Stalwart

Published by The Times (London), March 11, 2005

Archpriest Sergei Hackel:
Stalwart of the Russian Church who strove to make it a progressive counter to Soviet oppression

SERGEI HACKEL came face to face with the Queen at a St James’s Palace reception for the Council of Christians and Jews. With his long, grey, flowing beard, he looked every inch the Russian Orthodox patriarch as the Bishop of Oxford, the Right Rev Richard Harries, introduced him as “joint chairman of the Council in Brighton and Hove”. That puzzled Her Majesty. “Why Brighton?” she asked. Hackel explained that he did have an extensive flock in Sussex — at which the Queen passed on to the next in line, and Hackel added one more anecdote to his packed store.

Hackel found himself in Sussex because he was appointed to a lectureship in Russian at the University of Sussex in 1964. He ultimately became reader in the department. A year later he was ordained a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church by its charismatic head in Britain, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.

The church remained his passion for the rest of his life. From his base in Sussex he became one of its most influential figures outside the Soviet Union and its successor states.

He battled ceaselessly and with growing success to inject some Western openness and liberalism into his Eastern Church. For in the Soviet Union, Orthodoxy’s daily fight for survival against communist harassment had led to theological stagnation. Hackel could not see why this paralysis should extend to the Church in the West. Indeed, if it was to hold the allegiance of younger generations, and possibly make converts, its theology had to be dragged into the 20th and 21st centuries.

His chosen vehicle for this revolution was the periodical Sobornost. Roughly translated, it meant The Way of the Church, and he edited it for 30 years, incorporating the Eastern Churches Review. With clarity of exposition and elegance of style he made it stimulating reading for theologians of every denomination. For the past 21 years he also edited the weekly religious slot on the BBC’s influential Russian service.

His fierce sense of justice exploded into attacks on the Moscow hierarchy for what he considered inadequate support for priests openly persecuted by the Soviet regime.

He opened a second front against the Moscow patriarchate when he insisted that certain texts in the Russian Orthodox prayer book, especially in its Holy Week liturgy, were anti-Semitic and ought to be scrapped. In a Church that had eschewed the bridge-building with Judaism undertaken in the postwar years by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, as well as the Lutheran and other Protestant churches in Europe, his demand was not met with great welcome by the hierarchy. Yet he had raised a banner to which other influential theologians flocked.

Hackel’s involvement in the cause of the nun Maria Skobtsova, who died in the gas chambers of Ravensbrück concentration camp, and about whom he wrote two books, also did not endear him to the traditionalists within the patriarchate in Moscow. Mother Maria in her youth had been active in the revolutionary movement, was a poet, and had been married twice. In Paris in the 1930s she became a nun, devoting her life to the service of the dispossessed among the Russian émigr és, and after the occupation by the Nazis began to hide and protect Jews.

She was regarded as too liberal and anarchic by the traditionalists within the patriarchate in Moscow. He campaigned for her canonisation and took part in her canonisation service in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Rue Daru, Paris, last year, wearing robes which Mother Maria had herself embroidered.

His pursuit of justice, and his belief in liturgy, theology and, above all, individual human beings, were fuelled by his past. He was born in 1931 in Berlin where his father taught the history of art. The family moved to the Netherlands after Hitler’s ascent to power.

His mother escaped with Sergei as the German Army overran that country in May l940, but his father remained behind and Hackel never saw him again. In England his mother got a cleaning job in a private school which also found a place for Sergei as a pupil. From there he went to Oxford, and his outstanding brain assured his academic future and the lasting impact he would make on the theology of the Church he loved.

He married the painter Christina Mosse in l953. He is survived by her, and by two sons and two daughters.

Archpriest Sergei Hackel, priest in the Russian Orthodox Church and Reader in Russian at the University of Sussex, was born on August 24, 1931. He died on February 9, 2005, aged 73.



Volume 7 Number 11 - Tuesday, March 15th, 2005	A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY