Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

His talks on radio and television, unfailingly presented with charm and substance, drew thousands of people close to him, resulting in a significant number of conversions, especially among intellectuals. The late BBC religious affairs correspondent, Gerald Priestland, once called him the single most powerful Christian voice in the land. The heart of his life's work was building up the Russian Orthodox diocese in Britain.

Yet, curiously, in personal relations he could be distant. While gifted as a confessor and counsellor, to his spiritual protégés he could be authoritarian, sometimes failing to empathise with the complex difficulties in which they found themselves. For all his public warmth, and his membership of the central committee of the World Council of Churches, he was not an ecumenical figure, and did less than some others to bring closer the prospect of Christian unity, east and west.

Although of Russian parentage, André Borisovich Bloom was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, where his father was a member of the Russian imperial diplomatic corps. His mother was the sister of the composer Scriabin. The family returned to Russia just before the outbreak of the first world war, only to be posted to Persia.

When the 1917 revolution destroyed the old order, the family fled, along with so many others, to exile in Paris, where the young Bloom grew up. Distant from the church at this time, he was brought up bilingually. His interests developed along scientific lines, his first degree being in physics, chemistry and biology, leading to a doctorate in medicine from the Sorbonne in 1943.

He served in the French army and, after the fall of France in 1940, worked in a Paris hospital, having some contacts with the resistance. He had already turned to the Christian faith - his account of his conversion is very moving - and, like some other Russian Orthodox clerics of the Soviet period, he studied theology while practising medicine, professing monastic vows in 1943 and being ordained to the priesthood five years later.

What may have seemed a temporary move in 1949 now forged the direction of his whole career. Wishing to support the beleaguered clergy in the Soviet Union, he chose the controversial path of loyalty to the just re-established Moscow patriarchate, while being personally deeply critical of communism.

He came to England in 1949, as Orthodox chaplain to the fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, an organisation that sought to establish unity between Anglicans and Orthodox, but from which he moved the following year to take over the London parish under Moscow's jurisdiction. In November 1957, he was consecrated bishop of the titular diocese of Sergievo. Five years later, he was elevated to archbishop (in the Orthodox church, the rank is simply a mark of seniority).

This was a bad year for Soviet believers, although it saw the creation of a full Russian diocese in Britain. In the USSR, Khrushchev's persecution, which had begun in 1959, was in full spate. Churches were being closed, and those who resisted were imprisoned. The very future of monasticism - and therefore the episcopate - was under threat.

Archbishop Anthony's position became delicate, to say the least. On the one hand, there were those who ex pected him to speak out, and unambiguously address the universal constituency of the World Council of Churches, which his church had joined in 1961.

On the other hand, he was now in a position of great trust, accorded him by the threatened patriarchate. In 1963, he was created exarch in western Europe, with oversight of all patriarchal parishes in the area. On the BBC Russian service, his authoritative voice became a lifeline for the persecuted, yet Metropolitan Anthony - as he was from 1966 - remained diplomatic, speaking on spiritual, but never political, themes. Thus, he kept open his access to Moscow.

As exarch, he reported, from time to time, to the patriarch. The KGB, not always successfully, tried to prevent personal contact when he visited the churches, and he occasionally addressed the Theological Academy at Zagorsk. He also sometimes met Soviet government officials.

But maintaining a discreet silence was not always possible. In 1970, he said that "during the revolution, we lost the Christ of the great cathedrals ... we discovered the Christ who was rejected just as we were rejected". He went on to speak of the "eradication of the faith in the Stalin period by extreme violence and then systematic propaganda".

In 1974, there occurred an event of such enormity that Metropolitan Anthony condemned it in a sermon in his own cathedral: the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union. This act of barbarity was made worse for the metropolitan by the fact that Solzhenitsyn was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Moscow patriarchate did not defend him. They failed even to answer Metropolitan Anthony's telephone calls.

This episode led to a cooling of his relations with the patriarchate, and the temporary cessation of his visits to Moscow; he renounced the office of exarch over the radio. Yet he continued to attend official bishops' meetings and the councils ( pomestniye sobory ) of the church. When he spoke, he commanded rapt attention. In 1971, he had begged the sobor not to condemn the anti-Soviet Russian Church in Exile.

Metropolitan Anthony's short, but influential, spiritual works were published together in The Essence Of Prayer (1986), and, with his sermons, are now freely available in Russia, maintaining his reputation there.

As old age approached, he appeared less frequently in public, but by no means went into retirement. In 1994, his 81st year, he delivered an unforgettable talk on pilgrimage to the clerical leaders of tours organised by Inter-Church Travel. The following year, Cambridge University awarded him a much-prized doctorate of divinity, and his lectures continued into his late 80s, his charisma and vigour undiminished.

His last years were clouded by dissension over the issue of Bishop Ilarion (Alfeyev), sent to London supposedly to serve in a senior, but supportive, role. The new Russians in London were in conflict with the English-speaking converts, and Ilarion was moved to Brussels. However, Metropolitan Anthony's ministry of almost half a century in London, western Europe and - at some remove - Russia, was unique and irreplaceable.

· André Borisovich Bloom, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, head of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchal Church in Great Britain and Ireland (diocese of Sourozh), priest and doctor, born June 19 1914; died August 4 2003

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