Word: russian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...week. The exceptional climate was an appropriate accompaniment to the unprecedented warmth that emanated from Mikhail Gorbachev's Kremlin during the celebrations marking the country's 1,000th year of Christianity. Church bells, so rarely heard in the land of Lenin, pealed joyously as rituals unfolded in the gilded Russian Orthodox sanctuaries. Some 500 spiritual dignitaries from 100 nations were in attendance. Among them: Anglican Leader Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, American Evangelist Billy Graham, and no fewer than nine Cardinals and 27 bishops, the largest and clearly the most estimable Roman Catholic assemblage ever to visit the Soviet...
This week the Vatican representatives hoped to meet with Gorbachev. Casaroli was hand-carrying the Pope's first personal letter to the party leader, a three-page missive written in Russian that referred to the human rights claims of Catholics and other minorities. The dialogue may continue face-to-face if Gorbachev includes a papal visit in his anticipated trip to Italy later this year...
...Soviet Union contains the biggest of these disputed churches, made up of millions of Catholic believers, mostly in the western Ukraine, who were forced into the Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin in 1946. Since then, many of these Ukrainians, who still consider the Pope their leader, have led an illegal underground existence. Despite Vatican overtures on their behalf, the Russian Orthodox Church resists having the Kremlin give legal recognition to the Catholics, arguing that they belong within Orthodoxy...
Alongside this long-range ecumenical battle, the Russian hierarchy last week held its first council since the Communist Revolution that was summoned for purposes other than to elect a new Patriarch. The four-day assembly was attended by 74 bearded bishops behind the fortress-like walls of the Trinity- St. Sergius Monastery in Zagorsk. Nearly 1,000 of the faithful stood for hours in the withering heat to catch a glimpse of the gathering holy men. With the church's head, Patriarch Pimen, 78, so ill from diabetes that he made only brief appearances at most of the millennial events...
...council resolved the Russian Church's most bitter internal problem: control of local parishes. According to Orthodox canonical tradition, the priest is the head of his parish. In 1961, however, during the height of Nikita Khrushchev's antichurch campaign, the Orthodox hierarchy was forced to accept a ruling that gave Communist Party-approved lay delegates full control over each parish, making the priest a mere salaried functionary who presides at worship. In a major concession from the Gorbachev regime, the much hated regulation was revoked at last week's council. The new church charter also provides for regularly scheduled national...