ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

A letter from the Administration of the Archdiocese to the editor of the weekly Parisian newspaper, La Pensée Russe

Dear Sir,

In your issue No. 25 (27 June 2008), page 4, La Pensée Russe published an article entitled, ‘The Archdiocese of Russian Parishes in Western Europe accuses its parishioners of slander’. We ask you to publish the following correction:

The editor of La Pensée Russe chose not to publish in full the communiqué and the declaration of the Council of the Archdiocese dated 17 June 2008. Instead, he published an article inspired by an agency dispatch which seriously misrepresented the content of this communiqué and which contained tendentious comments. The full publication of the communiqué would have given readers an opportunity not to be limited to the partisan value judgements and conclusions suggested by the article, namely: (1) that the Archdiocese was accusing ‘its’ parishioners of slander; (2) that the Archdiocese was ‘Russophobe’. On these two points we can provide the following corrections:

(1) An attentive reading of the declaration of the Council of the Archdiocese will convince the reader that it did not state anything other than that ‘certain people, generally outside the parish’ were the vehicles of ‘personal – and false – attacks’ against the elected officers of the parish at Nice. It is a fact that these attacks ‘are being spread through the press and on internet websites closely linked to the Patriarchate of Moscow and to the Russian Federation’, such as the agency Interfax-Religion.

(2) The Archdiocese is not in any way hostile to Russia, to the Russian people, or their culture. It is itself born from the terrible tragedy that afflicted the Russian people at the beginning of the twentieth century and which led some of best of its children to find refuge in the West, and, by the mysteries of Divine Providence, to sow there the seeds of a local Orthodoxy. To affirm that the Cathedral of St Nicholas at Nice is not today the property of the Russian State, but that of the local parish, does not constitute an act of ‘Russophobia’ but is simply true. It is not an act of ‘Russophobia’ to prefer to maintain our canonical ecclesial status under the omophor of the Ecumenical Patriarchate rather than under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow, but the firm choice of Archbishop Gabriel, who has placed himself in the lineage of his predecessors, all of whom were always concerned to preserve the freedom of our Archdiocese with regard to all outside pressures, whatever they might be.

For the rest, we remind you of the text of our communiqué: ‘The Council of the Archdiocese does not intend to enter here into polemic with its detractors, whoever they be, but it does emphatically denounce in the most vigorous terms this base campaign of insinuation and lies aimed at destabilising the parish of Nice and the whole diocese.’

We cannot but add here that it is regrettable that such methods should be used. Several letters have been sent to La Pensée Russe by members of the parish in Nice to sound a note other than that disseminated by your local informants, but none of these letters has been published.

Placing our confidence in the readers of La Pensée Russe, we invite them to form their own opinion by themselves by consulting our publications and our websites.

The Diocesan Administration

[This text appeared in Russian in La Pensée Russe, No. 28 (4707), 18-24 July 2008.]