Return of relics brings Russian churches closer

MOSCOW, Nov 14 (Reuters) Russia's two Orthodox churches, split by 80 years of bitterness over communist repression of believers, took a step closer to one another this week when key relics were returned to Russia from the United States.

An archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad handed over a crosier (bishop's staff) and vestments belonging to the late Metropolitan Philaret, who had left secret instructions to return them when Russia was free.

The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union brought an easing of restrictions on Orthodox worship and a revival of ties between the Moscow-based Russian Church and its exiled brethren.

Philaret, who fled to China after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 and eventually made his way to the United States, went on to head the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad for 21 years. He died in New York in 1985 aged 82.

''I for many years preserved these relics,'' Archpriest Roman Lukianov, rector of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Epiphany in Boston, told Reuters by telephone.

''I was asked by the closest assistant of Metropolitan Philaret to preserve these relics until the Church in Russia was free and to give them to the Patriarch... as a symbol of unification of the Russian Orthodox Church,'' he said.

The relics were handed to a cleric from the Russian Orthodox Church at the weekend and are expected in Moscow any day.

The Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, headed by Patriarch Alexiy II, is pushing for its US-based rival to end the long division provoked by the 1917 Revolution.

During Soviet rule the exiled church considered the Moscow Patriarchate a tool of the state and the KGB secret police. But in May the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad adopted a resolution that would accept the Moscow Patriarch as its head.

REFLECTION OF UNIFICATION ''It is above all a reflection of the movement to unification,'' said Hieromonk Savva, a Moscow Patriarchate spokesman. Hieromonk is an Orthodox term for an ordained monk.

''The unification of the divided parts of the Russian Church ... is the fulfilment of the long-held hopes of all representatives of old Russian migration, including Philaret, who struggled with the Soviet authorities and believed that when the Soviet authorities were gone then unification would come.'' Philaret was born in the Russian city of Kursk in 1903. His family fled to China after religious persecution from the Bolsheviks.

He had trouble leaving China because he refused to accept a Soviet passport, but he eventually made his way to Hong Kong and Australia and then the United States.

Philaret, who in 1981 canonised the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, asked his closest adviser to make sure his sacred items went to Russia when the Church became free.

''This was not an act of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad but a local act and, it seems, for Russia it has become a big act,'' said Archpriest Lukianov.

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