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By the late 19th century, the Russian Orthodox Church had grown in other areas of the United States due to the arrival of immigrants from areas of Eastern and Central Europe, many of them formerly of the Eastern Catholic Churches ("Greek Catholics"), and from the Middle East.
Below is the article summary. For the full article, see Russian Orthodox Church . Russian Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodox church of Russia, its de facto national church. In 988 Prince Vladimir of Kiev (later St. Vladimir) embraced Byzantine Orthodoxy and ordered the baptism of his population.
Apr 10, 2024 · Ukraine and its monasteries are the birthplace of the Russian Orthodox Church; both nations trace their spiritual and national origins to the Kyiv-based kingdom that was converted from...
Jan 6, 2022 · Their Christian history is long and closely entwined. The faith arrived in the ninth century in Kievan Rus, a state that spanned modern-day Belarus, Ukraine and western Russia. Russian leaders,...
- Church Slavonic
- Church Governance and Church-State Relations
- Christian vs. Pagan Beliefs and Practices
- Scholarship and Education
- Orthodoxy vs. Roman Catholicism
- Monasticism
- Clergy
- The Seventeenth-Century Church Schism
- Peter The Great's Church Reforms
- The Church in The Eighteenth Century
Whereas Roman Christianity spread in Europe in the Latin language, Christianity emanating from the eastern regions of the old Roman Empire tended to spread not in Greek, the predominant language of Constantinople prior to the Turkish conquest in the fifteenth century, but in the local languages of the peoples being proselytized. Such are the origin...
Although various ecclesiastical jurisdictions arose among the East Slavs, the focus of this article is on the Russian Church headquartered first in Moscow (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), then St. Petersburg (eighteenth century). With the official conversion to Christianity in the tenth century, Kievan Rus' (the first "state" of the East Slav...
Much has been made in scholarly literature of the "double faith" in Russia of coexisting Christian and pagan beliefs and practices. Recent scholarship has deemphasized the uniqueness of the Russian experience, noting that all Christian societies retain pre- or extra-Christian beliefs, and that Christian and native beliefs tend to blend together rat...
Theological scholarship and debate were largely absent in the Muscovite Church. Muscovy was untouched by the skeptical and questioning spirit of Renaissance scholarship. Indicative is the admonition in theStoglav to study God's law in books, because "Books are created by the Holy Spirit," the Stoglav instruction to scribes to "copy only from good t...
Orthodoxy—in Russianpravoslavie, the 'true worship'—shares with Western Christianity basic Christian sources of the first millennium after Christ: the rulings of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, the canons and writings of the church fathers of approximately the second to the eighth centuries, and the Bible. Russians had no complete Bible until the 14...
No separate "orders" evolved in Russian monasticism, although some prominent monasteries and abbots developed particular rules and customs that were emulated by other monasteries—for example, St. Sergii of Radonezh (c. 1314–1392), and his many disciples, who spread monasticism into remote territories to the north and northeast of Moscow. Two concep...
Priests—that is, churchmen ordained to celebrate the liturgy, or Mass, and deliver the sacraments—were (and are) of two types. The first is known as the "white," or secular, clergy. The second is the monastic, or "black," clergy (from the color of their robes); they are monks, called hieromonks, who conduct services in monasteries and also, as nece...
The relative unity of Muscovite Orthodoxy was shattered in the seventeenth century under pressures both domestic and foreign. Pressures included the government's growing recognition, in the wake of disastrous defeats in the early seventeenth century by Polish and Swedish troops (during Muscovy's "Time of Troubles"), that Muscovy needed to lookto we...
Peter I the Great (ruled 1682–1725) ushered in an era in which the church was fundamentally transformed: church administration effectively became a government ministry, the church lost much of its landed wealth, and a system of clerical education was established for the first time in Russia. Tsar Peter inflicted numerous reforms on his country that...
Under imperial state regulation, the church became less recognizably Muscovite. Most bishops and metropolitans appointed under Peter were Ukrainians or Belorussians. Monasteries lost territory and were more closely regulated, resulting in a reduction of monks and nuns from twenty-five thousand in 1734 to fourteen thousand in 1738. That we can begin...
The years 1894 to 1917 witnessed the gradual erosion of bonds between the Church and the emperor, whose active involvement in Orthodox Church life had been un derstood as part of the ‘sacred order of things’ since Byzantine times (Zhurnaly 1:140). The Church’s uncoupling from the state did not, however, come easily.
Mar 13, 2022 · The Ukrainian Orthodox Church became independent in 2019 by decree of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the religious authority for all Eastern Orthodox branches. That decision outraged Russian ...
