Chapter 68. The Third Rome and the Orthodox East: Russia, the Old Believers and the Romanian Case

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Orthodox world lost the imperial centre it had had for a thousand years. Moscow claimed the succession. The following centuries saw a church bound closely to the throne, a schism over ritual, a Petrine bureaucracy, Soviet persecution, and communist regimes that used the church as an instrument. Romania is this chapter’s case study because the library holds an unusually dense and partisan shelf on it: Greek-Catholic histories, anti-communist martyrologies, a defensive memorial volume for Patriarch Teoctist, a critical biography of Arsenie Boca, and Wurmbrand’s Protestant testimony. The chapter ends with the present-day “war of churches” narratives about Ukraine, Keshe’s among them.

Moscow, the “Third Rome”

Ian Grey records how the idea was put into words. “Soon Russians were proclaiming Moscow as the center of Orthodox Christianity, the successor to Constantinople, and the ‘third Rome’.” The monk Philotheus of a Pskov monastery wrote to Vasily III that the Russian ruler “is on earth the sole Emperor [Tsar] of the Christians, the leader of the Apostolic Church which stands no longer in Rome or in Constantinople” [Grey, The Romanovs, #64788]. Grey judges the political effect harshly: “The Orthodox Church, and especially the idea of Moscow as the heir of Constantinople, the third and perfect Rome, had made them arrogant and complacent” [Grey, #64788]. He also describes a Muscovite society that “centered on the tsar”, whose people “could conceive of no rights or interests apart from those of the tsar”. In that setting the church’s claim to universality and the dynasty’s claim to rule supported each other [Grey, #64788].

Nikon and the Raskol

The great schism was over ritual. Angela Charlton puts it this way: “Russian Orthodoxy is among the world’s most ritual-oriented religions, yet almost since its birth more than 1,000 years ago, believers have differed over which rituals are more spiritually ‘correct'”. In the 1600s the patriarch’s reforms forced the issue [Charlton, Moscow & St. Petersburg, #363221, box “Old Believers”]. The Encyclopedia of Russian History records the church council’s decisions to “standardize religious books, rituals, and icon painting”. It calls Archpriest Avvakum “a founding father of the movement known in English as Old Belief”, which “assumed a coherent shape and a growing following from the beginning of the eighteenth century”. In Avvakum’s own lifetime the quarrel had been “a relatively esoteric dispute” among clerical and lay elites [Millar (ed.), Encyclopedia of Russian History, #6957, “Avvakum”; “Old Believers”].

Nikon fell over a matter of power, not doctrine. In 1658, offended by an insult at court, he withdrew to the Voskresensky Monastery, “declaring that he was no longer patriarch”. He expected Tsar Alexei to beg him to return. When Alexei did nothing, “Nikon next declared that he was still Russian patriarch, but not in Moscow” [Grey, #64788]. The reforms survived; the reformer did not. The Old Believers survived as well. Charlton describes the Nikolsky Old Believers’ Commune in eastern Moscow, whose Gothic-style church was “commissioned in 1790”. Its sponsors, the Ryabushinsky and Morozov merchant dynasties, “spent fortunes acquiring the religious art—dating from before the Schism—displayed in the church” [Charlton, #363221].

Synod, Empire and Dissent

Peter I set up the Most Holy Governing Synod on 25 January 1721 and abolished the patriarchate. The Synod was “composed partly of ecclesiastical persons, partly of laymen appointed by the Tsar”. It lasted until 1917, when the patriarchate was restored under Tikhon. The reference article notes that Peter also taxed beards, “which were common among the Old Believers” [Wikipedia: Most Holy Synod]. The synodal church became a department of state, and it used state-style sanctions against its most famous critic. Rosamund Bartlett writes that, “finally exasperated by Tolstoy’s blistering satire of a mass” in Resurrection, the church excommunicated him in 1901. The first official meeting between the church and the Tolstoy estate took place only in 2006, “105 years after the event” [Bartlett, Tolstoy: A Russian Life, #68122]. Bartlett adds a remark on Russian religiosity: “Until the nineteenth century the icon had fulfilled the role of theology in the Russian Orthodox Church” [#68122].

Soviet Persecution and the Church as Instrument

Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Lutheran pastor who spent fourteen years in communist prisons, says the “official” church of collaborators began right after the Revolution with the “Active Church” led “by a bishop named Sergiu”. He quotes one of its collaborators as saying that “Marxism is a gospel written in atheist letters”, and adds: “We had a Sergiu in every country” [Wurmbrand, Strigătul Bisericii Prigonite, #20685, §116]. He also describes infiltration running both ways. In the former Soviet Union “not only did the secret police infiltrate the church, but the Underground Church infiltrated the police”, and in Romania a few Christians joined the Securitate “to be able to inform” those under threat [#20685, §38]. His biographical note records that his release was bought for $10,000, and that in May 1966 he testified about his treatment before the Internal Security Subcommittee of the US Senate [#20685, “Despre autor”].

The Romanian Background: Union and Counter-Claim

The Greek-Catholic case starts from ethnogenesis. Prunduș and Plaianu open with the thesis that “the Romanian people was born Christian”, joining Daco-Latinity and Christianity under a Roman stamp. They argue that the early Latin Christianity of Illyricum contradicts the view that Romanians were from the start under “the legitimate jurisdiction of Greek Constantinople” [Prunduș & Plaianu, Catolicism și ortodoxie românească, #21843, Introduction, ch. 1]. They document Leopold I’s diplomas of 1692 and 1699. The latter rejected claims “that Romanians are forced into union” [#21843, ch. 9 “Unirea cu Roma”]. The reference shelf dates the Union to the Synod of Alba Iulia in 1698, with official organisation under Clement XI in 1716. It also records that in 1930 Greek-Catholics made up 31.1% of the population of historic Transylvania, against 27.8% Orthodox [Wikipedia RO: Biserica Română Unită cu Roma, Greco-Catolică].

The Orthodox pamphlet Romano-Catolicii în spatele propriilor declarații tells the opposite story. In its account the first united bishop, Atanasie Anghel, trained at a Calvinist seminary and “won with large sums of money the goodwill of the governor of Transylvania”. The promises made to the Uniates “collapsed”, and Catholic proselytism is presented as one method of extending Rome’s domination, alongside the crusade of 1204 [Unknown, Romano-Catolicii în spatele propriilor declarații, #20228].

1948: Hossu, Marina and the Suppression

Cicerone Ioniţoiu’s martyrology states the anti-communist charge plainly:

“When the Communist Party had programmed the death of Nicodim, the Greek-Catholic bishop Iuliu Hossu was summoned and offered the post of Patriarch of Romania (January 1948). After his refusal, Gheorghiu-Dej, at Moscow’s indication, followed his criminal plan, sacrificing Nicodim and Mihălcescu and installing his house man—Marina (Justinian)—as patriarch.” [Ioniţoiu, Genocidul din România, #11500, “Asaltul comunist împotriva Bisericii greco-catolice”]

Ioniţoiu places this within the second Cominform meeting’s tasks: breaking Catholic ties with the Vatican, abolishing the Eastern-rite (Greek-Catholic) churches, and subordinating the Orthodox to the state “through terror and blackmail”. He lists the outcome: the Greek-Catholic Church dissolved in 1948, the Roman-Catholic Church obstructed “with the arrest of all bishops”, schools and monasteries secularised, “about 4,000 priests and monks” arrested, and a spy trial staged on 10 September 1951 [#11500]. The Romanian Wikipedia biography of Justinian Marina (1901–1977, patriarch 1948–1977) confirms one key link. It says his rise was due to his having hidden Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej in his parish house at Râmnicu Vâlcea after Dej’s escape from Târgu Jiu in 1944, and it quotes Ion Gh. Maurer calling him a priest “who was, himself, the communists’ man” [Wikipedia RO: Justinian Marina]. The encyclopedia does not confirm Ioniţoiu’s claim that Nicodim was murdered. It does record the end of the Greek-Catholic Church: banned “at Stalin’s order” by Decree 358 of 1 December 1948, its property largely handed to the Orthodox Church, its bishops dead in prison, and its legality restored by Decree-Law no. 9 of 31 December 1989. John Paul II honoured Hossu’s grave in 1999, and Francis beatified the seven martyr bishops at Blaj in 2019 [Wikipedia RO: Biserica Română Unită cu Roma, Greco-Catolică]. The historian Camil Mureșanu cautions that the circumstances of the October–December 1948 suppression “are not yet fully elucidated” and will be clarified only if state documents are released [Mureșanu, În templul lui Janus, #11084].

Defences of the Hierarchy, and the Boca Case

The memorial volume for Patriarch Teoctist rejects the charge of collaboration. Its contributors say: “The Securitate collaborated with the Church and not the other way round!” They cite the communists’ own estimate from 1946 that “half of Romania was in the Legionary Movement”, adding that “priests and monks were in the Legionary Movement in an even higher proportion”. They dismiss the Tismăneanu Commission report as “this embarrassing report” [Al Cincilea Patriarh (memorial vol.), Prea Fericitul Teoctist…, #9494, part 51]. The volume also gives Teoctist’s own self-examination: “I did not have strength and courage. That is how I believed it was good: to be submissive and humble” [#9494, part 64].

Tatiana Niculescu’s biography of Arsenie Boca, based on archives, shows the Orthodox side of 1948 from the inside. Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan held that, since the Romanian provinces formed one state and one people, they “should have a single Church, the Orthodox one”. The new power in Romania could be “useful to the plans of assimilating the Greek-Catholics in the name of the Church’s ethnicity”. In autumn 1948, Interior Minister Teohari Georgescu, the new patriarch and Bălan organised at Cluj “a so-called synod” of Greek-Catholic clerics who “unanimously” asked to join Orthodoxy [Niculescu, Ei mă consideră făcător de minuni, #73613]. Boca reported to the patriarch on the progress of “his mission regarding the Greek-Catholics”, and he clashed with the Bishop of Oradea, who tacitly encouraged them. Bălan also distributed American Church World Service aid. After Boca’s imprisonment at Oradea he returned to Prislop and resumed restoring the monastery, while “rumours continue to circulate about his supposed magical powers”, healings, visions and prophecies [#73613]. Niculescu adds that he was defrocked in 1955 and later sentenced to forced labour for “abuse of office” [#73613].

Present-Day Geopolitics: the “War of Churches”

The Keshe document Vatican: Why Wars Never End – Ukraine, War of Churches is an excerpt from KSW 421–422 with time codes. It warns that the “summary has not been checked by KF”. It claims that “the Pope was lusting after the gold in the Russian Orthodox Church, which has more wealth than the Catholic Church”. It says that when Keshe saw the photograph of the Pope at the Russian embassy in Rome on 23 February 2022, “I knew that it was a war between the two Churches”, and that by the visit the Pope “accepted the defeat of the Vatican” and agreed “to underwrite all the damages and costs of the war”. The same document claims the Vatican carried out a “corporate takeover” of the Church of England, says that “the war you see today in Ukraine, really goes back to the wars between different divisions of Christianity”, and claims the Vatican collaborates financially with “the Rothschild’s family”, adding: “This is not conspiracy theory, but a deeper understanding of actual events taking place” [Keshe, Vatican: Why Wars Never End, #378512].

Avro Manhattan made a structurally similar claim about the 1920s. His chapter “The Catholic Church Welcomes the Rise of Bolshevism” summarises: “Secret negotiations with Lenin. She plans to replace the Orthodox Church, and prepares to administer the latter’s wealth — Failure of the Vatican-Kremlin deal”. He says papal commissions entered Bolshevik Russia “disguised as famine-relief missions” [Manhattan, The Vatican Billions, #64831, ch. 16]. A third text circulates in Romanian Orthodox circles, the anonymous Super-Memorandum. It alleges a secret agreement signed at Strasbourg on 25–29 June 2014 among the EU, Greece, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Orthodox churches, Russia and Cyprus, to bring in a syncretic “Masonic world super-religion” between 2016 and 2020 [Unknown, Super-Memorandumul, #48878]. It is reported here as a text circulating in those circles; no other work in the library documents the agreement it describes.

Key points

• Philotheus of Pskov called the Muscovite ruler “the sole Emperor of the Christians”. Grey judges that the Third Rome idea made Russians “arrogant and complacent”.
• The raskol was a dispute over “correct” ritual. Nikon said he was still patriarch “but not in Moscow”. The Old Believers kept pre-schism icons with merchant patronage (Ryabushinsky, Morozov).
• Peter’s Synod (1721–1917) replaced the patriarchate. The synodal church excommunicated Tolstoy in 1901.
• Ioniţoiu claims Hossu was offered the patriarchate in January 1948 and that Marina was installed as Dej’s man. Wikipedia RO confirms that Marina had sheltered Dej and records Decree 358/1948 and the bishops’ deaths in prison.
• The Teoctist volume counter-claims that “the Securitate collaborated with the Church”. Niculescu documents Bălan’s and Boca’s role in absorbing the Greek-Catholics.
• Wurmbrand testifies to mutual infiltration of church and police, to a $10,000 ransom and to his 1966 Senate testimony.
• Manhattan (1920s) and Keshe (2022) both say the Vatican seeks the Orthodox Church’s wealth. Keshe calls Ukraine a “war between the two Churches”, in an excerpt the Keshe Foundation itself has not checked.