2000 canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, a collective glorification naming over a thousand individuals with provision for further names to be added as cases are documented. Patriarch Tikhon had been canonised in 1989. The 2000 council also glorified the last imperial family as passion-bearers, a specifically Slavic category for those who accept death in a Christian spirit without being killed explicitly for the faith, and the decision was debated inside the Church. Catholics have their own martyrs from the same regime and the same camps, among them Eastern Catholics of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which was forcibly suppressed and absorbed into the Moscow Patriarchate at the Lviv pseudo-council of 1946 and survived underground until 1989. That suppression is a live memory on the Catholic side of this relationship, and section 11 returns to it.

8. Russian Orthodox and Catholic Compared

Russian Orthodox and Catholic Christians hold the same creed, the same seven sacraments, apostolic succession, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, prayer to the saints, honour to the Mother of God and prayer for the dead. The differences are real and they are fewer than most people expect. The table below sets out where the two stand, with the doctrinal questions treated at length in sections 9 and 10.

The Russian column follows the Moscow Patriarchate's own published documents, including the 2000 Basis of the Social Concept and the 2013 synodal statement on primacy, together with standard Orthodox catechetical teaching. The Catholic column follows Pastor Aeternus (1870), Ineffabilis Deus (1854), Unitatis Redintegratio (1964) and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Practice varies between dioceses on both sides; ask locally rather than assuming.

What Is Shared, Stated Plainly

The list of agreements is longer than the list of differences, and Catholics arguing with Orthodox often forget it. Both Churches hold the Trinity as defined at Nicaea and Constantinople, the two natures of Christ as defined at Chalcedon, Mary as Theotokos and ever-virgin, seven sacraments, the sacrificial character of the Eucharist and the change of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, a male priesthood in apostolic succession, the veneration of icons and relics, the intercession of the saints, prayer for the dead, monasticism, fasting, and the resurrection of the body at the end. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 states the conclusion Rome draws: with the Orthodox Churches this communion is so profound that it lacks little to attain the fullness that would permit a common celebration of the Lord's Eucharist.

9. Primacy: Honour Without Jurisdiction

The Moscow Patriarchate teaches that primacy in the universal Church is a primacy of honour that carries no power of jurisdiction, and that no bishop anywhere, in Rome or in Constantinople, governs another autocephalous Church. That position is the centre of the whole dispute, because it is structural: it concerns what kind of thing the Church is, and every other disagreement about authority follows from it.

The 2013 Synodal Document

Moscow put its position in writing. On 26 December 2013 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church adopted a document on the position of the Moscow Patriarchate on primacy in the universal Church. Its argument runs on three levels. At the level of the diocese, the bishop's primacy comes from apostolic succession and he governs. At the level of a regional Church, the primacy of the primate is established by the canons and he acts with his synod. At the universal level, primacy is a primacy of honour, established by the councils in the order of the diptychs, and it confers no power of governance over other Churches; the document was drafted partly in response to the Ravenna text of 2007 and partly against Constantinople's account of its own prerogatives. Moscow addresses that argument to Constantinople as firmly as to Rome, which is worth noticing.

The Orthodox Reading of the First Millennium

Russian theologians read the first millennium as a communion of local Churches in which Rome held the first seat and exercised it through witness, mediation and the hearing of appeals, without governing anyone else's diocese. On this reading the order of honour is an ecclesiastical arrangement made by councils, which is how they read canon 3 of Constantinople in 381 and canon 28 of Chalcedon in 451, both of which rank Constantinople second because it is the new imperial capital. If the ranking of sees is conciliar and political in origin, then it can be adjusted by councils and it cannot be a divine institution. Moscow adds a historical claim: that the medieval Western papacy converted a primacy of order into a monarchy the East never received, and that this conversion, rather than any Greek innovation, caused the schism.

The Catholic Position

The Catholic Church teaches that Christ made Simon the rock and gave him the keys of the kingdom (Matthew 16:18-19) and the charge to feed the sheep (John 21:15-17), that this Petrine office passes to the Bishop of Rome, and that the pope holds full, supreme and universal power over the Church which he can always freely exercise. The First Vatican Council defined this in Pastor Aeternus in 1870, and the Second Vatican Council set it inside a doctrine of episcopal collegiality in Lumen Gentium 22 to 23, teaching that the bishops together with the pope form one college with care for the whole Church. Catholics point to the appeals actually made to Rome in the first millennium, to the Roman interventions in the Christological controversies, and to the reception of the Tome of Leo at Chalcedon in 451, when the assembled bishops acclaimed that Peter had spoken through Leo. Our guide to the papacy and the Petrine office sets out the Catholic case in full.

Where the Dialogue Reached

The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church has worked on this question for decades. The Ravenna Document of 2007 agreed that primacy exists at the universal level and that the Bishop of Rome held the first place among the patriarchs, while recording continuing disagreement about what that first place involved. The Moscow Patriarchate delegation withdrew from the Ravenna session over the seating of the Estonian Church and has not accepted the text, which shows that the question is contested inside Orthodoxy as sharply as between the two Churches. In the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, John Paul II asked other church leaders and theologians to help him find a way of exercising the primacy that is open to a new situation while renouncing nothing essential to its mission. That invitation stands, and no Orthodox Church has yet answered it with a proposal Rome could act on.

10. The Filioque and the Other Doctrinal Questions

Four doctrinal questions divide Moscow from Rome, and none of them is peculiar to Russia: the Filioque, papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, and the Latin doctrine of purgatory. Moscow holds the common Orthodox position on all four. What Russia adds is a particular firmness about the second, since the Russian Church's own experience makes it suspicious of authority that cannot be checked by a council.

The Filioque

The Filioque is a single Latin word meaning "and the Son", added in the West to the clause of the Nicene Creed confessing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The Orthodox objection has two parts. The canonical part is that the Creed was settled by the Council of Constantinople in 381 and that the Council of Ephesus in 431 forbade the composition of a rival faith, so one part of the Church altered a conciliar text by itself. The theological part is the monarchy of the Father: Orthodox theology holds that the Father alone is the source within the Trinity, begetting the Son and breathing forth the Spirit, and Photius of Constantinople argued in the ninth century that a double procession gives the Spirit two causes. The Catholic answer is that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle, defined at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and grounded in John 15:26 and John 16:7. The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity issued a clarification in 1995 which affirmed that the Father alone is the origin without origin of the Holy Spirit and observed that the Greek verb used in the Creed carries a sense of ultimate origination that the Latin verb does not, so the Latin formula does not assert what the Greek objection takes it to assert. Byzantine Catholic Churches in communion with Rome recite the Creed without the Filioque. Our guide to the Trinity treats the underlying doctrine of the persons.

Papal Infallibility

Papal infallibility, defined at Vatican I on 18 July 1870, teaches that when the Roman Pontiff speaks ex cathedra, defining a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he is preserved from error by divine assistance, and that such definitions are irreformable of themselves and not by the consent of the Church. That final clause is the one Orthodoxy cannot accept, because reception by the Church is precisely how Orthodoxy recognises that a council was ecumenical. Orthodox theology locates infallibility in the whole body: the Holy Spirit preserves the entire Church from final error, and the 1848 encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs, replying to Pius IX, said that the guardian of the faith is the body of the Church, the people themselves. Catholic theology answers that papal infallibility is the Church's own infallibility exercised in a particular way under narrow conditions, and that the Catechism sets the infallibility of the whole body of the faithful, the sensus fidei, alongside it (CCC 92 and 891).

The Immaculate Conception

The Immaculate Conception, defined by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854, teaches that the Virgin Mary was preserved free from all stain of original sin from the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace given in view of the merits of Christ. Russian Orthodox Christians honour Mary as highly as any Catholic does, calling her Theotokos, Bogoroditsa in Slavonic, and the All-Holy, more honourable than the cherubim, and her name recurs constantly through the Divine Liturgy. They decline the definition for two reasons. The first is that Eastern theology has no inherited guilt to preserve her from, since ancestral sin is understood as inherited mortality and corruption, so the definition answers a problem posed by a particular Latin account of original sin. The second is procedural, that a pope defined a dogma for the whole Church without a council. Rome's response is that the definition says in Western terms what Eastern liturgy already sings about the All-Holy, and that the grace involved is entirely Christ's, applied to Mary in anticipation of the Cross. See our guide to original sin for the anthropology behind the difference.

Purgatory

Russian Orthodoxy prays constantly for the dead and declines the Latin doctrine of purgatory as it was defined at Lyons II, Florence and Trent, chiefly rejecting the framework of a temporal debt of punishment satisfied by a cleansing fire. Orthodox writers speak instead of a state of expectation before the general judgment in which the prayers of the Church genuinely help the departed. Both Churches therefore pray for the dead and both believe those prayers avail; the disagreement is about the mechanism and about the language of satisfaction. Our guide to purgatory gives the full comparison, and the Orthodox objection to indulgences, which follow from the doctrine of temporal punishment, belongs with it.

11. Uniatism and the Eastern Catholic Question

Uniatism is the name Orthodox Christians give to the practice of bringing groups of Eastern Christians into communion with Rome as separate Eastern Catholic Churches, and it is the sorest historical point between Moscow and Rome. The Russian objection is that it was pursued as a method of reunion by absorbing pieces of the Orthodox Church rather than by dealing with the Orthodox Church as a whole, often with the backing of Catholic political powers. Any Catholic who wants to speak usefully with a Russian Orthodox Christian has to understand this before saying anything else.

The Union of Brest and What Followed

At Brest in 1595 to 1596 most of the Orthodox bishops of the Kyiv metropolitanate, then under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, entered communion with Rome while keeping the Byzantine rite, forming the body that became the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. A large part of the clergy and laity refused, and both sides were supported by their respective states. Josaphat Kuntsevych, a Greek Catholic archbishop, was killed by a mob at Vitebsk in 1623 and canonised by Rome; Orthodox accounts of his episcopate are very different from Catholic ones. Under the Russian Empire the Greek Catholic structures were pressed back into Orthodoxy, notably at Polotsk in 1839, and in 1946 the Soviet state staged the Lviv pseudo-council that liquidated the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and transferred its parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate. That Church survived underground and re-emerged legally in 1989, reclaiming buildings in western Ukraine, and the resulting disputes were the immediate cause of the collapse of Catholic-Orthodox relations in the early 1990s.

Balamand, 1993

The Joint International Commission addressed the question directly at Balamand in Lebanon in 1993. The agreed statement said two things together, and both halves are usually quoted selectively. Uniatism, understood as a method of seeking unity by detaching communities from one Church into another, is rejected as a model for the future, and the Eastern Catholic Churches that exist have the right to exist and to serve the spiritual needs of their faithful. The statement also set out that the two Churches recognise one another as sister Churches, and that neither should engage in proselytism among the faithful of the other. Some Orthodox Churches were unhappy with Balamand and some Eastern Catholics were unhappy with it too, which is a fair sign that it named a real problem.

What This Means for a Catholic Reader

Rome's own commitment is that the Eastern Catholic Churches exist to keep their own traditions and are not a device for converting Orthodox Christians. That commitment was repeated in the Havana declaration of 2016, which asked Catholic and Orthodox communities living in the same territory to work for peace between them. In practice this means Catholics should not treat Russian Orthodox Christians as targets for conversion, should not present themselves for communion in Orthodox churches, and should support the Eastern Catholics who exist without using them as a lever. Our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches covers those Churches in their own right, and our guide to ecumenism covers the Catholic approach to Christian unity as a whole.

12. Havana 2016: What Was Actually Signed

Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow met at Havana airport in Cuba on 12 February 2016 and signed a joint declaration of thirty points. No Bishop of Rome and no Patriarch of Moscow had ever met before, in the whole period since the patriarchate was founded in 1589. Cuba was chosen as neutral ground because any European venue carried too much history, and the meeting was held in an airport lounge for the same reason, keeping it away from either Church's territory.

What the Declaration Says

The declaration opens with joy at the meeting and with the two men calling one another brothers. Its longest section concerns the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, appealing to the international community to act and naming the destruction of ancient Christian communities in Syria and Iraq. It defends the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, opposes abortion and euthanasia, and speaks about young people, poverty and migration. On unity it states that the two Churches are not competitors, asks Catholics and Orthodox in the same territory not to proselytise among one another, and repeats the Balamand principle that uniatism is not the method by which unity is to be restored, while affirming that the ecclesial communities that came into being in those circumstances have the right to exist and to serve their faithful. On Ukraine it calls for peace, urges all parties to work toward social harmony, and expresses hope that the division among Orthodox Christians in Ukraine will be overcome on the basis of the existing canonical norms.

What It Did Not Do

The declaration restored no communion, settled no doctrine, resolved no jurisdictional dispute and bound no other Orthodox Church. It was a joint statement by two primates rather than a conciliar act, and both Churches said so. Some Ukrainian Greek Catholics criticised the text sharply for what they read as an inadequate account of their situation, and some Orthodox critics attacked Kirill for meeting a pope at all. A judgment on the meeting that survives all of that is straightforward: it opened a working channel between Rome and Moscow that had been closed for the whole modern period, and a channel is what makes later conversation possible.

Since Havana

Contacts between the two Churches have continued through the Department for External Church Relations and the Holy See's ecumenical office, and a second meeting between the pope and the patriarch has been discussed publicly and has not taken place. Full diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the Russian Federation were established in 2009. John Paul II never visited Russia despite wanting to, and in 2004 he sent to Moscow the venerated copy of the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan that had been kept in his apartments, a gesture Moscow received warmly. Relations between the two Churches have been strained by the war in Ukraine, and section 14 treats that.

13. Ukraine and the Break with Constantinople

The Moscow Patriarchate broke eucharistic communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in October 2018 over the church situation in Ukraine, and that rupture inside Orthodoxy now shapes almost everything Moscow does ecumenically. A Catholic reading about the Russian Orthodox Church will run into this constantly, and the outline is worth having straight, stated as each side states it.

The Dispute Over 1686

In 1686 the Ecumenical Patriarch issued a letter concerning the metropolitanate of Kyiv and the Patriarch of Moscow's authority to consecrate its metropolitan. Moscow reads that act as a permanent transfer of the Kyiv metropolitanate to its jurisdiction, making Ukraine its canonical territory ever since. Constantinople reads it as a temporary permission granted under the political conditions of the time, a permission it retained the right to revoke, and in October 2018 it declared the act revoked. The two readings of a single seventeenth-century document carry the whole modern argument.

The Sequence

In October 2018 the Holy Synod of Constantinople announced its intention to grant autocephaly in Ukraine and lifted its censures on the hierarchs of two Ukrainian bodies it had previously regarded as schismatic. The Holy Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate responded by severing eucharistic communion with Constantinople. A unification council in Kyiv in December 2018 established the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and the Ecumenical Patriarch signed its tomos of autocephaly on 5 January 2019. Moscow does not recognise that Church. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church that had been under the Moscow Patriarchate declared its full independence at a council in Feofaniya in May 2022, a change of status that has been read differently by different parties. As the primates of Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus recognised the new Church, Moscow suspended communion with each of them personally, and in December 2021 it established its own exarchate structures in Africa, in territory Alexandria regards as its own.

Why This Matters to Catholics

Two consequences follow for anyone thinking about Christian unity. First, there is at present no single Orthodox interlocutor with whom Rome could negotiate anything: the Ecumenical Patriarch cannot speak for Moscow, and Moscow will not sit where Constantinople presides. Second, the argument turns on exactly the question that divides Catholics and Orthodox, namely whether any bishop has authority to settle a jurisdictional dispute between Churches. Orthodox writers on both sides of the Ukrainian question are debating primacy with each other in terms Catholics will find familiar. Catholics should resist the temptation to treat this as vindication, and should pray for the Churches involved.

14. Church and State, and the Criticism It Draws

The relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state has a long history behind it and a live controversy in front of it. The inherited model is the Byzantine idea of symphonia, a harmony of the spiritual and the civil power in which each supports the other in its own sphere. Russian history has produced that harmony, and also Peter the Great's synodal captivity and the Soviet persecution, so the record is anything but uniform.

What the Church's Own Document Says

The Jubilee Bishops' Council adopted the Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000, and it is the Church's own statement on this question. The document describes the Church as distinct from the state and not identified with any political system, sets out that the Church does not take on state functions, and includes a passage on civil disobedience: where the civil power compels Orthodox believers to apostatise from Christ or to commit sinful acts, the Church may call its faithful to peaceful disobedience. That text is on the record and is quoted by Russian Orthodox critics of church-state closeness as often as by defenders of it.

The Present Controversy

Statements by Patriarch Kirill about the war in Ukraine since 2022 have drawn public criticism from Orthodox Christians in many countries, including from clergy and theologians within the Russian tradition. In March 2022 a large group of Orthodox theologians published a declaration rejecting what it called the "Russian world" teaching as a form of ethnophyletism, the subordination of the Church to ethnic and national identity, which a council at Constantinople condemned in 1872. Pope Francis said publicly that a patriarch should not become a state's altar boy, and Moscow objected to the remark. Some parishes and dioceses abroad have left the Moscow Patriarchate over the same issue.

Two things should be held together here. Criticism of a hierarch's political statements is a normal act inside the Christian tradition and does not touch the validity of the sacraments celebrated in Russian Orthodox parishes, which the Catholic Church continues to recognise. And a Catholic has no standing to lecture on the temptations of church-state entanglement, given how much of Western church history consists of the same failure. Our guide to church scandals takes the Catholic side of that ledger seriously, and this site names no living person as an enemy of the Church.

Fatima and the Consecration of Russia

Russia occupies a particular place in Catholic devotional life because of the Fatima apparitions of 1917, whose message asked for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Bishop Jose Alves Correia da Silva of Leiria declared the Fatima visions worthy of belief in a pastoral letter of 13 October 1930, under the older framework for judging apparitions rather than the 2024 norms of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which are explained at our guide to Marian apparition sites and how the Church judges them. Popes from Pius XII to Francis have made acts of consecration, most recently on 25 March 2022 naming Russia and Ukraine, and the sequence and the arguments about it belong to our guide to Our Lady of Fatima. Russian Orthodox Christians have no obligation to any Catholic private revelation, and framing that devotion as something done to Russia rather than prayed for Russia guarantees offence. Pray it as intercession.

15. Practical Questions Catholics Actually Ask

Most people arriving at this subject have a concrete situation rather than a theological curiosity: a marriage, a funeral, a visit, a relative who has converted. The answers below give the Catholic rule and the usual Russian Orthodox practice, and the local parish always outranks a web page on the Orthodox side, because each Church governs its own discipline.

May I Attend a Divine Liturgy?

Yes, and it is worth doing. Stand rather than looking for a pew, arrive knowing the service will be long, dress modestly, and note that many Russian churches expect women to cover their heads. Do not approach the chalice. At the end of the liturgy the antidoron, blessed bread that is not the Eucharist, is distributed, and a visitor may usually receive it, though asking first is courteous. Attending an Orthodox liturgy does not fulfil the Catholic Sunday obligation in the ordinary case, since that obligation is satisfied by a Catholic rite; ask your own pastor if the situation is unusual.

May I Receive Communion There?

No, in practice. The Moscow Patriarchate does not admit non-Orthodox to communion, and Catholic teaching asks its faithful to respect the discipline of the Church they are visiting. Canon 844 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law permits a Catholic to receive the Eucharist, penance and anointing from an Orthodox priest only where genuine necessity makes access to a Catholic minister impossible and the Orthodox minister is willing, which in a Russian parish he ordinarily will not be. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 1399 notes both the recognition of Eastern sacraments and the requirement of appropriate circumstances and the approval of church authority.

May a Catholic Marry a Russian Orthodox Christian?

Yes. Catholic law requires the permission of the Catholic party's local ordinary for marriage with a baptised non-Catholic, and the arrangements need to be made carefully in advance with both clergy. Where the other party is an Eastern Christian, canon 1127 of the 1983 Code provides that the canonical form binds for lawfulness while validity requires the presence of a sacred minister, so a marriage celebrated in an Orthodox rite by an Orthodox priest is valid even though the permission should still be sought. The Moscow Patriarchate permits marriage with a baptised non-Orthodox Christian under conditions that vary by diocese, commonly including an expectation about the baptism and upbringing of children, and the couple should expect both Churches to ask questions about that. Both Churches will want the marriage prepared, and a couple who leave this until the last month will have a difficult time.

Do Converts Get Rebaptised?

A Russian Orthodox Christian received into the Catholic Church is not rebaptised, not rechrismated and not reordained if a priest, because the Catholic Church recognises those sacraments as valid; such a person is received by a profession of faith. In the other direction Russian practice varies: reception by confession and profession of faith, or by chrismation, are both used, and rebaptism of Catholics is practised in some stricter quarters. The Catholic Church regards all of this as a matter for the Orthodox to determine within their own discipline, while continuing to regard Catholic baptism as unrepeatable.

What About Funerals and Prayer for the Dead?

A Catholic may attend and pray at a Russian Orthodox funeral or panikhida, and a Catholic may certainly pray for a deceased Russian Orthodox Christian, since both Churches hold that prayer for the dead is right and effective. A Catholic priest may celebrate a funeral for a baptised non-Catholic in some circumstances under canon 1183, with the local bishop's judgment, and the family should approach the parish rather than assume. Both traditions treat the burial of the dead as an act of the whole Church.

16. Where Rome and Moscow Stand Now

Rome and Moscow recognise one another's sacraments, address one another as sister Churches, and are not in communion. The doctrinal distance is small and well mapped. The obstacles that actually hold are the structural question of jurisdiction, the memory of uniatism and of the twentieth century, the fracture inside Orthodoxy over Ukraine, and the political weather. A realistic Catholic assessment says the theological dialogue has advanced and the practical conditions for using its results are worse than they were a decade ago.

What Progress Has Looked Like

The record since the Second Vatican Council is real. Russian Orthodox observers attended the council. The Joint International Commission has produced agreed statements on the sacraments, on conciliarity and authority, and on the exercise of primacy in the first millennium. Balamand in 1993 named the uniatism problem honestly. The 1995 clarification on the procession of the Holy Spirit addressed a misunderstanding that had stood for centuries. The Havana meeting of 2016 happened at all. Practical cooperation on the persecution of Christians, on the family and on humanitarian work continues even when formal dialogue slows.

What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Learn the Russian Orthodox position from Russian Orthodox writers before answering it, which is the difference between argument and caricature. Pray for unity, which Christ asked for himself in John 17:21. Visit a Divine Liturgy and stand through the whole of it. Respect the Orthodox discipline on communion by not presenting yourself. Read the four doctrinal questions closely enough to hold the Catholic position without misstating the other. And notice how much of the Russian tradition is already available to you: the Jesus Prayer, the Philokalia, the icons, the fasting seasons, the elders. For the wider Catholic approach to Christian unity see our guide to ecumenism, and for the sixteenth-century divisions in the West our guide to the Reformation.

Related Topics