WARSAW, POLAND — When Pope Francis discussed the Syrian crisis with Russia's Patriarch
Kirill by phone in mid-April, it was just the latest top-level
Catholic-Orthodox exchange since their historic meeting in Cuba two
years ago — and it p
redictably brought fresh pledges of dialogue and
cooperation.
Yet some observers wonder whether the new interchurch closeness has
brought any real benefits at the local level, and whether it can continue
during the latest downturn in Russia's relations with the West.
"Whereas politicians tend to set people apart, the mission of
religious leaders is to reconcile them," Msgr. Igor Kovalevsky,
secretary-general of Russia's Catholic bishops' conference, told NCR.
"Since our own church is small and weak by itself, we should be pleased if
these contacts with the Holy See have helped achieve a few small steps, if
nothing more. But they all seem to be happening over our heads without much
reference to local conditions."
During their 15-minute talk on April 14, Francis and Kirill agreed on
the need to protect endangered Christians in the Middle East, and pledged, by
the Russian Orthodox account, to continue working for world peace.
Such themes were featured prominently in their February 2016 Havana
talks, when their 30-point Joint Declaration had also deplored the "grave threat to religious
freedom" posed by the West's "secularized societies."
In the flurry of contacts since, a key fixture was a Moscow visit in
August 2017 by the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who
lauded the "undoubted new dynamism" heralded by the Havana
encounter.
In an interview before his arrival, Parolin assured Gaudete.ru, an online Catholic
magazine, that his first aim would be to "meet the local Catholic
community" and to tackle the "very serious, urgent problem" of
ensuring work permits for foreign clergy and the restitution of Catholic
properties seized under Soviet rule.
Little if anything has happened since to benefit Russia's still heavily
restricted Catholic communities, who are put at 773,000 by the Vatican's
Annuario Pontificio and are widely dispersed over a Moscow-based archdiocese
and dioceses in Saratov, Irkutsk and Novosibirsk. Some regional authorities
have granted visas to visiting priests; other authorities have refused or
prevaricated.
As for property restitutions, an Immaculate Conception church was
rededicated at Ryazan in April by Russia's Italian-born Archbishop Paolo Pezzi,
after being closed for eight decades. The rededication required years of
litigation and the church, long used as a state art school, will need total
reconstruction.
Meanwhile, other churches are still being withheld, such as at Kirov,
where the parish priest, Fr. Grigoriy Zvolinskiy, began a hunger strike last
month in protest.
In Moscow, Kovalevsky's own historic church complex, Sts. Peter and
Paul, still awaits reopening, despite several court rulings in favor of his
parish.
"Despite the court victories, we're still facing bureaucratic
delays in registering our property rights," Kovalevsky said. "Since
some of our church's difficulties have been raised in the course of the
Vatican's contacts, we can say we've benefited and no longer feel so
threatened. But I wouldn't be too optimistic: The general situation isn't easy
here, and the Catholic Church still faces great challenges merely building
bridges with Russian society."
Popes since the reign of Paul VI (1963-78) have enjoyed friendly ties
with some Orthodox leaders, including the Istanbul-based ecumenical patriarch, who's
recognized as the spiritual head of Orthodoxy's nine patriarchates and 21
self-governing churches. But ties have often been tense with the Russian
church, which claims half the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians and is by
far the largest.
After the collapse of communist rule in 1989-91, there was talk of a
possible summit between Pope John Paul II and Russia's then-patriarch, Aleksi
II. But this was prevented by Russian complaints that Catholics were
"proselytizing" in traditionally Orthodox areas. The dispute reached
a head in 2002, when the Polish pope created four Catholic dioceses in Russia.
Contacts improved after the 2005 election of Pope Benedict XVI, leading
ultimately to the brief, much-celebrated Havana meeting between Francis and
Kirill.
Today, however, the interchurch exchanges are being questioned, given
the Russian church's close relationship with controversial President Vladimir
Putin.
Putin's landslide re-election on March 18, amid reports of
ballot-stuffing and intimidation, was received cautiously by Russia's Catholic
bishops' conference, whose Saratov-based chairman, Bishop Clemens Pickel, told
the president the Catholic minority prayed he would "justify the
confidence of voters."
By contrast, Kirill glowingly welcomed the election results,
congratulating Putin on his "convincing victory in open and fair conditions,"
and praising the president's "responsibility for preserving and
multiplying the nation's spiritual, moral and cultural values."
During Putin's 18 years in power, the Orthodox Church's wealth and
infrastructure have expanded dramatically, while its spiritual and temporal
supremacy in national life, endorsed by laws and regulations, now seems
assured.
While at least 50 Russian universities now have theology departments,
the Russian Orthodox Church's 300 eparchies, or dioceses, have opened three new
places of worship daily, with a further 900 Russian Orthodox parishes now
operating abroad.
Orthodox leaders have shown their gratitude by giving a religious and
moral underpinning to Putin's authoritarian rule and endorsing his claim to be
safeguarding true Christianity against the decadent West — as well as by
backing the projection of Russia's regional power with rhetoric about Slavic
brotherhood and unity.
Not a word has been uttered by Orthodox leaders questioning the forcible
2014 annexation of Crimea or Russia's involvement in the savage four-year war
in Eastern Ukraine, which has left more than 10,000 dead and 25,000 wounded.
Meanwhile, the Orthodox Church has used state power to restrict or
suppress confessional rivals, whether they are much-harassed Baptist
communities or Russia's Jehovah's Witnesses. The Russian Supreme Court's
prohibition of Jehovah's Witnesses in 2017 was condemned by human rights groups
but enthusiastically supported by Kirill's foreign relations director,
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, citing the Witnesses' "false
teachings" as justification.
As for criticizing regime policies, the head of the Moscow
Patriarchate's Church and Society Department, Vladimir Legoyda, insisted in
April this would never happen. Opposing secular authorities wasn't
characteristic of Orthodoxy, Legoyda assured the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily. Nor
had Christ himself sanctioned such things.
There've been signs of resistance.
When Kirill visited Bulgaria in March to extol the two countries'
"spiritual unity," by Valeri Simeonov, Bulgaria's vice-premier,
denounced him as a "second-rate Soviet cop." When Kirill traveled to
mostly Muslim Albania in late April, he caused controversy by insisting Orthodox
Christians everywhere followed "the same values."
Plans to build Russian Orthodox cathedrals in Western cities, including
Paris, Madrid and Nicosia in Cyprus, have faced local opposition.
In neighboring Ukraine, feuding continues with the Greek Catholic
Church, which was outlawed and savagely persecuted under Soviet rule with
Russian Orthodox connivance. Many Greek Catholics were dismayed when the
2016 Havana declaration appeared to excuse Russian Orthodox hostility and used
the contemptuous Russian term "uniates" to describe them.
Interviewed two days later, the Ukrainian church's leader, Archbishop
Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kiev-Halych, said the declaration's "half-truth
nature" had left many feeling "betrayed by the Vatican."
Russian
Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev (CNS/Robert Duncan)
Such fears were stoked again during Parolin's Moscow visit, when
Hilarion accused Greek Catholics of "politicized statements and aggressive
actions."
Yet the Russian Orthodox stance could backfire.
In April, Ukrainian parliamentarians overwhelmingly backed a request
from President Petro Poroshenko to the ecumenical patriarch, Bartholomew I, for
the country's Orthodox Church to be granted independence from the Moscow Patriarchate.
"The Kremlin sees the Russian Orthodox Church as a key tool for
influencing Ukraine," Poroshenko told the Kiev-based Verkhovna
Rada. "This is why separation from the church of Moscow is a matter
of national security and self-defence when this hybrid war is being waged
against us. It will curtail Moscow's attempts to dictate our history and our
future."
Meanwhile, Poland's Catholic Church initiated a dialogue with the
Russian Orthodox to much fanfare in August 2012, with a joint declaration
pledging to "overcome mutual prejudices and misunderstandings." But
the Polish Catholic Church has now suspended contacts, concluding the goodwill
gestures had had no impact on Russia's aggressive behavior.
In a message for Orthodox Easter in April, Kirill assured the Russian
army its "historic mission in Syria" was "not just political and
humanitarian, but also spiritual," and made no mention of his country's
deadly bombing campaign against Syrian cities.
And when ties with Western governments plummeted over British
accusations that Moscow had engineered a nerve-agent attack on a Russian exile
in Salisbury, the Orthodox Church again took the Kremlin's side, with Hilarion
dismissing the British claims as "nonsense" and backing Putin's
countermeasures.
Hilarion has also rejected claims of Russian meddling in U.S. elections
and urged Putin to ignore them.
"Many American Christians ardently sympathize with Russia and its
president, and I know many Russian Christians also sympathize with the American
president, who is in a very difficult situation," Hilarion observed after
visiting Washington, D.C., in 2017. "The mass media, including CNN,
are conducting a targeted propaganda campaign against him, playing the Russian
card. We hope he'll stick to his electoral promises and spare no effort to
establish a dialogue with Russia."
Women hold candles and pray
at a Roman Catholic church during the Easter Vigil in Krasnoyarsk, Russia,
March 26, 2016. (CNS/Reuters/Ilya Naymushin)
All of this should weigh heavily on the Vatican, which opened formal
diplomatic ties with Russia in 2009, two decades after the Soviet Union's
collapse, and has hosted Putin five times, most recently for meetings with
Francis in November 2013 and June 2015.
Despite pledges to help rebuild Syria's destroyed churches, observers
say Russian Orthodox leaders are doing little in practice to help the Middle
East's Christians.
As for defending Christian values against Western secularism, these
values do not appear, in the Russian Orthodox lexicon, to have much to do with
democracy and human rights, or respect for pluralism, free speech and national
sovereignty — all subjects that were conspicuously absent from the 2016 Havana
declaration.
Nor do the much-vaunted contacts seem to have eased the position of
Catholics in Russia, whose bishops outlined their continuing problems in a
two-hour session with the pope during their January ad liminavisit.
When Francis travels to the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and
Estonia in September, a part of Europe now feeling the full force of Russian
intimidation, it will be an opportunity to discern how much has really changed
— and how far, beyond prayers for peace, the Catholic Church can go in its
contacts with Russian Orthodoxy.
Kovalevsky, the bishops' conference secretary-general, remains
cautious.
"Certainly, we're too isolated and insignificant here to do much
for ourselves — while Russia's multi-ethnic Catholics hold various political
views and often need reconciling themselves," he said. "At the very
least, we should hope we won't be punished personally for any deterioration
with the West, and will be able to continue our own mission of reconciliation,
whatever the practical outcomes."
*Jonathan Luxmoore covers church news
from Oxford, England, and Warsaw, Poland. The God of the Gulag is
his two-volume study of communist-era martyrs, published
by Gracewing in 2016.
It was posted in National Catholic Reporter on May 14, 2018