A Spectacular Success
This chapter focuses on the Russian Orthodox press, which represented the new church as a spectacular success. It explains why, according to Orthodox publicists, the Paris church was signified as the light of Orthodoxy that was dawning in the West and represented a critical step in Russia's providential task of reuniting Christendom. Even though Orthodox publicists had great expectations that the new church represented a harbinger for overcoming the schism that divided West and East, like French discourses about the Paris church, the Russian accounts described in the chapter reinforces the dichotomy between the Orthodox Christian and the heterodox other. It also discusses the French Catholic polemicists that clung to the law of schismatic churches and their narratives about the enslaved Caesaropapist Russian Church when the papal question unsettled in the 1860s. It investigates the elements of backlash against the Russian Orthodox Church's closer proximity and greater visibility that was indirectly caused by the establishment of a Russian church in Paris.