Orthodox Church(es) Stepping out of the Orthodox Heartland

Abstract

One of the key conditions for religiousgroups to obtain legal recognition by the state in the Swiss Canton of Vaud is the capacity to provide a unique representative in its dealings with the political authorities of the canton. Nobody expected that this apparently trivial and mundane task, especially for small population samples at the regional level, would turn out to become the stumbling block for Orthodox communities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Though numerically a tiny minority, the Orthodox in the Canton of Vaud are ethnically very diverse: Serbs, Russians, Romanians, Greeks, and a few local converts populate the “Orthodox landscape” in the region, which is organized correspondingly in ethnic parishes placed under the jurisdiction of national churches back home. Five different bishops (belonging to the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate) are in charge of these parishes, and only two of them have residence in Switzerland. Some of the bishops did not give their blessing for their parishes to form a politically involved seculczr structure, which would mean that, in some particular matters, the respective parishes would follotv instructions frovn an authority other than ecclesiastical.

Some of the arguments developed in this chapter have been discussed previously in Maria Hämmerli, “Orthodox Diaspora? A Sociological and Theological Problematisation of a Stock Phrase,” International journal for the Study of the Christian Church 10, no. 2 (2010): 97–115.