Friday, May. 05, 1961
New World for the Council
Ecclesiastical diplomacy bore fruit last week, and with it a massive new area was added to the ecumenical movement's ever-widening embrace. At the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference for the World Council of Churches at Buck Hill Falls, Pa., Dr. Franklin Clark Fry, chairman of the World Council's central committee (and president of the United Lutheran Church in America), announced that the Russian Orthodox Church has applied for membership.
It was an application that had been cautiously courted for years. When the World Council of Churches was being formed, invitations were sent to the pre-Reformation churches--Roman Catholic, Greek and Russian Orthodox--but only the Greek Orthodox Church accepted. The death of Stalin gave the leaders of the World Council new hope, and they warmed the fraternal atmosphere with a delegation to Russia (TIME, Jan. 4, 1960) and a continuing campaign of discreet liaison.
The application, when it arrived, was signed by Moscow's Patriarch Alexis, and is almost certain to be approved by the necessary two-thirds of the 178 Christian bodies affiliated with the World Council at the meeting of its third General Assembly in New Delhi, India, next November. The total membership of the Russian Orthodoxy is vague--estimates vary from 25,000 to 50,000--but the application included some impressive statistics: 30,000 priests, 73 bishoprics, 20,000 parishes and 40 monasteries.
World Council leaders braced themselves for a barrage of slings and arrows from Protestants who want no part of state-subservient Russian Orthodoxy and Chairman Fry acknowledged that there might be trouble ahead. But he called the Russians' emergence from isolation "a major event in the life of the council, if it is allowed to take place." It would be unfortunate, he added, "if the cleavages of the world were reflected in the organization of the churches. It would have unhappy consequences for the Christian cause."
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