Kyiv Metropolitan Volodymyr to head Moscow Orthodox Church

The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church gathers for an urgent session in Moscow after the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, has died.

“We are waiting for the information from the Holy Synod”, priest Mikhail Prokopenko, head of the Moscow Patriarchy press-service, told journalists.

In line with the Church regulations, the Synod should officially announce about the death of the Patriarchy.

Besides, by the Orthodox regulations, after a Patriarchy dies, the Church is headed by a bishop who is the oldest by chirotony (ordination). At present, namely Kyiv Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sabodan) is the oldest by chirotony.

As UNIAN reported earlier, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, has died, on Friday. He was 79.

Born Alexei Ridiger, Alexy II made his ecclesiastical career at a time when the church was controlled by Soviet authorities before forging an alliance with the new Russian state under presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, AFP reported.

The patriarch was an impressive character with a benign expression and moral authority among millions of Russian believers but his personality was always locked in by the deeply hierarchical nature of his role.

Alexy II took stances on foreign policy issues that often matched the Kremlin line, criticizing NATO strikes against Yugoslavia, the US-led war in Iraq and defending the rights of ethnic-Russians in the former Soviet Union.

But his role in the international arena was marked above all by wariness of Catholics, whom he accused of "proselytism," and he refused repeatedly to meet Roman Catholic pope John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI.

The main reason for the row was a property dispute between the Catholic and Orthodox churches in Ukraine, where the Greek Catholic church, which was banned by Stalin and dispossessed, took back hundreds of parishes from the Orthodox church at the beginning of the 1990s.