58. Единоверие

Some of the so-called Old Believers of the clerical sense, accepting priests who had fled from the Orthodox Church, felt dependent on it and wanted to unite with it. Such was the Starodub monk Nicodemus. At his initiative, in 1783, 1,500 Old Believers drew up and signed a petition to the Holy Synod to reunite them with the Orthodox Church, so that oaths and censures would be removed from them as former schismatics, that they would be allowed to perform divine services according to old printed books and in observance of the old rituals, and that they would be given a special bishop who would depend directly on the Synod. The Holy Synod recognized the appointment of a special bishop for the Old Believers as inconvenient, but allowed local bishops to appoint priests for the Old Believers who wanted to unite with the Church who could perform divine services for them using old printed books and in compliance with their rituals. These Old Believers were called concordants. After the “consent” was consolidated in Starodubye, it began to appear in Irgiz, where its zealous distributor was the famous abbot of the Verkhne-Preobrazhensky Monastery, Monk Sergius, in the Nizhny Novgorod diocese, in Kazan and St. Petersburg. For those who accepted “consent,” their chapels were transformed into churches, new churches were built, and priests were appointed. Finally, in 1799, the Moscow Old Believers also expressed a desire to accept Orthodox priests, and they specified detailed conditions for reunification with the Church in 16 points. These conditions were considered by Moscow Metropolitan Platon and, in accordance with his comments, approved by the Holy Synod and approved by Emperor Paul I in 1800. At the same time, the Old Believers who enter into an alliance with the Church are called co-religionists, and their churches are called co-religionists. The meeting of archpastors in Kazan in 1885 defined the meaning of Edinoverie: “Orthodoxy and Edinoverie are one Church; therefore, on the one hand, no one should humiliate or condemn what is blessed by the Church; and, on the other hand, co-religionists themselves must remember that co-religion lies only in union with the Orthodox Church, that without this union there is no co-religion, but there will be a schism again.” You might be interested in: