It has been a bad week for those Irish Catholics who believed their prayers for the "Conversion of Russia" had been answered. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Alexy II, has announced that Pope John Paul II is "not welcome" in Russia, Georgia's Patriarch Ilya II barred his faithful from attending the papal Mass in Tbilisi yesterday and an Irish priest in the Volga town of Syzran began a struggle to stop the civil authorities taking control of his parish.
A strong anti-Roman Catholic strain has always existed in the Orthodox churches of the former Soviet Union. In the great monastery of Sergiev Posad north of Moscow, for example, a large oil painting depicts the Roman Catholic Church's clergy and prelates being consumed by the fires of hell after the Last Judgment.
This long-standing antipathy was reflected in Patriarch Ilya's admonishing of Orthodox believers that it would be "inadmissible" to attend Pope John Paul's Mass in Tbilisi's Palace of Sport. Orthodox believers observed the Patriarch's instructions and the attendance at the ceremony was significantly reduced. President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former leading member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ignored the Patriarch's call and attended yesterday's Mass.
In Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, declared the Pope to be unwelcome in Russia. He accused the Roman Catholic Church of seeking to gain members in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. "This sort of thing should not be happening between sister churches, which the Vatican considers us to be," he said.
There is tension between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church in western Ukraine, where churches and church property given to the Orthodox Church by Stalin are being claimed back by local Catholics.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been a strong backer of a controversial new law on religious observance, which favours Orthodoxy, Islam and Buddhism over "non-indigenous" religions such as Roman Catholicism, Judaism and Protestantism. This law placed Roman Catholics in Syzran in a similar situation to their co-religionists in China, according to the local priest, Father Philip Andrews, who is a nephew of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr David Andrews.
The law requires Roman Catholic parishes to undergo a process of registration, and in Syzran, according to Father Andrews, the authorities have refused to register the parish unless it makes significant changes to its statutes, which would remove it from the authority of the local bishop and give the civil authorities rights over church property.
The consequences of such political decisions were, according to Father Andrews, that the Samara regional authorities were promoting a weakening of Catholic structures in Russia. "This is the typical Chinese model, yes to Catholics, but no to any outside control, no to the Vatican."