Email from Russia: Pope's move to return icon divides Orthodox Church

From Marcus Warren in Moscow, exclusively for Electronic Telegraph

ICONS are not just beautiful, holy objects; they are supposed to put you in touch with the divine. In spite or, perhaps, because of this, some provoke almighty rows down here on earth.

The Vatican, the world's largest Orthodox Church and the former seat of the Tatar Khanate were all recently involved in a major contretemps over one of Russia's most revered holy images. The fuss has now abated. But for how long?

The icon known as the Kazan Mother of God first came to light in the Russian city of the same name in 1579, discovered by a ten year-old girl called Matryona Onuchina. On several occasions its miracle-working powers have supposedly saved the country from disaster.

Now, however, an icon bearing the same name has turned up in the Pope's private chapel in the Vatican and the Pontiff is said to pray to it twice a day. In fact the Holy Father is reported to want to return it to its homeland. The only problem is: how and to whom?

Should it go back to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan on the river Volga, a city with a Muslim majority? Or should it be restored to Moscow's Kazan Cathedral on Red Square where it was kept for almost 300 years before being sold to the West? Mix in the politics poisoning relations between the Holy See and the Russian Orthodox Church and you have the makings of a major dispute over the icon.

An audience granted the mayor of Kazan, Kamil Iskhakov, by the Pope at the end of October was the pretext for a sudden outbreak of controversy. By pursuing personal diplomacy with Rome apparently without the approval of the Russian Orthodox Church, Mr Iskhakov was courting disaster. It did not take long to break.

The Patriarch, Aleksiy II, publicly berated what he called "amateur initiatives" by the regions, strong words from the Church's head. One source inside the Patriarchate called the visit to Rome "a provocation". Mr Iskhakov, when challenged over the Patriarch's remarks, stammered: "That expression slightly....in fact, it was quite delicately put, but all the same we think we should sit round the table and talk this through."

Kazan, once Islam's northernmost centre, lays claim to the icon partly to cultivate an image of religious tolerance. But the mayor being denounced by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church did little for that claim.

Since then, however, some delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations seem to have mended relations between Kazan and the Church and Mr Iskhakov recently rang me up with the good news of the reconciliation. He said: "We have agreed to work together to get the icon back to Russia. There are no hard feelings."

All the same, the new spirit of co-operation between the Tatars and the Orthodox Church does not in itself secure the icon's return. And the suspicion must be that this peace declaration only postpones future conflicts between the mayor and the Patriarchate.

The poor Pope! He is said in all seriousness to want to send the Kazan Mother of God back home, but now he founds himself in the middle of a row between secular authorities and the Orthodox Church. On top of that, he has the problem of deciding how to return it to Russia.

The neatest solution would be to bring it with him on a historic first visit to Russia by a Vicar of Rome and hand it over then. And yet, given the current hostility between the Orthodox Church and the Vatican, it seems unlikely that this Pope will ever be invited to come to Russia.

Indeed, given the intractable nature of their differences over their rivalry in Ukraine and Orthodoxy's fear of Catholic "trespassing" on its territory, even the next Pope will be hard pushed to make it. So, for the time being, unless John Paul II wants to make a unilateral gesture of good faith towards Moscow, the Kazan Mother of God will remain in his private apartments.

Its route from Kazan to the Vatican is another of the interesting facets of the icon's history. According to Dmitry Khafizov, a Kazan-based historian who has made a special study of its fate, the icon hanging in the Vatican is not the copy stolen from a Kazan church in 1904. It is the version (there are three in all and this is probably the original one) kept on Red Square from 1636 until the 1920s.

From there it travelled to Poland, to Britain and then the United States, where it was bought by the Blue Army, a conservative US catholic group. They kept it in a chapel in Fatima until presenting it to the Pope in 1993. He apparently believes that Our Lady of Fatima saved his life during the 1981 assassination attempt and the Kazan icon is therefore bound up with the whole Fatima cult.

The Pope is ready to sacrifice his claim to the icon and send it home. As for the Patriarchate and the city of Kazan, they could do worse than display a bit of magnanimity themselves.