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→Views on the Moscow Patriarchate
:"As regards the Moscow Patriarchate and its hierarchs, then, so long as they continue in close, active and benevolent cooperation with the Soviet Government, which openly professes its complete godlessness and strives to implant atheism in the entire Russian nation, then the Church Abroad, maintaining Her purity, must not have any canonical, liturgical or even simply external communion with them whatsoever, leaving each one of them at the same time to the final judgment of the Council (Sobor) of the future free Russian Church."<ref>[http://www.orthodox.net/articles/anastasy-will.html The last will and testament of Metropolitan Anastassy, 1957], December 28, 2007</ref>
ROCOR viewed the Russian Church as consisting of three parts during the Soviet period: 1. The Moscow Patriarchate, 2. the Catacomb Church, and 3. The Free Russian Church (ROCOR). The Catacomb Church had been a significant part of the Russian Church prior to World War II. Most of those in ROCOR had left Russia during or well before World War II. They were unaware of the changes that had occurred immediately after World War II—most significantly that with the election of Patriarch [[Alexei I (Simansky) of Moscow|Alexei I]], most of the Catacomb Church was reconciled with the Moscow Patriarchate. By the 1970s, due to this reconciliation, as well as to continued persecution by the Soviets, there was very little left of the Catacomb Church. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made this point in a letter to the 1974 [[All-Diaspora Councils|All-Diaspora Sobor ]] of ROCOR, in which he stated that ROCOR should not "show solidarity with a mysterious, sinless, but also bodiless catacomb."<ref>[http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/cat_1974.aspx The Catacomb Tikhonite Church 1974], The Orthodox Word, Nov.-Dec., 1974 (59), 235-246, December 28, 2007.</ref> The fact that the catacomb Church had essentially ceased to exist was de facto recognized when, as Communism was about to finally collapse in Russia, ROCOR began to establish "Free Russian" parishes in Russia, and to consecrate bishops to oversee such parishes, and never recognized any alleged Catacomb bishop as having a legitimate episcopacy.
Finally, the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union precipitated a crisis in ROCOR, because the very reason that had initially resulted in its separation from the Moscow Patriarchate had been removed, and so the basis of the consensus that had previously united ROCOR began to unravel. There were those who did not believe that the Moscow Patriarchate was yet free from the control of the KGB, and that in any case they had not sufficiently renounced the policies of Metropolitan Sergius. There were also those who believed that regardless of the political situation in Russia, that the question of Ecumenism had become sufficient grounds for continued separation. But after the August 2000 All-Russian Sobor of the Moscow Patriarchate, in which the MP officially condemned the Branch Theory of Ecumenism, and also renounced in principle, if not in name, the policies of Metropolitan Sergius, the question of reconciliation with the Moscow Patriarchate become an unavoidable question that had to be resolved, one way or another.<ref>[http://pages.prodigy.net/frjohnwhiteford/statusquo.htm Status Quo, ROCOR?], December 28, 2007.</ref>
