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Defenders of the church point out that the alternative was complete extirpation, and thus that keeping the church, any church, alive was a factor that outweighed the humiliation.

What the mild, shy, and retiring Alexei II inherited, therefore, was a college of bishops steeped in collaboration with the atheist state and a pastoral priesthood discredited among the people.

There were exceptions, wandering priests without parishes who preached and dodged arrest, or failed to do so and were sent to the labor camps. There were ascetics who withdrew to the monasteries to keep the faith alive by self-denial and prayer, but these hardly ever met the masses of the people.

In the aftermath of the collapse of Communism the opportunity occurred for a great renaissance, a rebirth that would put the church and the word of the Gospel back at the center of the lives of the traditionally deeply religious Russian people.

Instead the turning back to religion was experienced by the newer churches, vigorous, vibrant, dedicated, and prepared to go and preach to the people where they lived and worked. The Pentecostalists multiplied, the American missionaries poured in with their Baptism, Mormonism, and Seventh-Day Adventism. The reaction of the Russian Orthodox leadership was to beg Moscow for a ban on foreign preachers.

Its defenders argued that root-and-branch reform of the Orthodox hierarchy was impossible because the lower levels were also dross. The seminary-trained priests were of poor caliber, spoke in the archaic language of the scriptures, were possessed of pedantic or didactic speech, and had no training in non-academic public delivery. Their sermons were delivered to captive audiences, few in number and elderly in years.

The opportunity missed was vast, for as dialectical materialism was proved a false god and as democracy and capitalism failed to provide for the body, let alone the soul, the appetite for comfort was pan-national and profound. It went largely unanswered. Instead of sending out its best younger priests on missionary work, to proselytize for the faith and spread the word, the Orthodox Church sat in bishoprics, monasteries, and seminaries waiting for the people. Few came.

If a passionate and inspirational leadership was desperately needed after the fall of Communism, the mild scholar Alexei II was not the man to provide it. His election was a compromise between the various factions among the bishops, a man who, the inadequate hierarchs hoped, would not make waves.

Yet despite the burden he inherited and his own personal lack of charisma, Alexei II was not without some reforming instinct, which took courage. He did three important things.

His first reform was to divide the land of Russia int

o one hundred bishoprics, each far smaller than in the past. This enabled him to create new and younger bishops from among the best and most motivated priests, the least tarred by the brush of collaboration with the defunct KGB. Then he visited every see, making himself more visible to the people than any patriarch in history.

Second, he silenced the violent anti-Semitic outpourings of Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg and made plain that any bishop preferring to offer hatred of man above love of God as his message to the faithful would depart his office. Ioann died in 1995, still privately railing against the Jews and Alexei II.

Finally he gave his personal sanction, over considerable opposition to Father Gregor Rusakov, a charismatic young priest who steadfastly refused to accept either a parish of his own or the discipline of the bishops through whose territory he moved on his itinerant pastoral mission. Many a Patriarch would have condemned the maverick monk and forbidden him the pulpit, but Alexei II had refused to take this path, preferring to accept the risk of giving the nomad priest his head. With his moving and passionate oratory Father Gregor reached out to the young and the agnostic, something that the bishops were failing to do.

One night in early November 1999 the gentle-mannered Patriarch was disturbed at his prayers just before midnight with the news that an emissary from London was waiting at the street door and asking for an audience.

The Patriarch was dressed in a plain gray cassock. He rose from his knees and crossed the floor of his small private chapel to take the letter from the hand of his secretary.

The missive was on the letterhead of the London bishopric, based in Kensington, and he recognized the signature of his friend Metropolitan Anthony. Nevertheless he frowned in perplexity that his colleague should contact him in such an unusual way.

The letter was in Russian, which Bishop Anthony both spoke and wrote. It asked his brother in Christ to receive as a matter of some urgency a man who bore news that concerned the church, news of great confidentiality and very disturbing.

The Patriarch folded the letter and glanced at his secretary.

“Where is he?”

“On the pavement, Holiness. He came by taxi.”

“He is a priest?”

“Yes, Holiness.”

The Patriarch sighed.

“Let him be admitted. You may return to your sleep. I will see him in my study. In ten minutes.”

The Cossack guard on night duty received a whispered command from the secretary and reopened the street door. He glanced at the gray taxi from Central City Cabs and the black-clad priest beside it.

“His Holiness will see you, Father,” he said. The priest paid off the cab.

Inside the house he was shown to a small waiting room. After ten minutes a plump priest entered and murmured: “Please come with me.”

The visitor was shown into a room that was clearly the study of a scholar. Apart from one exquisite Rublev icon on a white plaster wall, the room was adorned only with shelving on which row upon row of ancient books gleamed in the light from a table lamp on a desk. Behind the desk sat Patriarch Alexei. He gestured his guest to a chair.

“Father Maxim, would you bring us refreshments. Coffee? Yes, coffee for two, and some biscuits. You will take Communion in the morning, Father? Yes? Then there is just time for a biscuit before midnight.”

The plump valet/butler withdrew.