Stooge Technique

Two statements from Moscow last week revealed snags in the Kremlin's efforts to use religion as a political opiate in other countries.

After a 15-year struggle to dominate the Orthodox Church in the U.S., Moscow appeared ready to accept failure. Patriarch Alexei, who works closely with the Soviet Foreign Office, last week promised "full administrative autonomy" to the American churches of his faith.

The other message from Moscow was less conciliatory. Tass, the Soviet news agency, denounced "General Douglas MacArthur for "crude interference" with the Orthodox Church in Japan--i.e., refusing to cooperate in a Soviet effort to take over the Japanese Orthodox Church. A year ago the Japanese church, which has 35,000 members, asked Metropolitan Theophilus of San Francisco, head of the U.S. church, to send a spiritual leader to Japan.

When Theophilus sent Bishop Benjamin Basalyga of Pittsburgh, a group of several hundred White Russians in Japan, most of whom have recently taken out Soviet citizenship, requested Patriarch Alexei to supply a spiritual leader for the Japanese church. Alexei promptly raised the ante; he offered (through Soviet General Kuzma Derevyanko in Tokyo) to send in two bishops. Few Japanese converts to the Orthodox Church had supported the request to Alexei, and the Russian bishops were not allowed to enter.

Alexei has had considerable success in encouraging pan-Slav propaganda and promoting other Soviet aims in the Iron Curtain countries. But elsewhere Alexei is not having much luck. Most Orthodox clergy are nonpolitical, like Tokyo's new Bishop Benjamin, of whom TIME Correspondent Carl Mydans cabled last week: "He is a simple, soft-spoken man who constantly rambled into a report of his sewing school, showing little interest in the ado over his bishopric."

Obviously, Bishop Benjamin would be difficult to convert to Alexei's viewpoint, best revealed in a recent statement: "The main thing the Russian Orthodox Church achieved during the war was to show the entire world its complete unity with its Government."

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