It took over 1,000 years to gather the religious leaders of the many
Eastern Orthodox churches in one place, and still, when it happened, not
everyone was in attendance.
The week-long Holy Great Council, in the pipeline for 55 years, was
supposed to bring together all the congregations of the Eastern Orthodox
faith. But as the bishops gathered on a Greek island on June 19, some
last-minute cancellations cast a shadow over the summit.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, was the
last and most high-profile of the four religious leaders to pull out of
the historic pan-Orthodox summit. To explain the cancellation, Moscow
cited the absence of three other churches, also last-minute drop outs:
the patriarchates of Bulgaria, Georgia and Antioch (based in Syria).
More likely, however, was that the Russian refusal to attend was
based in politics rather than theology. Geopolitics, after all, have
prevented Orthodox bishops from uniting since their last meeting in the
year 787.
Politics undermined the council even before it began. There was
controversy over the summit’s location, originally planned for Istanbul,
the former city of Constantinople and the birthplace of Eastern
Orthodox Christianity. Bad relations between Russia and Turkey made that
location impossible, so Patriarch Kirill’s Constantinople equivalent,
the ethnic Greek Patriarch Bartholomew, agreed to change the location to
more neutral territory: Crete.
Everything was done so as not to antagonize the Moscow delegation. But in the end, Russian priests never made it to the island.
And the reason they pulled out of this once-in-a-millennium council lies in Kiev.
Ukrainian Rivals
Even before the Maidan revolution tore a rift between Kiev and
Moscow, Ukraine’s Orthodox believers were far from united. The Ukrainian
church split in 1992: Part of the country’s parishes broke away from
Moscow’s authority and formed the Kiev patriarchy of the Orthodox
church. The current head of the Kiev Patriarchy, Patriarch Filaret, has
stood at the front of a drive to recognize Ukraine’s independent
religious authority ever since his appointment in 1995.
But the political and military conflict between Russia and
Ukraine increased the animosity. The Kiev patriarchy sided with the
Euromaidan movement from the start. The Ukrainian capital’s St.
Michael’s Monastery symbolically opened its doors to protesting students
when the violence first erupted in December 2013, protecting them from
riot police. It served as a sanctuary for the injured during the
bloodshed that followed in February 2014.
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Patriarch
Filaret made his views clearly known: “Satan went to Putin, as into
Judas Iscariot.”
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchy, meanwhile,
had close links to the Viktor Yanukovych regime, as well as a history of
cooperating closely with previous presidential offices. During the
subsequent conflict in eastern Ukraine, a large number of the parishes
of the Moscow patriarchy backed separatist rebels. This cost the Moscow
patriarchy many worshippers in Ukraine.
Holy and Great Council / AP
The leaders of 10 Orthodox churches stand for a portrait at the
Orthodox Academy of the Greek island of Crete on June 17. The Orthodox
Christian leaders met in an effort to promote unity.
Some of Ukraine’s parishes remain loyal to the Moscow patriarchy —
perhaps as much as 20 percent of Ukraine’s religious population. Given
the breakdown in communication between the two countries, support is now
growing for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to break away from Moscow’s
authority altogether. On the eve of the Crete summit, the Ukrainian
parliament urged the church to act, appealing to Patriarch Bartholomew
to recognize the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and to
take it under Constantinople’s wing.
They argued that this was Ukraine’s historical right: Before being
transferred to Moscow by Tsar Michael I’s decree in 1686, Kiev was
originally under Constantinople’s authority. “They want to switch back,
and that’s within their right,” argues historian Andrei Zubov.
But the stakes are high for Moscow. “They cannot allow this at any
price,” says the theologian Andrei Desnitsky. The Russian Orthodox
Church, he says, sees itself as the sole leader of Eastern Orthodox
Slavs. Losing Ukraine would mean losing thousands of parishes. After the
Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Orthodox Church had more active
parishes in Ukraine than in Russia.
The Russian Orthodox Church could thus be almost halved as a result of such a change, says Zubov.
Two Dying Empires
Ukraine’s ambition for a religious divorce from Russia threatens to
rekindle a centuries-old rivalry between Moscow and Constantinople.
Before the congress, Kirill warned Bartholomew that any steps to
separate Ukraine from his authority would lead to deterioration in
relations. The two churches agreed to keep the issue off the agenda at
the summit, providing the Russians turned up.
Even though the Russian delegation was absent, no changes were made
to the Ukrainian church’s authority. Patriarch Bartholomew did, however,
accuse Moscow of prioritizing national interests over church unity
during a speech at the summit.
The Russian Orthodox Church sees itself as the sole defender of
Christianity against the “barbarians” in the East and the “decadence” of
the West.
Patriarch Bartholomew has the most authority of all Orthodox clerics,
but Moscow sees Constantinople as a tiny quarter in Istanbul,
representing an empire that no longer exists. By contrast, Patriarch
Kirill controls much of Moscow’s post-Soviet empire and represents 130
million of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians.
Leadership rivalry may well have pushed Patriarch Kirill to snub the
Crete meeting with the intention of undermining Bartholomew’s authority.
Damning Documents
Ultraconservative circles inside the Russian clerical elite also see
Patriarch Bartholomew as the leader of a dangerous, pro-Western stream
of Orthodoxy. The hardliners inside the Russian Orthodox Church made
their position clear when they were presented with documents of the
questions scheduled to be discussed in Crete.
Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters
Protesters rest in Kiev's Mikhailovsky Zlatoverkhy Cathedral
on Dec. 1, 2013. After police used batons and stun grenades
on pro-Europe protesters, about 10,000 of them regrouped in Kiev.
Among these was the “intolerable” issue of allowing marriages between
Christians of different congregations and the proposed reversal of a
resolution that ruled Catholics and Protestants were heretics. A scheme
to allow the use of modern languages in preaching, as opposed to ancient
tongues such as the Old Slavonic used by Russian Orthodox priests, was
also a step too far.
The documents confirmed suspicions of Russian Orthodox bishops toward
Patriarch Bartholomew: He is ready to work with Western Christians. For
them, any agreement with other Orthodox churches ready to recognize
Western churches as equals is unacceptable. Staunchly anti-Western, they
were unhappy when Patriarch Kirill met with Pope Francis in a Cuban
airport lobby in February.
“The Patriarch was pressured by his own elites to snub the meeting,” says Andrei Zubov.
The Patriarch and the Tsar
The fundamentalists inside the Russian church have been growing in
strength in the current political climate. The Russian Church has played
an active role in promoting the Kremlin’s nationalistic propaganda and
confrontational rhetoric with the West. Patriarch Kirill enjoys a close
relationship with President Vladimir Putin: Just recently, he joined him
on a trip to Mount Athos in Greece.
The links between the Russian state, security services and the
Russian Orthodox Church have come under particular scrutiny. This close
relationship goes back to the Middle Ages, save for some time between
the 1917 revolution and 1943. Toward the end of World War II, Stalin
reversed the repressive Soviet policy toward religion by allowing
priests to preach under close state supervision.
According to Desnitsky, the Russian state gains much more than the
church in the bargain. But there are few dissenting voices within the
church. “There’s no opposition, nor is there likely to be,” says
Desnitsky.
That is something the independently minded deacon Andrei Kuraev knows
only too well. He is one of the few who have openly criticized the
church leadership.
He has been shunned by the church elite ever since he met with
members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot. The group were described
by Kirill as “doing the work of the devil.”
Kuraev says many bishops will be unhappy about the Russian church
snubbing the Crete summit. “We should have done what the Serbs did,” he
says, noting that the Serbian Orthodox Church initially announced it
wouldn’t attend and then changed its mind.
Patriarch Kirill, it seems, has chosen politics over unity. But
walking away may cost his increasingly secluded church dearly.