4/27/25

If we know someone who loses a person close to them, it is an act of kindness to express sympathy for their loss. However, as Orthodox Christians there are certain limits to what is considered acceptable in offering our condolences. Recently at the death of the Pope of Rome, a number of public expressions of condolence from Orthodox leaders raised questions concerning what is appropriate

This directive from the Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad can serve to guide our God-preserved flock. 

 + Bishop Luke 

The Decision of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad

On August 20/September 2, 1932, the Synod of Bishops reached a decision on the question concerning burial services for the heterodox and, since it is insufficiently well known that it is forbidden to serve burial services for the heterodox or to have panikhidas sung for them, it has been decided to publish the following explanatory proclamation encyclically, by means of a declaration addressed to the eminent hierarchs, clergy and all the children of the Russian Church Abroad.

Preserving the purity of her Orthodox teaching and the entire divinely established order of her life, the Church from time immemorial has forbidden her bishops, clergy and laymen alike from entering into communion in prayer, whether in church or at home, with all heretics, renegades (schismatics) and those who have been excommunicated from Church society (Apostolic Canons X, XI, XLV, Synod of Laodicæa, Canon XXXIII). The strictness with which the Church protects her children from the danger of infection by any heresy has extended even to prohibiting priests to pray or to perform any sacramental action in the mere presence of heretics, with the exception only of those cases when the latter “promise to repent and abandon their heresy” (St. Timothy of Alexandria, Canon IX). At the basis of these canonical decrees lies the eternal word of Christ: “But if he (thy brother) neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto thee an heathen man and a publican” (Matt 18:17).

Being outside the Church during their lifetime, heretics and schismatics stand yet further apart from her after death, for then the very possibility of repentance and of turning to the light of Truth is closed to them. It is quite natural, therefore, that the Church cannot offer up for them the propitiatory Bloodless Sacrifice or, in general, any purifying prayer at all. The latter is clearly forbidden by the words of the apostle (cf. I Jn 5:16). Following the ordinances of the apostles and the fathers, the Church prays only for the repose of Orthodox Christians who have died in faith and repentance, as living organic members of the Body of Christ. There may also be included those who had fallen away but later repented and united themselves to the Church once more (St. Peter the Martyr, Canon III). Without that final condition, they remain alien to the Church and, as members who have fallen away from her, are deprived of the latter’s nourishing sap, i.e., the grace-bearing mysteries and prayers of the Church.

Faithful to the whole spirit of the ancient, universal Church, our Russian Orthodox Church customarily forbade not only burial services, according to the Orthodox ritual, for the heterodox (i.e., Roman Catholics, Protestants, Armenians, etc.), but even the serving of panikhidas for them. Out of a sense of Christian mercy, she began to tolerate a single condescension in regard to them: if a heterodox person of another “Christian confession” dies and there is no priest or pastor of his confession to perform the funeral, the Church permits the Orthodox priest, vested in epitrachilion and phelonion, to accompany the body of the departed from its place to the cemetery, and to lower it into the grave as the hymn “Holy God...” is sung. The decrees of the Holy Synod, which gave legal force to this rule (the first of which is dated July 20, 1727), permit neither the carrying of the body of the deceased into an Orthodox Church, nor the singing of a requiem litia or even of “Eternal Memory” for him (cf. the decrees of the Holy Synod dated May 22, 1730, August 24, 1797, and February 20, 1880).

 Regrettably, our ecclesiastical practice has not been consistent and uniform in the given case. Under the influence of the liberal trends of public opinion, and sometimes to placate the civil authorities, the Synod began to permit at times the serving of panikhidas for Roman Catholics and Protestants, to the great scandal of the people of the Church, whose conscience could not be reconciled with so clear-cut a departure from the ancient tradition of the fathers.

This grievous practice, which took root gradually over a period of time, was later carried abroad by Russian refugees and began to be widely disseminated, especially in the Western European parishes that acknowledged Metropolitan Evlogy as their head. It being his custom, in general, to follow after his flock rather than to lead, the latter himself widely encouraged this anti-canonical practice. It is known that, on his orders,panikhidas were served in all the Churches that acknowledged him for Doumer, President of the French Republic, who had been assassinated by Gorgulov. It should be understood why a public display of prayer for a non-Orthodox person was necessary. The Catholics could not attach to it its true meaning; to them it was merely the prayer of “schismatics”; and it could not have been the sincere desire of the Russian Orthodox people to pray for a man with whom they had not the least ecclesiastical ties. Is it not clear that this was simple a manifestation of Russian feeling in regard to the honored president who had perished at the hand of a Russian criminal? But were there no other means of expressing sympathy for France and of censuring the guilty Gorgulov besides the Church’s services for the dead? Does it not lower the dignity of the Church in the eyes of the heterodox themselves when she is made the instrument of purely political aims? With the aim of subverting the Russian refugees, the Catholics do not cease repeating to them that there is no essential difference between the teaching of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, and that the division which exists between them is based substantially on misunderstandings. The serving of solemn panikhidas for Catholics can only heighten the confusion in the minds of the Russian Orthodox people, strengthening them in the erroneous belief which Roman propaganda strives to foster in them. Even less can they justify having a panikhida served for deceased Protestants, for Lutherans do not ascribe any power at all to the Church’s prayerful intercession for the dead.

The breadth of Orthodox Christian love — in the name of which, ostensibly, the Church’s prayers should be permitted for departed Christian, regardless of which confession they belonged to — cannot be extended to include a disregard for the Orthodox teaching of the faith, the deposit of which our Church has preserved within herself throughout the course of centuries, for then every boundary separating the One, True Church of salvation from those that were torn from grace bearing union with her would be blotted out. The limits of condescension permitted by reason of ecclesiastical œconomia in regard to those who have fallen away are precisely defined in the holy canons, and no one has the right to extend the boundaries fixed by the holy and divinely-wise fathers.

In order to put an end to the scandal which has arisen in the Church over the ecclesiastical commemoration of the heterodox and over the serving of panikhidas for them in particular, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad has considered it necessary once more to remind both the pastors and the Russian Orthodox flock abroad of the intolerability of any departure from the ancient canonical order apart from those provided for in the above mentioned decrees of the Holy Synod. The flock must not exert pressure of any kind on the conscience of priestly celebrants who are obliged to maintain faithfulness to the ancient, canonical order and to hold high the standard of Holy Orthodoxy before the face of both the other Eastern Churches and all the heterodox as well.

In the event of the threat of serious conflicts with his parishioners over this issue, the priest must forthwith refer the matter for decision to his diocesan bishop, whose duty it is to show them authoritative support in the battle for the preservation of the ancient patristic statutes of the Church (1)

(1) “Burial of Heterodox: The Decision of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad,” Orthodox Life 28, no. 1 (1978): 28–31.