The American Orthodox Church has urged the Russian Foreign Church to unite with the Moscow Patriarchate. This call was made in the wake of the Russian patriarch's recent message to the Archbishops' Assembly of the Russian Foreign Church currently being held in New York.

The Russian Orthodox Church split up into two churches in the 1920s, after part of the clergy living abroad accused those who remained in Russia of cooperating with the Soviet authorities. Since then, the Russian church, whose spiritual center remains in Moscow, has been urging the Foreign Church to re-unite.

In an appeal to the Foreign Church's Assembly, the hierarchs of the American Church write that with Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia they grieve over the split and intend "to move towards repentance together."

This is very important, they said, since having just stepped into the 21st century people are witnessing violence and wars, droughts and hunger, the menacing reality of terrorism and the use of biological and chemical weapons. "In Western civilization, materialism and the atheism that goes with it have permeated the entire mass culture," the American Church hierarchs write.

Noting that "the Orthodox Church has inherited dissent and the split from the 20th century," the members of the American Church's Synod write that "God is calling for unity, which is necessary if we want the voice of the Orthodox religion, which is telling us to repent of our sins and make peace, to be heard by the scared and suffering mankind." (Copyright 2001 Interfax News Agency, posted 26 October 2001)