An outstanding pastoral teacher deeply sensitive to modern problems, Metropolitan Anthony, the head of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Church in Great Britain and Ireland, was a leading representative of the White Russian emigration, for whom Western European values and traditions were an integral part of a Russian culture brutally persecuted by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
He was consecrated bishop in 1957 and five years later became archbishop and ruling bishop of the newly created Diocese of Sourozh, covering Great Britain and Ireland. In 1966 he was elevated to the rank of metropolitan and at the time of his death he was the senior bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church.
When he became vicar of one of the two Russian parishes in London he had made it clear to a conservative congregation jealously guarding its national traditions that the Orthodox Church was universal, its liturgy could be celebrated in any language, and its vision and teaching were as relevant to Western worshippers as to those in the traditional Orthodox Churches. His vision of multinational, West European Orthodoxy, embracing descendants of the old diaspora, local converts and new expatriates, is now the official policy of the Russian Orthodox Church.
On arrival in England, Father Anthony, as he then was, set about learning English and for a time he startled and charmed his interlocutors by addressing them in the language of the King James Bible. He was not an academic theologian, but he was widely read in the Fathers of the Church, both Eastern and Western, as well as the ancient rabbinical writings. This reading, combined with his wartime experience as surgeon and soldier, enabled him to speak of Orthodoxy in terms that could be immediately understood by the modern worshipper.
Metropolitan Anthony was born Andrei Bloom in Lausanne. His father was a Russian imperial diplomat of Dutch origin, and his mother was the composer Scriabin’s half-sister. He spent his early childhood in Persia. When the old Russian Embassy was shut down after the 1917 Revolution the family set out for Western Europe. The steamer they eventually boarded was sailing to England but sprang a terminal leak in Marseilles.
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He grew up in Paris and in his early teens was a convinced atheist. But he was challenged to read any one of the Gospels, and chose the shortest, that of St Mark, where he discovered a quite unexpected Christ. A decisive conversion followed. He became active in the Russian Student Christian Movement, one of many White Russian youth organisations dedicated to keeping alive Russian cultural traditions for when Russia threw off the Communist yoke.
He trained as a doctor specialising in oncological medicine and dedicated himself to serving the most destitute and marginalised among the Russian émigrés. To supplement a very meagre income he also taught in the Russian gymnasium, and he is remembered as an inspiring teacher.
He was called up into the medical service of the French Army and after the fall of France he went underground into the Resistance. After taking secret monastic vows he was professed in 1943 as monk Anthony. The ancient tradition of the warrior monk was deeply formative for the future bishop. He often spoke of the sacrificial calling of the soldier.
A French Jesuit and specialist in Middle Eastern Christianity, a convert to Orthodoxy and chaplain to the ecumenical Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius chose the young doctor monk as his successor. There was no apparent logic in this choice but he sensed an act of Providence he could not deny. He was ordained priest and came to London with his mother and grandmother in the summer of 1948.
The White Russian emigration into Great Britain was small and the second generation had begun marrying out, and Father Anthony soon had a growing Anglo-Russian parish as well as an increasing number of English converts to Orthodoxy. For some the symbolism and drama of the liturgy brought back the richness of ritual excised from their practice by churches seeking to “modernise” themselves. Gradually purely British parishes, with native British clergy, came into being all over the country.
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In 1961, when the Russian Orthodox Church was allowed by the Soviet authorities to become a member of the World Council of Churches, a new dimension was added to Bishop Anthony’s pastoral activity. As a delegate to the World Council, Bishop Anthony was given carte blanche to give a much fuller picture of the true situation of the Church than anyone could from the Soviet Union. He made this part of his mission and extended it to the regular BBC broadcasts to the Soviet Union over a number of years. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Metropolitan Anthony was regularly invited to Russia by the Church to lecture on pastoral theology in seminaries and theological academies. His broadcasts had ensured him a huge following and he was mobbed in every church he went to. Eventually the Soviet authorities lost patience and his visits grew much rarer. His last visit was in 1988, for the celebrations marking a thousand years of Russian Christianity. His health precluded further visits, but with the relaxation of travel restrictions under Mikhail Gorbachev, increasing numbers of Russians came to see him in London.
Late in 1992 President Yeltsin lifted all travel restrictions and a vast new Russian diaspora began. The homogeneous, multinational community at All Saints Cathedral in Knightsbridge found its Sunday congregations swelling from the customary 150 or so to six or seven hundred. Metropolitan Anthony reflected that he needed at least another 30 years to “educate them into the Church” and transform their inward-looking, ethno-centred concept of church life.
Metropolitan Anthony was always a man of the spoken rather than the written word, but his pastoral legacy is available in numerous collections of his lectures, talks and sermons in English, Russian and other languages.
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Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, Head of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Church in Great Britain and Ireland, was born on June 19, 1914. He died of cancer on August 4, 2003, aged 89.