The Orthodox Church and the Communist State in Bulgaria (1944 – 1989)
Author: Momchil Metodiev
Published by the Institute for Studies of the Recent Past, Open Society Institute and Ciela Publishers
Sofia 2010
This book is result of the extensive research of Momchil Metodiev conducted as part of the Communism Research Project.
ISBN: 978-954-28-0649-3
Summary
The communist state, in line with its policy towards all religions, sought to marginalise the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and reduce it to an insignificant institution that did little more than perform just a few “rituals”.
In the later years of communism, the ideologists of the system demanded active co-operation from the Church in two main areas. The first was support for the regime in spreading “patriotic propaganda” among Bulgarian expatriates. The second was co-operation in pushing propaganda for the communist system in general. The policy of the communist state towards the Church falls into three main periods. The first began right after September 1944 and ended in the mid-1950s. This period saw physical persecution of the intellectual elite of the clergy. When Stalin died in 1953, a relative degree of political liberalisation followed, in turn extending to a more moderate attitude to the Church.
The second period was from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, when the Church was allowed to operate in relative freedom provided that it remained “apolitical” and abstained from “religious propaganda”, leaving the field open to the state to propagate its “scientific and atheist worldview”.
The third period, which began in the early 1970s and continued until the end of the communist regime, was dominated by a campaign for enforcement of civil rituals, meaning a return to soft administrative repression, mainly against local clergy.
STATE POLICY TOWARDS THE BULGARIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH
The overall attitude of the communist regime to the Church was spelt out most clearly in a notorious speech by the communist dictator of the time, Georgi Dimitrov, at the celebration of the 1000-year anniversary of Bulgaria”s most famous saint John of Rila, delivered at Rila Monastery on May 26 1946. While showing utter contempt for the Church as an institution, the speech also outlined the key points of state policy on religion. The Church was given credit only for having preserved the Bulgarian national identity under foreign occupation. At the same time, the speech made a clear distinction between “progressive” and “conservative” clergy, demanding loyalty to the new system from the “progressives” and threatening the “conservatives” with retribution.
The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the drafting of the main state documents that would shape state policy towards the Orthodox Church. Most important was the 1949 law on religious denominations, which proclaimed religious freedoms (in the beginning of each article) and then limited them (in the second sentence in each article). The policy of “separation of church and state”, proclaimed in the late 1940s, meant limiting the visibility of the church in society, including by legislating civil marriage as the only legal form (1945), removal of religion from the school curriculum (1945), unification of the two existing church seminaries (1950), and separation of the Academy of Theology from the State University and placing it as a separate university under the Synod of the Church. During the same period, the church was affected by the laws on nationalisation of agricultural land. The ensuing shortage of money was compensated for by a state subsidy, paid annually through the Committee for Church Affairs.
By the mid-1950s, the campaign against the Orthodox Church was conducted at central party and state leadership level. The CC BCP Politburo endorsed several resolutions to intensify atheist propaganda. After that period, gradually the policy on the Church was put in the hands of secondary state institutions – mainly the Committee for Church Affairs and State Security. The position of the Committee for Church Affairs was undisputed during the term of Mikhail Kyuchukov. As Chairman of the Committee, Kyuchukov was one of the architects of the policy to gradually marginalise the Church. In the late 1960s, State Security questioned the monopoly of the Committee, especially in metropolitan promotions, which led to a bureaucratic war between the two institutions. State Security won, and after this the chairmen of the Committee were figureheads (Stoino Barumov and Lyubomir Popov), while the strong man in the Committee in the late 1970s was Hristo Marinchev, who worked under cover as chief of division in the Committee for Church Affairs, while at the same time being Deputy Head of the Cultural-Historical Division in the Intelligence Department of State Security. Throughout the Communist period, two divisions of State Security were in charge of church and clerical activity. Division Three of the Sixth Department concentrated on control of the clergy, including recruitment of promising clerics. The Intelligence Department”s task was to involve clergy in the regime”s foreign policy and propaganda.
For the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the most traumatic experience was the policy of enforcement of civil rituals, which dominated the third period of church-state relations. In 1962, the state commissioned a large-scale survey of Bulgarians” attitudes towards religion. The results were published as late as 1968 under the title “The Process of Overcoming Religion in Bulgaria” and they were a genuine surprise. Only 35 per cent of the population described themselves as religious, mainly from the less educated, elderly, rural, and female population. At the same time, the survey revealed that more than 80 per cent of funerals were held with religious rites, more than 52 per cent of newborns were baptised, and religious weddings amounted to 36 per cent.
The state was quick to react to the survey. By the mid-1970s, a series of instructions were adopted to limit permission for church rituals, and soon this policy culminated in a campaign to enforce new civil rituals. The campaign had two prongs: the first was to enforce civil rituals in the strict sense of the word “civil marriages”, civil “baptisms”, and civil funerals created as substitutes for the equivalent religious rituals. Gradually, in the early 1980s the campaign evolved into coming up with a new “socialist holiday system” aimed at eradicating holidays based on religious traditions and replacing them with so-called “rethought holidays”.
This campaign had mixed results. In the 1980 the Committee for Church Affairs reported that 40.7 per cent of all newborns were baptised, while only 4.52 per cent of marriages were religious. Religious funerals remained the most popular religious ritual, but in the same year they dropped to 47.9 per cent of all funerals. The new policy caused many conflicts at local level, and many priests complained to their metropolitans of administrative harassment. The practice of grandparents having their grandchildren baptised in church, ostensibly without the consent of the children”s parents, became relatively widespread.
THE REPRESSED CHURCH (1944 – MIDDLE OF THE 1950s)
The period from 1944 to the middle of the 1950s was dominated by repressive state policy, of varying intensity in different years. When the communists seized power, they adopted a relatively soft approach to the senior clergy (metropolitans and bishops) and to the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Exarchate, which at time consisted of 10 metropolitans elected to life-long terms and headed since 1915 by chairman ad interim. In general, the state abstained from taking brutal measures against the senior clergy, such as disbanding the Holy Synod, forcing some metropolitans to retire or closing down some dioceses, although these options were seriously discussed.
Initially, the government supported the idea of elevating the status of the Bulgarian Exarchate to a Patriarchate. This step was also endorsed by the Moscow Patriarchate, with the clear aim of using the new political situation to create satellite churches around the Russian church as a counterbalance against the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Vatican. On January 21 1945, Metropolitan of Sofia Stephen was elected as the new Exarch. On February 22 1945, the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephalous status to the Bulgarian Exarchate, thus officially lifting the schism imposed on the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1872.
The elevation of the status of the Exarch to Patriarch caused serious discord between Exarch Stephen and members of the Holy Synod. The Synod insisted that the Ecumenical Patriarchate should have been consulted, but Exarch Stephen, relying on his good terms with the Bulgarian state and Moscow Patriarchate, tried to bypass the Synod. In August 1948, Exarch Stephen took part in the Moscow meeting of the Orthodox Churches, where he expected to be enthroned as the new Patriarch. The Synod, however, did not give its consent, causing a dramatic deterioration in relations with Stephen, who officially resigned on August 8 1948. Surprisingly for him, his resignation was unanimously approved by the Synod and subsequently by the government. After his resignation, the Holy Synod returned to the synodal system of government, headed in the following six years by a chairman ad interim. The government approved Stephen”s resignation because, after the Moscow meeting, Orthodox churches lost their significance in Moscow”s great game. The meeting failed to establish an “Orthodox Vatican” because the Patriarchates of Constantinople and other traditional cathedras were unwilling to accept the leadership of Moscow and its idea to set up a united centre directed against Rome and capitalist countries. This failure opened the door for a new campaign of repression against Orthodox clergy in Soviet Russia, and Bulgaria”s government quickly accepted the same policy. The period of 1948-1949 became the most brutal years in church-state relations. On November 8 1948, one of most vocal anti-communist members of the Synod, Nevrokop metropolitan Boris, was murdered by an unfrocked priest after church liturgy.
This event could be seen as the turning point in state-church relations and as the beginning of a new repressive campaign, mainly affecting local clergy. In autumn 1948, the Committee for Church Affairs asked the local authorities to compile and send a written record for every local priest. Priests were divided into eight different categories on the basis of their attitudes to the regime. The Committee collected records for 2063 local priests. Of these, 1600 were characterised as unfavourable to various extents towards the regime, whereas only 400 priests were assessed positively. Those records became the basis for the repressive campaign that followed, which resulted in at least 10 per cent of all priests (between 250 to 300 out of a total of 2500 priests at that time) being imprisoned or sent to labour camps. The state”s approach to the senior clergy was much more cautious, indirect evidence of the influence of the church at the time. The state”s main goal became breaking the unity of the Synod and winning the loyalty of some of its key members. It was at this time that the new Statute of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was negotiated, entering into force on January 4 1951. In the negotiations, the Synod and its chairman ad interim, Vratsa Metropolitan Paisii, succeeded in overcoming state resistance and nominally preserving church autonomy, endorsing a democratic Statute and retaining the life-long term of metropolitans, which at that time was viewed as an obstacle to direct state interference.
At the same Synod meeting on January 4 1951, Paisii was forced to resign as chairman ad interim and was succeeded by Plovdiv Metropolitan Kyril, who became the favourite of the state. After carefully orchestrated elections of the whole church pyramid, on May 10 1953 Kyril was elected as the first Patriarch of the modern autocephalous Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The selection of Kyril was not accepted wholeheartedly by all metropolitans. Five of them tried unsuccessfully to block his election as Patriarch and the election of bishop Pimen as the new Metropolitan of Nevrokop in 1952, because Pimen secured the majority of votes in the Synod favourable to the future patriarch. State Security documents prove that its most important agent among metropolitans in that period had the codename PATRIARCH. In future years, the opposition remained united and, although it was not able to divert the overall direction of church-state relations, it was influential enough to question the authority of the Patriarch. From this unstable situation evolved a certain model of Church-state relations, personalised by Patriarch Kyril and Committee for Church Affairs chairman Mikhail Kyuchukov. The essence of this model was commitment of the state to maintain and increase the prestige of the Patriarch, including by taking into consideration his opinion in metropolitan nominations and making small concessions to the opposition, while at the same time the state carried out active atheist propaganda and imposed administrative restrictions on local clergy.
THE PROVINCIAL CHURCH: PATRIARCH KYRIL (1953-1971)
Paradoxically, provincialism and isolation became the main characteristics of the newly-established Bulgarian Patriarchate. The elevation of the Patriarchate without having consulted Constantinople once again soured relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and they remained tense to the end of the period, although in 1961 they were officially resolved. The Bulgarian Patriarchate became fully dependent on the Moscow Patriarchate and the Bulgarian communist state. This isolation is an important factor because it was imposed in the most crucial period of church-state relations, when the opposition in the Synod was still strong but was unable to rely on foreign support.
During Kyril”s term, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was successfully marginalised through effective administrative repression of local clergy and through several important reforms that affected church life in the next few decades. At the end of 1968, the Synod implemented a calendar reform, rejecting the traditional Julian calendar and accepting the so-called “neo-Julian calendar” (in fact the Gregorian calendar), already adopted in civil practice. The reform was undertaken with a view to supporting attempts by the Russian church to convert to the new calendar and to facilitate foreign contacts and ecumenical activity by the Bulgarian church. While the new calendar was clearly much more convenient, this reform did not affect the date of celebration of a number of church holidays also observed as state holidays (e.g. The Day of St. St. Cyril and Methodius, celebrated as the Day of Slavonic Alphabet). The calendar reform, implemented so clandestinely that it was practically secret from the public, caused a schism within the Bulgarian church when a small group of dissidents separated in a small monastery near Sofia and organised something rather like an underground church.
Similar steps included limitations on religious education, publications and monasticism. The state strictly controlled the curricula of the Seminary and the Theological academy, anti-communist teachers and students were fired, and the teaching institutions were infiltrated with many State Security agents. Religious publications were limited to 1600 pages a year, and their content was subject to censorship. In 1956 all libraries were “cleared” of “reactionary books” by order of the Committee for Church Affairs.
The fate of the monastic communities was similar. In 1961, Rila, the main monastery of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, was nationalised and turned into a national museum. In 1968, a small monastic community was allowed to return to the monastery but the monks were allowed to perform religious services only when no tourists were present. The same happened to many churches, especially in the countryside. Urbanisation and modernisation led to the abandonment of many village churches, while at the same the state did not allow new religious buildings to be erected in the cities. Although there was no written ban on construction of new churches, it was enforced in effect because any such attempt met the quiet disagreement of local authorities and the Committee for Church Affairs.
In the middle of the 1960s, a restriction on attendance of church services at Easter was enforced. On the night of Easter 1965, militia cordoned off the main church in Sofia, Alexander Nevsky. Attendance of the church service was allowed only with special permission, distributed beforehand among the faithful. The official version was that the restriction had been requested by the clergy, with the consent of Patriarch Kyril, because in previous years groups of youths had come early to the church and caused turmoil when the Patriarch served the liturgy. In the following years, barred from Alexander Nevsky, the groups of youths moved on to other churches, creating turmoil and leading the militia cordons being extended. The same happened in other Bulgarian cities, and finally in the early 1970s all big churches were cordoned off for the Easter liturgy, a practice that remained in effect until the end of the communist period.
THE CHURCH SPLIT: PATRIARCH MAXIM
Patriarch Kyril died on March 7 1971. On the next day, the CC BCP Politburo approved a resolution, proposed by the Committee for Church Affairs, that the Committee should endorse and promote as the new Patriarch the Lovech Metropolitan Maxim. Four months later, Maxim was elected as the new Patriarch at a Church Council held on July 4 1971. Because of the communist party”s backing for Maxim, his election was disputed both at that time and in the early 1990s, becoming the main reason for the schism in the Synod after the collapse of communism. On the basis of one main argument, Maxim”s opponents disputed the legitimacy of the Council that had elected the new Patriarch. According to the Statute of the Bulgarian church, the election Council consisted of members elected by diocesan electors, whose term of office was four years. The same diocesan electors also elected new metropolitans in every diocese. Those electors were elected in 1952 and despite the fact that their term of office expired in 1956, in ensuing years it was prolonged by internal orders of the Synod. Maxim”s opponents claimed that because the diocesan electors were illegitimate, the election Council also had been illegitimate. On the basis of this argument, the convocation of the Council was disputed in April 1971 by three members of the Synod – the metropolitans of Vratsa, Paisii; of Varna, Joseph; and of Nevrokop, Pimen. While the motivation of the first two metropolitans was most likely fair and intended to restore the church electoral pyramid, the motivation of the third metropolitan, Pimen, was most likely personal. Having been the favourite of the regime in previous years, Pimen was one of the strongest contenders for the patriarchal throne.
The Committee for Church Affairs nominated Maxim for reasons arising from the context of the institutional struggle at the time between the Committee and State Security. On the other hand, the communist state strongly opposed the idea of new elections of the whole church pyramid because to do so would have revived the parish structures. By the end of the communist period, such elections still had not been held, which completely violated the spirit of the Statute of the Bulgarian church and undermined the legitimacy of every metropolitan elected after 1956. In 1990, the only metropolitan who was elected according to the letter but not of the spirit of the Statute was Pimen. That was why he was designated to lead the so-called Alternative Synod.
The way Maxim was elected as Patriarch permanently damaged his authority in the Synod. By the end of the communist period, he had to balance between two wings within the senior clergy. The first is that of the old metropolitans, whose main agenda was to keep alive and possibly invigorate the church tradition. The other is the wing of the “progressive” metropolitans, who were close to the regime and who gradually became an alternative power centre within the Synod. Paradoxically, this situation of divided high clergy led to the revival of the collegial character of the Synod, which had been successfully despoiled during Kyril”s term. The result was that Varna Metropolitan Joseph, the last member of the Synod elected before 1944, became even more influential during Maxim”s term compared to the term of his predecessor. The influence of the “reactionaries” could be seen in the attempt by the Synod to persuade the state of the necessity for a new edition of the Bible. Although formally this attempt was successful and the Bible was published in 1982, the state skillfully limited possible “negative consequences” by manipulating the circulation and price of the new edition. During his term, Maxim also successfully rescued the St. Ivan Rilski church in the city of Pernik, which was marked for demolition because it was too close to the new party headquarters in the city centre.
Maxim”s term also coincided with the new campaign to enforce civil rituals. Although the Synod tried to resist the campaign, all it was able to do was to complain regularly but futilely to the Committee for Church Affairs.
Unlike his predecessor, Maxim was not always consulted about the nominations of future metropolitans, and this led to the most serious clash between the church and state in 1974. When Vratsa Metropolitan Paisii died that year, the state decided to support bishop Kalinik as the “official candidate”. Despite this, diocesan electors chose Bishop Arsenii as their candidate, presenting him to the Synod for endorsement. Finally, the elections were annulled, opening the way for Kalinik to be enthroned as the new Vratsa Metropolitan. In the early 1990s, Kalinik became one of the most influential members of the Alternative Synod.
Although Maxim was widely criticised after 1990, it could be concluded that in general he tried to keep alive religious traditions, without confronting the state directly. He also epitomises the bureaucratic skills that the high clergy developed during the 1970s and 1980s in dealing with the communist state.
THE STATE CHURCH: ECUMENICAL ACTIVITY
Participation of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in ecumenical organisations (the World Council of Churches, Christian Peace Conference and Conference of European Churches) was initiated, implemented and guided by the communist state, mainly by State Security. If, in popular perceptions, State Security is classified as a state within the state, then the ecumenical activity could be classified as a Church within the Church, and as the forerunner of the schism in the early 1990s. Usually branded in documents as a “peacemaking” activity, participation of the Bulgarian church in ecumenical organisations was not inspired by the idea of interdenominational dialogue and co-operation. Rather it was inspired by the communist state, which wanted to infiltrate the World Council of Churches and push it into the ranks of international organisations that could be used for communist propaganda, especially in the so-called Third World.
Churches from the socialist countries (with the exception of Roman Catholic churches) joined the World Council of Churches in 1961. In the late 1950s, the WCC already had become an “object for penetration” of the Bulgarian State Security services. They also selected the first Bulgarian participants to attend ecumenical training courses in the early 1960s.
The socialist countries also established a well-organised system of co-ordination and unity of action in the ecumenical organisations. At state level, this policy was co-ordinated by the Committees for Church Affairs and the relevant State Security divisions; at church level, the co-ordination was implemented by the Divisions for Ecumenical and Peacemaking Affairs within the administration of participating churches. During the 1970s, Leningrad Metropolitan Nikodim (also known with his KGB codename ADAMANT) was placed on top of this pyramid. His Bulgarian counterpart, from the early 1970s to the end of the communist period, was Stara Zagora Metropolitan Pankratii, also known by his codename BOIKO. As a result of this co-ordination, in 1979 Bulgarian representative Todor Sabev was elected Deputy Secretary-General of the World Council of Churches. Documents prove that his election was prepared by representatives of the Russian church and that an agent codenamed DAMYANOV was recruited by Bulgarian State Security in 1952.
The ecumenical activity led to the creation of a small but influential elite of prelates and lay theologians, who gradually became an alternative centre of power within the Church. They were able to communicate directly with the state institutions and, when necessary, to manipulate the decisions of the Synod. The head of this elite was the Metropolitan of Stara Zagora, Pankratii, and included at least two other metropolitans, who were called “the junta” within the Synod. The loyalties of this group were also well-known in the World Council of Churches. Despite this, the WCC, manipulated by the representatives of the socialist countries, regularly criticised the policies of the US and Western European countries regarding the Third World countries. Only once, at the Assembly in Nairobi in 1975, was there an unsuccessful attempt to criticise the violation of religious freedoms in the Soviet Union.
THE CHURCH IN EXILE: THE AMERICAN DIOCESE AND THE ZOGRAPH MONASTERY
The history of the Bulgarian diocese in America and Australia and of the Zograph monastery on Mount Athos represents a case study of the policy of communist state towards the church. The regime”s main objective regarding the Bulgarian churches in the United States, Canada and Australia was to curb their internal democratic spirit, whereas the Zograph monastery was regarded as an important monument of culture, situated outside the country”s borders.
Formed in the late 1930s mainly by Bulgarian emigrants from Macedonia, the Bulgarian diocese in North America and Australia was organised internally and self-sustaining. After 1944, boards of trustees of these churches were controlled by anti-communist emigrants, who only nominally accepted the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. All metropolitans of the Bulgarian diocese had to perform a never-ending balancing act between the anti-communist feelings of emigrants and the expectations of the communist state to keep the churches, at very least, away from any kind of political activity. The impossibility maintaining such a balance led to several divisions within the Bulgarian diocese as a result of ethnic or political disputes, encouraged and sometimes created by the state. The election of Andrei as metropolitan of the united Bulgarian diocese in 1947 remained unrecognised until 1963. His decision to accept the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 1963 caused half of the Bulgarian parishes, dominated by Macedonian emigrants and anti-communist trustees under the leadership of Archimandrite Kyril Yonchev, to separate into an independent diocese. In 1964, Kyril Yonchev accepted the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and was ordained as a bishop. In 1977, he and his diocese moved to the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which received its autocephalous status from the Moscow Patriarchate in 1970.
In 1969 the diocese, which remained under the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, was divided between New York and Akron, Ohio, because the communist state wanted to limit the influence of Metropolitan Andrei. By the end of the communist period, the diocese of New York, which included only one parish, was headed by a metropolitan (initially Andrei and later Joseph Dikov) who was respected by the emigrants but disliked by the state. This metropolitan was kept as a façade for the emigrants but he was deprived of real power. The centre of Bulgarian church life in America was transferred to the city of Akron, Ohio, and its diocese was administered by a bishop who was credible solely from the point of view of the state. This diocese included all remaining Bulgarian parishes in the US, Canada and Australia. This situation caused perpetual disagreements between the bishop in Akron, supported by the state, and the metropolitan of New York, supported by the emigrants. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church was among the first to recognise the autocephalous status of the OCA, which resulted in the paradoxical situation of recognising the OCA but not one of its archbishops (Yonchev). This ambiguous situation continued until 1990, when the Bulgarian diocese finally was unified under the leadership of Metropolitan Joseph (Bosakov). The diocese led by Kyril Yonchev remains part of the OCA even after his death in 2007.
Unlike the diocese for America and Australia, the Western European Diocese did not cause any problems to the Bulgarian state. The Western European diocese was set up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the support of Bulgarian embassies, which carefully selected members of the boards of trustees. Formally the new diocese was established in 1986, with Simeon appointed as its metropolitan. The Zograph monastery on Mount Athos was a source of constant problems for the Bulgarian state, which regarded it as a national museum, containing important documents and manuscripts. The concept of monastic self-rule remained completely incomprehensible to the state, and became the main reason for permanent disputes. The communist state tried to preserve the Bulgarian character of the monastery, supporting it financially and organising the research at the monastery. However, several reasons were obstacles to the state achieving this aim.
The first reason was the mutual mistrust among the Bulgarian state, the Greek state and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, understandable in the context of the Cold War. The deterioration of the contacts between Bulgaria and Greece, and between Bulgarian and the Ecumenical Patriarchates, was why the monastery remained virtually closed to the Bulgarian state and church until the middle of the 1960s. As a result, the Bulgarian character of the monastery was questioned because of the scarcity of new Bulgarian monks and the election of a Romanian monk as the new abbot in 1965.
The second reason was Bulgarian monks” suspicions about the intentions of the state. The 1976 removal from office of the Romanian abbot, who was succeeded by Bulgarian monk Euthimii, did not improve ties with Bulgaria. The state, trying to monopolise all the contacts with Zograph monastery and opposing the concept of monastic self-rule, cast some of the monks as its favourites, which led to personal conflicts within the monastic community. The monks, trying to avoid the influence of the Bulgarian state, tried to establish contacts with emigrant communities. Finally, in the early 1980s the Bulgarian state succeeded in imposing its will on the monastery. As a result, the state financed the construction of two buildings in Thessaloniki, the revenue from which was given to the Zograph monastery. The suspicions of the monks towards the state were not without foundation. In 1988, Bulgarian secret services officers managed to steal, and transfer illegally to Bulgaria, the most important book preserved in the monastery – the Istoria Slavianobulgarska (the first summarized History of Bulgarians, written in late 18 century). Smuggled to Bulgaria, the book remained locked in the office of the chief of the intelligence service until 1996. The diplomatic scandal with Greece that followed when the affair became public was resolved when the book finally was returned to the monastery. This scandal symbolised the failure of the policy of the state towards the Zograph monastery and completely discredited the efforts of other state institutions and honest researchers during the communist period.
CONCLUSION
How to sum up the communist legacy of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church? Statistically, the local clergy were most affected by the marginalisation of the Church – the total number of regular priests shrunk from about 2500 in the mid-1940s to less than 1000 in 1985. The lack of regular priests was compensated for by the “holiday priests” – retired priests who served only at holidays. There was a significant, but not drastic, decline in the number of the monks – the overall number of monks and nuns declined from 440 in mid-1950s to 391 in the late 1970s. Rapid urbanisation also aggravated the marginalisation of church life. The unofficial ban on the construction of new religious buildings, combined with abandonment of many churches, destroyed the parish structure and parish life, which is the only possible foundation for influential and visible church life and organisation. This is why the policy of the communist state could be described as a policy of forced secularisation. Another important consequence was secularisation of the public image of the church, which became one of the main reasons for the deep misunderstandings between the church and society in post-communist Bulgaria.
It would be incorrect to conclude that the whole Church consciously collaborated with the communist regime, although this was clearly the case of some church prelates. Despite all the state”s efforts, by the end of the regime the Church had succeeded in retaining some autonomous life, albeit very restricted. On the other hand, it would be incorrect to conclude that the Church resisted communist pressure, because this resistance was successfully overcome by the middle of the 1950s. The most correct conclusion would be that the Church”s leadership tried, with a relative degree of success, to stay on the middle way between repression and compromise with a view to maintaining certain religious traditions.
Having kept those traditions in an atmosphere completely unfavourable to the Church, however, was not enough to revive the Church and its public image in the post-communist period. The long-disputed schism within the senior clergy in the early 1990s was proclaimed as opening the way to renew and reform the Church. In fact, it was much more a power struggle within the Synod, started by the prelates closest to the communist regime. The situation that emerged after the end of the schism is dominated by two opposite trends.
The first trend, which could be called centripetal or monarchial, made some metropolitans behave irresponsibly in the face of public expectations. Relying on the church canons for the monarchial power of the episcopacy, they disregard public criticism, claiming that it comes from lay people ignorant of church matters. On the one hand, this “feudalisation” causes constant tensions between local and senior clergy, on the other, it makes creation of unified church budget an impossible task. The high clergy”s distrust of secular people, on the third hand, has led to a lack of lay theological intelligentsia who could transmit the Church”s messages to broader public.
Despite these problems, some positive, although modest, signs of renewal can be seen. The first is that the Church finally succeeded to separate itself from the state effectively. Traumatised by its communist experience, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is persistent in asserting its apolitical attitude, to the extent that it cannot even communicate its own agenda to the state. This apolitical attitude is why the Church (so far) successfully has resisted the temptation to become an exponent and defender of nationalist causes, a syndrome that has not been avoided by other postcommunist Orthodox churches. Another sign of renewal is the appearance of small but active and well-educated groups of young people, who started to create a real Christian journalism, which tries to check and limit the “monarchial” power of the metropolitans. Another positive sign is the advent of a new generation of priests, who are much better educated and motivated than their predecessors, and who are trying to revive the real parish life.