A leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Ladoga, said last week that the Moscow Church did not accept the mutual ending of excommunication between the Vatican and the Eastern Orthodox Church of Constantinople.
The action of Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople in ending the 900-year-old schism, he said, was the decision of "only one branch of the Orthodox Church". A similar stand has been taken by the Orthodox hierarchy in Greece.
