Taking a Troubled Throne

Under normal circumstances, election as Patriarch of a church of 40 million souls would be the desire of a priest's lifetime. That is probably not so for Metropolitan Pimen of Kolomna, 60, who was chosen last week by the Holy Synod, meeting in Zagorsk outside Moscow, to head the Russian Orthodox Church. A pliable moderate who has been caretaker head of the church since the death of Patriarch Alexei 13 months ago, Pimen faces enough problems to tax an archangel.

The Orthodox Church suffered greatly in the last decade of Alexei's 25-year reign when Nikita Khrushchev forced half the country's churches to close to prove he was a hard-line Communist. Now a reform movement within Orthodoxy, seeking complete freedom from state controls, is bound to further complicate the church's nervous relationship with the Soviet government. The new Patriarch must also deal with the state's Council on Religious Affairs, which is likely to keep a close rein on him. In the past, Pimen has accommodated himself to the state's needs, never deviating from official policy in public statements at home or abroad. The son of an office worker, he has risen steadily through the church hierarchy since entering a monastery at the age of 17. Knowledgeable observers think that he will have to maneuver so cautiously between the reformers and the government that the real power in the church will be wielded by Leningrad's Metropolitan Nikodim, 41, a better-known and articulate spokesman for Soviet policy in world ecumenical circles.

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