"This would be a great event," said Natalia Narochnitskaya, deputy head of the State Duma's international committee and president of the Historical Perspective Foundation, a non-governmental organization. "The Russian people have risen to this historic challenge."
The ROCOR approved a resolution at its All-Diaspora Council Friday to reunify with the Moscow Patriarchate, the move that lays the groundwork for a canonical decision on the matter. According to the resolution, the ROCOR could be a self-governed branch within the Moscow Patriarchate, similar to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Narochnitskaya said the resolution was the Council's main outcome.
"The Church, as Corpus Christi, will be united, even though as an institution it will have some organizational specifics," she said, adding that it was not important how long the process might take.
Revolutions in 1917 and the ensuing Civil War in Russia caused a split in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s, when some top clergy in exile refused to be subordinated to Church leaders who allegedly collaborated with the Communists.
Narochnitskaya said it was extremely important for a nation to reach internal accord and end a schism. She said reunification would help Russia bolster its spiritual linchpin, which holds everything together, turning a territory with natural resources into a state and an agglomeration of people into a nation.
"We have made a spiritual effort, crucial for Russia's further existence," she said.
Narochnitskaya said the ROC's membership in the World Council of Churches, a liberal ecumenical movement that brings together more than 340 churches, denominations, and fellowships in more than 100 countries, was not an obstacle to the Orthodox Church's reunification.
She dismissed some of ROCOR officials' criticism of the ROC for contacts with the state throughout the Soviet era, saying it was impossible to live in a state without interacting with it.
Norochnitskaya said the ROC, on the contrary, helped people in the former Soviet Union preserve their faith.
"We have always been grateful to them [ROC clergy], as they preserved in love and faith the Russia we have lost," the MP said.
She said joining together modern Russia and a Russia remembered and preserved by Russian emigrants was an objective facing the present generation.
