Evolution of the attitude of metropolitan (patriarch) Sergiy (Stragorodskiy) to the renovationist schism in the 1920–1940s
Abstract
This article deals with changes in the attitude of metropolitan (Patriarch at the end of his life) Sergiy (Stragorodskiy; Russ. Сергий Страгородский) to the Sovietinspired Renovationist schism (Russ. обновленческий раскол) in the Russian Orthodox Church. The article examines the circumstances of metropolitan Sergiy’s fall into the schism in June 1922 and his subsequent activity within this schism. The background of these vicissitudes is development of contradictions in his relations with the “Living Church” (Russ. Живая Церковь). The article also studies the issue of his involvement or non-involvement in the work of the Renovationist “Higher Church Administration” (Russ. Высшее Церковное Управление) in the light of his dismissal from Vladimir see in November 1922. Further, the article looks at metropolitan Sergiy’s stand as to Renovationism after his reunion with Patriarch’s Church, both during the offi ce of Patriarch Tikhon and of Patriarch’s Locum Tenens Metropolitan Petr (1923–1925), and during the time when he himself became head of Moscow Patriarchate as Deputy Locum Tenens. Attention is paid to his strict attitude to the schism which was expressed, among other things, in his requirement to accept those baptised in Renovationism through Chrismation. This being said, his political stance in 1927 came to be quite close to Renovationism, which allowed church zealots to accuse him of some kind of “new Renovationism”. His final attitude to Renovationism was seen in the period of liquidation of the schism during the Great Patriotic War, when the strictness as to the order of acceptance of the repentant combined with oekonomia that admitted in certain cases acceptance of schismatic consecrations. In its conclusion, the article proposes an explanation of fluctuations of this personage as to the Renovationist schism. Presumably, the cause was not only his opportunism, of which he was accused by many contemporaries, but rather the features of his ecclesiological views that attached prime importance to the administrative mechanism of the church.
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