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ON THE VERGE OF A SPLIT
About the origins of the religious conflict in Ukraine, by Vladimir Vigilyansky (October 1, 2018 08:30)
It is not necessary to be a prophet in order to predict events in Ukraine in connection with the creation of the United Orthodox Ukrainian Church, which was announced by the president of the neighboring country, Petro Poroshenko. People far from the Church, it is not very clear why someone opposes this state project. It would seem that any union is better than any disconnections.
In order to understand this political provocation, one needs to know history, secular and ecclesiastical law, Orthodox teaching about the Church, statistics of religious preferences among the Ukrainian people, who is the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and how he relates to Ukraine. What is autocephaly and Tomos, why in the name of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is the phrase "Moscow Patriarchate" and what does Moscow have to do with it. Who are the schismatics (Kiev Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church) and how they were formed in Ukraine in the twentieth century. Why Filaret, who heads the Kyiv Patriarchate, does not get out of America, why did Muslim Mustafa Dzhemilev, chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people in 1991–2013 (an organization banned as a terrorist in the Russian Federation),
To unravel this tangle of questions, each of us requires knowledge and thoughtful, prudent attitude to events.
Everyone knows that the most painful and controversial problems in the history of mankind are the problems of language and religion, which are connected with the self-identification of the national consciousness. If you want to create confusion in any nation, do so in order to disrupt the well-established balance of linguistic and religious preferences.
None of the politicians who want good for their people will not address these issues. And vice versa - if you want a part of the people to hate you, make the people change their language and change the Church they chose for their faith. It is the latter that is happening now in Ukraine.
Let's start from afar. Until the XV century there were only four local Orthodox churches: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem.
In ancient Russia, the Church was ruled by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It was he who delivered his metropolitans to our state: first to Kiev, then, after the defeat of Kiev by the Tatar-Mongol hordes, to Vladimir (1299), then to Moscow (1325).
But after the Patriarchate of Constantinople changed Orthodoxy and went into union - unification with the Roman Catholic Church (1439) - Moscow, not wanting to participate in the betrayal of its faith, became practically independent and began to elect Russian hierarchs to itself as Metropolitan. In this right, our Church was supported by the remaining local churches - Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
In the end, the Church of Constantinople, which returned to the bosom of Orthodoxy, recognized our Church as independent in 1589, handing a Tomos to it.
Now Patriarch Bartholomew is misleading everyone, saying that this Diploma was temporary, although the originals of many documents on recognition of the Moscow Patriarchate stored in our archives are published and they do not contain the word "temporarily". But the most important thing is that there were no complaints about the fact that the Russian Church, together with the Kiev regions, became an independent patriarchate, has not been received from Constantinople for centuries.
During the time of the Russian troubles, for example in the revolutionary years of the last century, Constantinople showed its interest in seizing foreign canonical territory belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church. In particular, he concluded a political alliance with the Bolsheviks and a church alliance with schismatics and renovators. But historically he suffered a defeat here, although he opened his dioceses for Russian believers in Western Europe and in Estonia without the permission of the Russian Church.
In all these cases, the Patriarch of Constantinople acted as the Pope, having assumed the status of the head of world Orthodoxy, which is considered to be a frank heresy for the Orthodox.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is an autonomous church that solves its problems (canonical, organizational, financial) without any relation to Moscow. This is the largest religious organization in Ukraine in terms of the number of churches, clergymen and parishioners. According to these indicators in sum, all other Christian organizations in the country cannot compete with the Ukrainian Church.
With all this, the Ukrainian authorities did not react in any way to the barbaric seizure of the temples of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (there were about 50 such cases in the last four years and hundreds of temples until 2014), but they encouraged neo-Nazis to violence.
In this situation, the appeal of the Ukrainian dissenters, the president of Petro Poroshenko and the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada about the gift of autocephaly by Constantinople for an as yet unclear new religious organization is the impetus for religious confrontation.
Some experts believe that this situation is beneficial only for the United States in their confrontation with Russia, that the sense of separating the once united nation not only along the borders of states, but also by language and religion is to strengthen the zone of instability for decades, which will bleed and take away strength from the people, not wanting to be divided.
The constitutions of almost all states enshrine non-interference of the authorities in church issues, including in the United States and Ukraine. But for some reason, in the United States, in which there are 120 denominations, it does not occur to anyone to create a single American church, but many politicians from the State Department are trying to support such a religious organization in Ukraine. Isn't it strange?
Why did none of the Western politicians pull up President Poroshenko, who declared that he is unleashing a war against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which, on its false accusations, supposedly prays for the aggressor country and blesses the murder of Ukrainians? Why no one can stop him from making a political accusation against the majority of Orthodox Christians in his country?
Well, okay, Ukrainian dissenters and irresponsible politicians fighting for power and political influence, but how can the Orthodox Turkish hierarch allow themselves to unite with dissenters to intervene in political life in a country that is undergoing civil war and electoral struggle on the side of those who are only interested in personal ambitions?
Does he give a report that fishing for goldfish in the muddy waters of unrest will be regarded by history as a political provocation, as an act of fanning a fire of hatred among the Ukrainian people, as an incitement to a religious war?
Archpriest Vladimir Vigilyansky is a publicist, literary critic, rector of the Church of the Holy Martyr Tatiana at Moscow State University,
