Metropolitan Vitaly Ustinov; Russian Orthodox leader in exile
Hyfler/Rosner
28 September 2006
Felix Corley
Rostislav Petrovich Ustinov, priest: born St Petersburg 18
March 1910; clothed a monk 1939, taking the name Vitaly;
ordained priest 1941; Bishop of Brazil 1951-54; Bishop of
Edmonton 1954-57; Archbishop of Montreal 1957-86; First
Hierarch of Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia
1986-2001, died Magog, Quebec 25 September 2006.
For the last 15 years of the 20th century, the aged
Metropolitan Vitaly headed the Russian Orthodox Church
Outside Russia (Rocor). This proud but dwindling church
defiantly traced its history back to Patriarch Tikhon, the
last non-Soviet-chosen head of the Moscow Patriarchate who
blessed the émigré church's escape from Moscow's control in
the 1920s as the Soviet authorities moved to crush the
Patriarchate at home.
Rocor revered the "martyred" Russian imperial family,
resisted what it regarded as the "heresy" of ecumenism and
from afar scorned what it viewed as the ungodly
collaboration of the Moscow Patriarchate's bishops and
priests with the Soviet authorities.
Even in his nineties in retirement, Vitaly fought a
rearguard action to resist Rocor's growing rapprochement
with the Moscow Patriarchate launched by his successors. "I
can calmly assert, with a clear conscience," Vitaly declared
in 2004, defending his decision to split from his erstwhile
colleagues, "that we have remained faithful to the ideology
and principles of the Russian Orthodox Church and of that
free part of Her which was created by Patriarch Tikhon."
Rostislav Ustinov was born in 1910 into a military family in
the Russian imperial capital St Petersburg. In 1920, as the
civil war raged between Reds and Whites, Ustinov's family
sent him to the military school founded in Crimea by the
White general Pyotr Wrangel. The boy joined what he later
described as the "glorious" White forces, but as their cause
crumbled all 650 cadets were evacuated to Constantinople.
"Within the depths of my soul," he later recalled, "I felt
and realised that I was beholding my native land for the
last time, until it vanished beyond the horizon."
The Cadet Corps - among them the young Ustinov - was
relocated to Yugoslavia, where many Russian monarchist
émigrés settled. In 1923, his mother took him back to
Constantinople and then to Paris, where he completed his
schooling. After a spell in the French cavalry he decided to
follow his vocation and in 1938 he entered the Monastery of
St Job in the Carpathians (then in Czechoslovakia). The
following year he became a monk, taking the name Vitaly. By
now Central Europe was engulfed in war and was soon invaded
by Nazi forces. In 1941, in the Slovak city of Bratislava,
Fr Vitaly was ordained by Metropolitan Seraphim of Berlin
and assigned to minister in two towns on the Polish border.
However, if conditions were not too uncongenial for
anti-Bolshevik Russian Orthodox under Nazi rule, the
imminent Red Army invasion forced the monks to flee. Vitaly
ended up in Berlin, ministering to Russian forced labourers
and prisoners of war in a tuberculosis-ridden camp near the
Nazi capital. But as the Red Army moved closer to Berlin he
and a fellow priest fled to Hamburg, where the two did their
best to save émigré Russians from forced repatriation to the
Soviet Union and certain death.
In a barracks in the Fischbeck displaced persons' camp -
where most of the inmates were Orthodox - he established a
makeshift chapel and theology courses for young men. "The
camp church was the centre of life and growth in the
Orthodox faith for young and old alike," one inmate who
later became a priest recalled. "Its spiritual leaders
enjoyed the common love and respect of all."
In 1947 Vitaly came to London to head the Rocor parish. He
and Fr Anthony Bloom of the Moscow Patriarchate alternated
their Sunday services at a dilapidated Anglican church on
Buckingham Palace Road, but relations between them were
hardly cordial. Bloom once asked Vitaly what he thought of
him. "If I wanted to be polite I would say: 'You are not a
priest'," Vitaly responded. "But I will give you a straight
answer: 'If you are under Moscow, you are a priest of
Satan!' "
Vitaly was consecrated as a bishop in 1951 in London and
transferred to Sao Paolo, Brazil, where he founded a small
orphanage for boys. In 1954 he became Bishop of Edmonton,
and in 1957 Archbishop of Montreal. There he acquired and
renovated the huge St Nicholas' Cathedral but, as before, he
preferred to live in a small monastic community he
established in Mansonville in rural Quebec.
After the death in 1985 of Rocor's leader, Metropolitan
Philaret Voznesensky, the Council of Bishops met in New York
in 1986 to choose his successor. After several tied ballots,
Vitaly was chosen by lot.
As Communism began to crumble in Russia in the late 1980s -
and with it the monopoly of the Moscow Patriarchate - Vitaly
eagerly welcomed defectors within Russia, setting up
parallel parishes and dioceses. But many in Rocor were wary,
fearing an unstable network of parishes in Russia would
discredit the church.
Suffering memory loss, Vitaly retired in 2001, 50 years
after his consecration. But within weeks he regretted the
move, publicly attacking his successor, Metropolitan Laurus.
Vitaly led his faithful followers into schism. "There came a
time when I recognised that I was left all alone," he
explained:
I had the choice of writing the final chapter of the Church
Abroad or of embarking upon the road once more, and of again
carrying away the true Orthodox Church to freedom with me.
Our church became small, but preserved her crystal-like
purity.
Vitaly's final years were marred by murky goings-on at his
monastery, with allegations that his entourage was holding
him hostage and faking his signature on church decisions.
Like many splinter religious communities, his church came to
fight not so much to preserve the purity of its faith as to
engage in bitter infighting.
Felix Corley