Solemnly, cautiously, as befits those who come out of the past into the present, the 160-odd delegates filed into Moscow's onion-domed, 17th-Century Sokolniki Church. Wearing the stiff scarlet and gold mantles and the high, crownlike klobuka, the bearded archbishops took their places before the altar. They joined with the clerical and lay delegates from every diocese in the Soviet Union and from the branches of Russian Orthodoxy abroad, in a brief prayer, the moleben: "God bless this act, send down Thy spirit. . . ."
In his huge Russian voice, Nikolai Feodorovich Kolchitsky, Prior and Chief of the Administration of the Patriarchate,...
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