Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia died near Moscow on Dec. 5 at the age of 79.His portrait was installed in Holy Assumption Cathedral in Tashkent, the main church of the Orthodox Church's Central Asian eparchy, which covers Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
More than 100 Church members gathered for the Dec. 9 service to pray for their late patriarch.
The memorial service was held on the same day of the patriarch's funeral Mass in Moscow. Father Michail Kotlyarov, senior priest at the cathedral, led the requiem Mass.
"I call you to remember the holy patriarch and his good deeds," he told worshippers, reminding them of the patriarch's visit to Central Asia in 1996, when the Central Asian eparchy celebrated its 125th anniversary. Patriarch Alexy blessed the construction of a spiritual and administration center near the cathedral, and dedicated the church in Samarqand, Uzbekistan's second-largest city.
Also that same day, Catholic Bishop Jerzy Maculewicz, apostolic administrator of Uzbekistan, offered a requiem Mass for Patriarch Alexy.
About 15 other Catholics attended the liturgy in the chapel of Sacred Heart Church, the only Catholic church in the Uzbek capital, where the bishop read out the pope's letter of condolence addressed to the Russian Orthodox Synod.
Afterward, Bishop Maculewicz told UCA News he hoped the next patriarch would be more amicable to the Catholic Church. However, the bishop said he thought the late patriarch's coolness reflected the attitude of all the higher echelons within the Russian Orthodox Church.
The late Estonian-born patriarch took office as the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1990, a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under his rule the number of monasteries increased from 18 in 1988 to more than 700 today, and churches now number nearly 30,000.
Patriarch Alexy was also known as a zealous defender of Russia. His Church strongly opposed the establishment of four Roman Catholic dioceses in Russia in 2002 and the expansion of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church considers the territories of the former Soviet Union part of its canonical area.
Like Bishop Maculewicz, Father Jaroslaw Wisniewski, parish priest in Angren, near Tashkent, told UCA News he too expects the new leadership will maintain the same policy toward the Catholic Church.
He recalled that in 2002, he, three other priests and Bishop Jerzy Mazur, who headed St. Joseph in Irkutsk diocese at the time, were deported for their active missionary work in that eastern Russian city. Divine Word Bishop Mazur now heads Elk diocese in Poland.
Father Wisniewski told UCA News he might go back to Russia but is fearful for his life, since the Russian Orthodox Church allies closely with the Russian state in attempting to control what it considers its canonical area.
The priest, a Polish Conventual Franciscan as are the bishop and all priests serving in the country, claimed the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church should be credited to the late Pope John Paul II, who helped defeat communism. Patriarch Alexy, he said, was dictated to by the Russian state, which now tries to spread Orthodoxy instead of collapsed communist ideals.
However, Father Sergey Nikolaev, vicar of Holy Assumption Cathedral, considers the late patriarch a legendary figure who restored the Church from the ruins of the collapsed Soviet Union and resisted expansion of religious sects in Russia.
"He tried to protect Russian identity from the West, which is not interested in a strong and united Russia," he said.
Father Nikolaev said another of Patriarch Alexy's major achievements was the 2007 reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church with a counterpart Church set up outside Russia by priests who fled abroad after the communists came to power in 1917.
The election of the new patriarch is planned for the end of January 2009.
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(Source: EPEP)