An American Orthodoxy?

Eastern Orthodoxy is America's "fourth faith"—and perhaps its most thoroughly fragmented. The 3,000,000 Orthodox Christians in the U.S. are mostly second-or third-generation immigrants, and their churches have developed as daughter colonies of ancient sees in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Theoretically, nothing would make more sense than to link these assorted Russians, Greeks, Serbs, Syrians, Ukrainians and others—all of whom share a common faith—into one American Orthodox Church. That dream has now reached the talking stage, only to become embroiled in the kind of old-world intra-church rivalry that has plagued Orthodoxy for centuries.

The first concrete step toward creating an independent American Orthodoxy has been taken by the Russians, who have no less than three separate churches in the U.S. By far the largest is the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic hurch of America, known generally as the Metropolia, with jurisdiction over some 350 parishes. The Metropolia has a somewhat irregular status in Orthodoxy. During the early years of the Russian Revolution, it was cut off from contact with the Patriarchate of Moscow and was forced by circumstances to elect its own bishops. When the Patriarchate was restored to ecclesiastical power by the Soviet Union, it refused to recognize the Metropolia and organized instead its own Exarchate, or ecclesiastical province in America, which claims about 65 parishes. Over the years, these rival churches have fought bitterly with each other, and also with another church founded by Czarist White Russian refugees. Last year, however, the Patriarchate of Moscow tentatively agreed to withdraw its Exarch and recognize the Metropolia as "the Orthodox Church of America," which would then be able to invite other Orthodox bodies in North America to join its fold.

The Russian proposal—reasonable as it may seem on the surface—has thoroughly outraged the largest and wealthiest Orthodox body in the U.S., the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, claiming 443 parishes. The Russians contend that they have a canonical right to establish an "autocephalous" (self-governing) church in America, on the basis of historical preeminence: Orthodox canon law, they say, gives rights over a missionary district to the first hierarchy that establishes itself in a new area—and the Russians have had a diocese in North America since 1840. The Greeks, who did not establish their American archdiocese until 1921, insist that other Orthodox canons give jurisdiction over all believers in the "diaspora churches" to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I, first among equals of the world's Orthodox bishops.