Word: alexei
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When Theophilus sent Bishop Benjamin Basalyga of Pittsburgh, a group of several hundred White Russians in Japan, most of whom have recently taken out Soviet citizenship, requested Patriarch Alexei to supply a spiritual leader for the Japanese church. Alexei promptly raised the ante; he offered (through Soviet General Kuzma Derevyanko in Tokyo) to send in two bishops. Few Japanese converts to the Orthodox Church had supported the request to Alexei, and the Russian bishops were not allowed to enter...
After a 15-year struggle to dominate the Orthodox Church in the U.S., Moscow appeared ready to accept failure. Patriarch Alexei, who works closely with the Soviet Foreign Office, last week promised "full administrative autonomy" to the American churches of his faith...
...Alexei has had considerable success in encouraging pan-Slav propaganda and promoting other Soviet aims in the Iron Curtain countries. But elsewhere Alexei is not having much luck. Most Orthodox clergy are nonpolitical, like Tokyo's new Bishop Benjamin, of whom TIME Correspondent Carl Mydans cabled last week: "He is a simple, soft-spoken man who constantly rambled into a report of his sewing school, showing little interest in the ado over his bishopric...
Obviously, Bishop Benjamin would be difficult to convert to Alexei's viewpoint, best revealed in a recent statement: "The main thing the Russian Orthodox Church achieved during the war was to show the entire world its complete unity with its Government...
...Communist press of Russia and China cheered, the Soviet consul general in Shanghai rescued from a Chinese jail an Orthodox archbishop who once fought with the Czarist armies, but was absolved last fall when he became a Soviet citizen and declared allegiance to Moscow's Patriarch Alexei, who follows the Kremlin political line. The Chinese who had arrested Archbishop Victor had accused him of helping the Japs. So did some of the anti-Soviet followers of Victor's Shanghai rival, Archbishop John of the Orthodox Church in Exile...