While the statement has much to commend it and it does speak to the heartfelt yearnings of all faithful and orthodox Christians, I cannot help bu think it also has a political spirit since I’ve long believed the ROC is used by and is an agent of the communist government. In this sense it is like many American denominations that have been co-opted and infiltrated by foreign agents seeking to change real and orthodox beliefs of authentic Christianity.
I think one should take a deep breath before indicting an entire church. Under the Communists somewhere between 12-20 million people were murdered in Russia for their faith. The vast majority of those were Orthodox Christians. EVERY BISHOP that attended the great council (sobor) of 1917 was either murdered outright or died in a Soviet concentration camp.
In 1914 there were 55,173 Russian Orthodox churches and 29,593 chapels, 112,629 priests and deacons, 550 monasteries and 475 convents with a total of 95,259 monks and nuns in Russia. On the eve of the German invasion in 1941 those numbers had fallen to less than 500 clergy including bishops. Only a few dozen churches were still legally open and only one monastery. all but a handful of of the priests, monks and nuns were murdered. Most of the rest were sent to slave labor camps. It is more or less impossible to determine the exact number of the laity murdered, but it is certainly well over 12 million. By 1941 the Orthodox Church had been all but exterminated. The survivors went underground and mostly shunned the the visible remnants of the church that the Communists allowed to exist as collaborationist and apostates in all but name.
In January 1918 Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the Bolsheviks.. When Tikhon died in prison in 1925, Soviet authorities forbade patriarchal elections to be held. Patriarchal locum tenens (acting Patriarch) Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky, 1887–1944), going against the consensus of a major part of the church’s parishes, in 1927 issued a declaration accepting the Soviet authority over the church as legitimate, pledging the church’s cooperation with the government and condemning political dissent within the church. By this declaration Sergius granted himself authority that he, being a deputy of imprisoned Metropolitan Peter and acting against his will, had no right to assume according to the XXXIV Apostolic canon.
Thereafter the church began moving underground and most of the bishops and clergy living outside Russia broke communion with Sergei and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the puppet Patriarch. This remained the case until after the fall of the USSR. The slow healing of the wounds, with often very bitter recriminations, has progressed since then with the largest schism, that with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, only ending in 2007.
Today the Orthodox Church commemorates the millions of Martyrs of the Communist persecution on the Sunday closest to January 25th (old calendar).
There is no church in the history of the world that has endured a more bloody and ferocious persecution than the Russian Orthodox.