“Christ is in Our Midst” | Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D. | Catholic World Report
A Catholic pays a visit to a Russian Orthodox Church in Beijing.
Sunday morning in China’s capital city is not unlike most other days: Beijing’s more than 20 million inhabitants bustle through congested sidewalks, cars compete almost hopelessly for space on crowded roads, and hazy grey skies loom heavily over the city landscape, punctuated by soaring cranes marking new constructions.
Beijing is not exactly a city of church bells and rising spires, but nestled quietly among the trees within the protective walls of the Russian Embassy lies the Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of Most Holy Theotokos. Its humble but majestic onion dome and Greek cross rise above the embassy walls, a sight few could have imagined only 50 years ago, when the Orthodox church was converted by the Soviet authorities into a garage. Three years ago the “garage” was restored into what it was originally made for, a temple of God where the Divine Liturgy is offered in all the rich beauty of the Russian Orthodox tradition.
About a month ago I contacted the priest rector of the church, Father Sergiy Voronin, and the first words of his response were, “Christ is in our midst.” The presence of Christ becomes obvious as one enters the beautiful Church of the Dormition, with its remarkable iconostasis; 30 minutes before Liturgy the icons are already illuminated as the faithful light candles and offer them prayerfully while intoning the name of Holy Trinity.
Why was I, a Roman Catholic, visiting this Orthodox church located in the Russian embassy?
Other than our shared brotherhood as Christians in the Apostolic Church, I came as a pilgrim to visit the site where 222 Orthodox Christians were massacred by Boxers in 1900, just as Catholic priests and faithful were being killed in other parts of the city. During the Divine Liturgy, my wife and I stood near the icon dedicated to the Orthodox martyr saints of China, and I could not help but contemplate Tertullian’s declaration, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
Catholics and Orthodox remain divided—God grant the grace to heal this division—but we remain in a very real way part of the same Body of Christ. I came to the Church of the Dormition as a pilgrim to visit the place where members of the same Body I am part of died as witnesses to the Church of Christ founded on the Apostles. I have visited other locations where Chinese Christians were massacred during the Boxer Uprising, and like those places, I could see how their blood planted seeds—though the seeds of Orthodoxy in Beijing have only recently begun to grow again into a more visible community. The problem today is that China does not recognize Orthodoxy as an official religion, and so only foreign-passport holders are granted access to Orthodox Liturgy. Chinese Orthodox Christians today can only walk by what were once grand Orthodox churches, such as those in Harbin, Shanghai, and Wuhan, and see structures that are now either boarded up or converted into artists’ studios, dance clubs, or exhibition halls.
Comments