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Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC)

The ever-orthodox Church of Georgia resisted the artifices of Nestorians, Jacobites, and Armenians, produced countless martyrs under the invasions of Turks, Persians, and Tartars, and formed the nucleus of a mighty empire during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Georgian of the Church books is entirely different from the Georgian that is now spoken; intelligible, perhaps, to the educated, but certainly not to the peasant. By the time of the Czars the ancient Church of Georgia officially formed part of the Russian Church.

The Church of Georgia, or Iberia was a daughter-Church of Antioch beyond the Empire. The first planting of the Christian faith in Georgia dates from the Apostolic times. Irenaeus relates that, in the hundredth year after Christ, the Roman bishop Clemens, who was sent by the Emperor Trajan into banishment, to the barren shores of the Black Sea, to the Taurian Chersonesus along the Cimmerian Bosporus, was the means of carrying the glad tidings of the Gospel into many places, by means of divers confessors from Colchis. The apostle of Iberia was a lady, St. Nino, who fled thither during the Diocletian persecution.

The conversion of the Georgians in A.D. 330 placed them among the first peoples to accept Christianity. According to tradition, a holy slave woman, who became known as Saint Nino, cured Queen Nana of Iberia of an unknown illness, and King Marian III accepted Christianity when a second miracle occurred during a royal hunting trip. Mirian then sent to Constantine for bishops, and Eustathius of Antioch came with priests and deacons, and ordained a certain John as first Bishop of Iberia. The Georgians' new faith, which replaced Greek pagan and Zoroastrian beliefs, was to place them permanently on the front line of conflict between the Islamic and Christian worlds.

In receiving pastors from Constantinople, Georgia received with them all the rites of the Greek Church which were coming into general use, and also admitted the decrees of the first Ecumenic Synod. Meanwhile, their Church, only just come into existence, was reckoned to the Patriarchate of Antioch. In the 4th century the bishop turned Arian and the king turned pagan. But the Church of Iberia got over that, and all went well for a time. In 455 Tiflis was built, and became the seat of the Metropolitan. In 601 Iberia was recognized as a separate Church province, independent of Antioch.

The Church of Georgia under the Katholikos of Tiflis had its own rite in the Georgian language. It was almost entirely Orthodox and free from any suspicion of Nestorianism or Monophysism. In the 7th century Georgia was conquered by the Saracens, and a great persecution filled the Calendar of Tiflis with names of martyrs. In the 7th century the country was again free, and the native Georgian kings reigned at Tiflis till the beginning of the 11th century. They were continually attacked and overrun by the Persians ; but, on the whole, the land was free, and the valiant Georgian warriors formed one of the bulwarks of Christendom against Islam. Meanwhile the Church of Georgia shared the fate of the kingdom ; she was persecuted whenever the Georgians were defeated, and she shared their triumph when they won.

Almost inevitably this little distant Church, surrounded by other Orthodox Churches, shared their schism, probably hardly or not at all realizing the fact. But the Russians can scarcely afford to blame her for that, and otherwise no shadow of reproach can be brought against her. The most ancient Church of a heroic people, she deserved to remain one, and one of the most honored of the Orthodox allies.

In 1802, however, the greatest misfortune happened to Georgia that can happen to any nation. It was made a Russian province. And from that time its Church has ceased to exist. After Georgia was annexed by the Russian Empire, the Russian Orthodox Church took over the Georgian church in 1811. The colorful frescoes and wall paintings typical of Georgian cathedrals were whitewashed by the Russian occupiers.

The upstart tyrants at Petersburg, of course, cared nothing for the rights of a Church that was by five centuries more ancient and more venerable than their own, nor for the national feeling of the heroic race that for centuries had guarded the frontier of Christendom. They simply applied their usual policy of making every one a Russian who came in their power. So at one stroke the Georgian nation and the Georgian Church were wiped out. What all the barbarians who had attacked the land unceasingly for nine hundred years-Tartars, Kurds, Persians, and Turks- had not succeeded in doing, that the Czar did with one Ukaze. All Georgians were declared members of the Russian Church ; the Katholikos of Tiflis disappeared, and his place was taken by an Exarch of the Province of Georgia, who was simply a Russian bishop under the Holy Synod.

Throughout the land the Russian Liturgy alone was allowed, just as at Petersburg and Moscow. The Georgian language was forbidden to be taught in schools under the direst penalties. The Georgian Uniates had to flee into more tolerant Turkey, or were forced into the Russian schism. In 1904, when the storm they had brought upon themselves frightened the Russian Government into some unwilling pretence of tolerance, the Georgians hoped that they, too, might at last receive better treatment. So they presented a petition to the Czar in which, with the most piteous protestations of loyalty towards the tyrant who persecutes them, they implored him to allow them again their own Church and their own language. And equally, of course, no notice was taken of their petition. Meanwhile the only remnant of the old Georgian Church remained in the few Uniates abroad in Constantinople.

The Georgian church regained its autonomy only when Russian rule ended in 1918. Neither the Georgian Menshevik government nor the Bolshevik regime that followed considered revitalization of the Georgian church an important goal, however. Soviet rule brought severe purges of the Georgian church hierarchy and constant repression of Orthodox worship. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, many churches were destroyed or converted into secular buildings. This history of repression encouraged the incorporation of religious identity into the strong nationalist movement in twentieth-century Georgia and the quest of Georgians for religious expression outside the official, governmentcontrolled church. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, opposition leaders, especially Zviad Gamsakhurdia, criticized corruption in the church hierarchy. When Ilia II became the patriarch (catholicos) of the Georgian Orthodox Church in the late 1970s, he brought order and a new morality to church affairs, and Georgian Orthodoxy experienced a revival. In 1988 Moscow permitted the patriarch to begin consecrating and reopening closed churches, and a large-scale restoration process began.

The 2002 concordat between the GOC and the state defines relations between the two entities. The concordat contains several controversial articles: giving the patriarch legal immunity, granting the GOC the exclusive right to staff the military chaplaincy, exempting GOC clergymen from military service, and giving the GOC a unique consultative role in government, especially in the sphere of education; however, many of the controversial articles require Parliament to adopt implementing legislation, which it had not done by the end of the reporting period.

A 2005 law separating state schools and religious teaching narrowed the interpretation of the government concordat with the GOC regarding teaching Orthodoxy as an elective part of the school curriculum. The law states that such Orthodox teaching may take place only after school hours and cannot be controlled by the school or teachers. Outside instructors, including clergy, cannot regularly attend or direct student extracurricular activities or student clubs and their meetings. Lay theologians, rather than priests, led such activities.

By law the GOC has a consultative role in curriculum development but no veto power. The GOC routinely reviews religious and other textbooks used in schools for consistency with Orthodox beliefs, although this review is not conducted within the government structure but rather as part of the GOC's pastoral activities. According to the Ministry of Education (MOE), priests are not as active on school grounds as they have been in the past and, in addition, some priests have offered more craft and science activities outside of school to attract children into groups at church.