International Orthodox Christian News

MOSCOW — A delegation of the Georgian Orthodox Church met in Moscow on Friday with the Russian deputy foreign minister, Grigory Karasin, in the first official contacts between the countries since war broke out in the breakaway region of South Ossetia in August.

Zurab Abashidze, a former Georgian ambassador to Russia and a member of the church-led delegation, described the conversation as “quite frank and quite critical.” The Orthodox churches have become the main channel of communications between the countries, he said.

“Right now, in principle, this is the only thread, the only channel, that connects the two countries and the two peoples, such church ties,” he said in a telephone interview after the meeting, which he said was arranged by the Russian Orthodox Church.

A statement posted on the Web site of the Russian Foreign Ministry did not give any details about the meeting. During the fighting in August, both Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church and Patriarch Aleksy II of the Russian Orthodox Church called for an end to bloodshed between Russians and Georgians, who share a common Orthodox Christian faith.

The Russian Orthodox Church has been seen as taking a position at rare odds with the Kremlin in rejecting appeals by South Ossetians who would like to join the Moscow Patriarchate. The issue has not been resolved — Orthodox churches in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway region of Georgia recognized by the Kremlin, are still in jurisdictional limbo — but church officials in Moscow have said that canonical territory cannot be dictated by political lines. There have been strains as well in the relationship between Patriarch Ilia and President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia.

The Georgian delegation, led by Metropolitan Gerasim, the chairman of the church’s Foreign Relations Department, met with Patriarch Aleksy at the Danilov Monastery in central Moscow on Thursday. Patriarch Aleksy emphasized the role of the churches in overcoming the conflict.

“We pray that the full unity of faith that we share will have a beneficial influence on all aspects of the mutual relations of our peoples,” he said. After his remarks, the rest of the meeting was held behind closed doors.Metropolitan Gerasim told journalists afterward that the churches were essential to fill a diplomatic vacuum.

“We have shown in Georgia and in Russia that the churches have not lost relations,” he said. “We think the church should help in relations being restored little by little, because very many Georgians live in Russia and very many Russians live in Tbilisi. The diplomatic corps that used to exist no longer exists.

“Our citizens and yours have to get visas through the embassies of other countries. Why should this be the case when there are two Orthodox countries that have had good fraternal relations for very many centuries?”

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, said he had been invited to Tbilisi to present the “social concept” of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was adopted in 2000, once it is translated into Georgian. The wide-ranging document addresses the church’s position on issues including abortion, bioethics, poverty and globalization.

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