The Russian Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)
In brief
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia — ROCOR, also called the Russian Church Abroad — is the church of the Russian emigration, formed by bishops and faithful driven into exile by the Revolution of 1917. For most of the twentieth century it governed itself apart from the Moscow Patriarchate, which it regarded as compromised by its subjection to the Soviet state. In 2007, after long negotiation, ROCOR was reconciled with Moscow and restored to full communion while keeping its own self-government.
A church in exile
When the Bolshevik Revolution shattered the Russian Church, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled abroad, and among them were bishops who could no longer freely communicate with the Patriarch of Moscow. Gathering first on Russian soil in the south, then in exile, these hierarchs organized themselves to shepherd the scattered emigration. From 1921 they were centered at Sremski Karlovci in Serbia — hence the early name "the Karlovtsy Synod" — under Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky). They understood themselves not as a new church but as the free voice of the Russian Church until such time as Russia itself was free. The exiles' grief is the ancient one: "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" (Psalm 137:4).
The decisive breach came in 1927. Metropolitan Sergius, administering the Church inside the Soviet Union under enormous pressure, issued a Declaration pledging the Church's loyalty to the Soviet state and even claiming its joys as the Church's own. To the bishops abroad — and to many confessors imprisoned inside Russia — this went beyond lawful submission to civil authority into a false union with a regime then martyring Christians by the thousand. ROCOR broke administrative communion with Moscow, holding that it could not recognize a church leadership it believed to be captive.
Guarding a memory
For three generations ROCOR saw its vocation as keeping the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church whole in freedom: its liturgy, its piety, its confessors. It was among the first to glorify the New Martyrs of the Soviet persecutions and the imperial family killed in 1918, decades before Moscow did the same. In America its parishes, monasteries, and seminary at Jordanville became strongholds of traditional Russian churchmanship, and one of its bishops, St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco, is among the most beloved saints of twentieth-century Orthodoxy. ROCOR also kept a firm distance from the ecumenical movement, which it regarded with deep suspicion.
This stance set ROCOR apart from the other Russian-rooted body in America, the Orthodox Church in America, which received its self-governing status from Moscow in 1970 — a grant ROCOR did not then accept. For much of the century the Russian inheritance in America was thus divided among jurisdictions that did not concelebrate, a painful situation for all involved.
The reconciliation of 2007
With the fall of the Soviet Union the wall that had justified the separation began to come down. The Moscow Patriarchate, now free, glorified its own New Martyrs and issued a social teaching affirming the Church's freedom to disobey an ungodly state — meeting two of ROCOR's longest-standing concerns. After years of careful dialogue, on 17 May 2007, the feast of the Ascension, Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and Metropolitan Laurus, ROCOR's First Hierarch, signed the Act of Canonical Communion in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, restoring full sacramental unity.
The Act made ROCOR a self-governing part of the wider Russian Church rather than a body apart. Not everyone accepted it: a minority left to form small groups that continue the old separation, and the reunion is still discussed with strong feeling. But for most of ROCOR's faithful it healed an eighty-year wound, and it left the Church Abroad with its own bishops, parishes, and way of life intact within the communion of the Russian Church.