Who communicates in the media supported by the Russian Church?

The Russian Orthodox Church has established new Church media in order to gain a new audience, e.g. young people. The aim of this study was to determine what kind of interaction is typical of this media, and how interactional relations between representatives of the Church and ordinary readers of Church media are constructed. The material consisted of three texts published in the journal, Foma (Issue 5, 2005). The analysis of the texts indicates that to some extent they constitute an institutional discourse because the interaction expressed by the priest, the bishop and the ordinary readers of the journal “Foma” demonstrates the difference between authoritative and individual opinions. On the one hand, the use of colloquial language shows a tendency toward a more casual interaction between the clergy and the readers. On the other hand, interactional linguistic features such as modality markers and attitude markers does not occur very frequently in written interaction, which, however, may refer to a certain distance between the debaters. Hence the official voice of the Church tends to prevail.