The Cold War cathedral case where the Court sided with Moscow's archbishop

Consider the politics of the moment. It is 1952. American troops are fighting Communist forces in Korea. Congress is investigating Soviet infiltration. The Iron Curtain has fallen across Europe, and the Kremlin is the most feared government on earth. And the Supreme Court of the United States is asked whether New York's legislature may take a Russian Orthodox cathedral away from an archbishop appointed by the Moscow Patriarchate.

The popular answer was obvious: of course it may. Why should a church under the thumb of Stalin's government keep a cathedral on East 97th Street in Manhattan? And the Court said no.

It is one of the more striking decisions in the history of religious liberty, because the Justices did not decide for the church they liked. They decided for a principle, and the principle is one the Founders would have recognized at once: the state does not get to choose who runs the church.

Definitions

• Hierarchical church. A church organized with a structure of authority that runs from local congregations up to a governing body or head, as in the Catholic, Orthodox, Episcopal and Presbyterian traditions. A congregational church, by contrast, governs itself locally.
• Church autonomy. The principle that religious bodies are free to decide questions of doctrine, discipline and government without state interference.
• Patriarchate. The governing authority of an Orthodox church headed by a patriarch. The Moscow Patriarchate was the central authority of the Russian Orthodox Church.
• The Metropolia. The shorthand for the Russian Orthodox Church in North America, which governed itself administratively after 1924.

The background: a church split by a revolution

The Russian Orthodox Church had a diocese and parishes in North America from the late eighteenth century, when missionaries came to Alaska, and the cathedral of St. Nicholas in New York City was built in the early twentieth century. Then came the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik persecution of the church. The Patriarch of Moscow was cut off from his flock in America, and the church in North America was left to run its own affairs. In 1924, a general council of the North American church, meeting in Detroit, declared itself temporarily self-governing until normal relations could be restored. That is the origin of the group called the Metropolia.

Over the following decades there were two claims. The Moscow Patriarchate said the American church remained under its authority. In 1927, Metropolitan Sergius, the acting head of the Moscow church, issued a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state, which many Russian believers in the West could not accept. In 1943, the Soviet government, seeking wartime unity, allowed the election of a patriarch, and Moscow's authority was restored in a form that the Metropolia viewed as compromised by Soviet control. The Metropolia maintained its independence. In the 1930s, the Moscow Patriarchate had sent Archbishop Benjamin Fedchenkoff to America to take charge of the American flock, and in the 1940s the question of who held authority in New York grew sharper.

Who owned St. Nicholas Cathedral? The answer, in the minds of both sides, depended on who the lawful bishop was. That made it a case about church government.

The 1945 statute

In 1945, the New York legislature passed a law, Article 5-C of the Religious Corporations Law. It said that all churches of the Russian Orthodox faith in New York should be governed by the authorities of the Russian Church in North America, meaning the Metropolia, and that the trustees of a church would be selected under that authority. It required a church, in effect, to recognize the North American body, and it denied recognition to a hierarchy sent from Moscow.

Think about what that was. The legislature of a state had picked one side in a dispute over who governed a church and had written the answer into the statute. It was not a neutral property law. It was a law saying: this bishop is the bishop, and that one is not.

The legislature had its reasons. Some members saw the Moscow patriarch as a creature of the Soviet state, and a Soviet-controlled church in America as a danger. But the principle at stake was not what the legislators thought of Moscow. It was whether they had the power to decide.

Archbishop Benjamin, whom the Moscow Patriarchate had appointed, and a priest were in possession of the cathedral and its residence, and the cathedral corporation sued for the right to use them. The trial court and the Appellate Division ruled for the Moscow-appointed side; the New York Court of Appeals reversed, relying on the 1945 statute and giving possession to the cathedral corporation. The case went to Washington.

The earlier rule: Watson v. Jones

The Supreme Court had faced this kind of dispute before, in the aftermath of the Civil War. In Watson v. Jones (1871), the Walnut Street Presbyterian Church of Louisville had split over slavery and the war. A faction loyal to the national General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and a faction that supported the pro-slavery position each claimed the property. The Court, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Miller, held that when a hierarchical church has decided a dispute through its own highest authorities, civil courts must accept that decision as final.

Miller's reasoning is among the clearest statements in American law about the separation of church and state. The law knows no heresy, he wrote, and is committed to the support of no dogma, the establishment of no sect. Civil courts, composed of judges who are not theologians, should not be arbiters of church doctrine and discipline. Members of a church who join a hierarchical body accept its tribunals. Civil courts should defer.

That was a rule of common law, decided before the First Amendment was applied to the states. Kedroff would raise it to the level of the Constitution.

The decision: Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral

On November 24, 1952, the Supreme Court ruled that the New York law was unconstitutional. Justice Stanley Reed wrote the opinion for the Court. Justice Frankfurter wrote a concurrence, and Justice Jackson dissented.

The reasoning ran in four steps.

1. The statute transferred control of a church. The New York law went beyond ordinary property regulation. It shifted the right to use the cathedral from one hierarchy to another, based on a legislative decision about which hierarchy the Russian Orthodox church in New York should follow. That was a legislative determination of ecclesiastical government.
2. Watson was a constitutional rule. The Court read its earlier decision as resting on a principle of religious freedom: churches must be free to decide matters of faith, discipline and internal government without interference from the civil government. Reed wrote that the freedom to select clergy, to determine who holds the office of bishop, is part of the church's freedom. The Court described the principle as a power in the church to decide for itself, free from state interference, matters of church government as well as those of faith and doctrine.
3. The state may not displace the church's choice. Whatever the merits of the question, who rightfully occupied the archbishop's office, it was the church's decision. When the Moscow Patriarchate's authority over the diocese was what the church's own law provided, the legislature could not override it by statute. The law, in the Court's view, burdened the free exercise of religion by one side in the dispute and transferred control from one church authority to another.
4. The First Amendment, through the Fourteenth, binds the state. New York was a state, not Congress. The Court reaffirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment makes the religious-freedom guarantee applicable to the states, as it had said in Cantwell v. Connecticut in 1940.

Justice Jackson's dissent took a narrower view. He saw an ordinary action over possession of real estate, which he thought the state courts could decide under state law, and he pointed to New York's power over the charters of the corporations it creates. That is a conservative worry, about deciding more than the case requires, and I do not dismiss it. But I think the majority had the better of it. A statute whose whole function was to say which hierarchy governs a church is not a property law.

The sequel: Kreshik

The story did not end in 1952. The dispute came back through the New York courts, this time without the statute.

In Kreshik v. St. Nicholas Cathedral (1960), the Supreme Court reversed the New York Court of Appeals in a short per curiam opinion decided June 6, 1960. The Court held that the constitutional principles of Kedroff forbid the judiciary of a state, as well as its legislature, to interfere with the free exercise of religion. Swapping a judge's ruling for a legislature's statute did not change the effect.

The wider story is interesting. The Metropolia kept its independence from Moscow in practice, and on April 10, 1970 the Russian Orthodox Church's Holy Synod proclaimed its autocephaly, or full self-governance, and it became the Orthodox Church in America. Not every Orthodox church recognizes that status, but the courts had stepped out of the question long before, and the churches worked out their own relationship. That is what the principle predicts.

The argument: why church autonomy holds even for an unpopular church

Let me now make the argument as a constitutional point, because this is where the case teaches the most.

One, the Founders knew what happens when the state governs the church. The English Crown was the supreme governor of the Church of England. Parliament set the liturgy through the Act of Uniformity, and ministers who refused it were ejected. The colonists who left for America had fled these arrangements. The First Amendment's ban on laws "respecting an establishment of religion" was written against a background of government choosing the clergy and the creed. A state that chooses which bishop governs a church has taken the central power of an establishment.

Two, the principle is a limit on power and not a favor to a faith. In 1952 the Moscow Patriarchate was widely viewed as an instrument of a hostile state. That did not matter, and it should not have. The rule that a state may not decide who governs a church protects the churches that are most vulnerable to the passions of the moment. If New York could decide that the Soviet-aligned patriarch was out, another state could decide that a church with disfavored views on a contemporary question must be governed by whoever the legislature prefers. Madison's warning in Federalist No. 51 applies: ambition must be made to counteract ambition, and a power that can be used against one's enemies will be used against one's friends.

Three, the state is not competent to decide. The question of who is the rightful bishop of a church is a question of canon law, tradition and theology. A civil judge or a legislator has no standing to answer it. If he tries, he must take a side in a theological dispute. That is what the First Amendment forbids.

Four, a free church is a check on the state. Churches are among the independent institutions that stand between the individual and the government. A church whose leaders serve at the state's pleasure is not independent and cannot speak to the state with moral authority. The Russian Orthodox Church under the Soviets was a bitter example. The American church's freedom to govern itself was the reason it could speak.

The strongest objection

The best objection is a national-security one, and it should be taken seriously. In 1952, the Moscow Patriarchate was, in the eyes of many, controlled by the Soviet security apparatus. If it exercised authority over an American cathedral, it might use that authority to serve a hostile power. The state's interest in preventing foreign control of institutions on its soil was real.

That is a legitimate concern, but the answer is that the state has other tools. It may prosecute espionage. It may prosecute sabotage. It may regulate foreign agents who act as foreign agents. What it may not do is decide a church's internal government on the ground that the church's head is aligned with a bad regime. The remedy for a church captured by a hostile government is for the members of that church to choose differently, as the Metropolia did, and not for the state to choose for them. The state could have addressed any specific wrongdoing by individual persons, and it did not need to name a bishop.

There is also a question of consistency. If a state may disfavor a hierarchy because of the foreign government that influences it, it may do the same to any foreign-linked church, including Roman Catholics, whose head sat in Rome. The history of American anti-Catholicism, covered in Bible riots, Know-Nothings and the amendment named for James G. Blaine, is the history of exactly that argument. The Court was wise to close the door.

What came after

The church autonomy principle of Kedroff has been carried forward. In Serbian Eastern Orthodox Diocese v. Milivojevich (1976) the Court again refused to review a church's internal decision to remove a bishop. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC (2012), a unanimous Court recognized the "ministerial exception," which bars employment-discrimination suits brought by ministers against their churches, and relied on Kedroff for the idea that the state may not interfere with a church's selection of its ministers. In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020), the Court extended the principle to teachers at religious schools who carry out important religious functions. And in 2025, Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin applied the related principle that a state may not rank churches by how religious they appear, a story told in Wisconsin told Catholic Charities it was not religious enough and lost 9-0.

The pattern is consistent. The courts defend the church's right to decide who leads it and what it teaches, and they require the government to keep out. For a reader who wants the underlying text, the starting point is Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase.

What a citizen should take from it

Liberty means that your freedom does not depend on whether the powerful like you. The fate of a Russian Orthodox cathedral in 1952 may seem remote, but the principle is the one that protects a Baptist church from a city council, a synagogue from a legislature, and a Catholic diocese from a state agency. The people most likely to be tempted to override a church's choice are those who disagree with it, and the reason to hold the line is to protect the churches we agree with when the next majority decides it disagrees with them.

The case in brief

1. Kedroff v. St. Nicholas Cathedral (November 24, 1952) struck down New York's 1945 law that transferred the Russian Orthodox cathedral from the Moscow Patriarchate's appointee to the North American church.
2. The Court raised the common-law rule of Watson v. Jones (1871) to the level of the First Amendment: churches are free to decide matters of faith and government without state interference.
3. In Kreshik (1960) the Court held that state courts, like state legislatures, may not interfere with a church's free exercise in such a dispute.
4. The principle holds even for an unpopular church because the power to choose a church's leaders is the power of an establishment, and because a state that can use it on one church can use it on any.
5. Church autonomy survives in the ministerial exception and in the Court's later cases.

What you can do: read Watson v. Jones and Kedroff on a free case-law site, then ask the leaders of your own congregation whether its governing documents say who decides its leadership and property disputes.