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MAX SEDDON:
PUTIN AND THE PATRIARCHS. HOW GEOPOLITICS TORE APART THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
1 Mount Athos
On a chilly
day in February, a small group of Ukrainian monks approached a monastery on
Mount Athos, the remote peninsula in north-eastern Greece that is one of
Orthodox Christianity’s holiest sites. For more than a thousand years, monks
here have spent eight hours a day in prayer and study. Women and meat are
banned from the entire peninsula, clocks run on Byzantine hours, and using the
internet requires the blessing of an abbot to ensure the faithful stay focused
on sacred matters. A thousand male pilgrims are granted entry visas to Athos
every day, arriving by boat to tour the 20 monasteries on its coastline, attend
services, pray and receive blessings. Yet when the Ukrainians reached St
Panteleimon, a gleaming monastery particularly beloved of Russian and Ukrainian
pilgrims, the abbot shut the gates in their face, telling them they were not
welcome
Until
October 2018, when Constantinople’s ‘tomos’ gave it its independence, Ukraine’s
church was allied to Russia’s – the largest and most powerful bloc within the
faith © Antonis Theodoridis It was the painful manifestation of a split that
had been announced four months earlier. In October 2018, the man considered by
most to be the Orthodox church’s highest authority, 79-year-old Patriarch
Bartholomew of Constantinople, said he would give the Ukrainian church a tomos,
or holy scroll, granting it independence from the Russian Orthodox church for
the first time since 1686. In response, the Russian church severed ties with
Constantinople, creating one of the biggest rifts in Christianity since the
Great Schism of 1054, when the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches divided.
Far from being an arcane squabble over centuries-old church doctrine, Patriarch
Bartholomew’s decision had geopolitical significance. The fallout has affected
the lives of priests and politicians, of ordinary worshippers and oligarchs.
Russian
Orthodoxy has risen in status in the 20 years since President Putin came to
power, prompting a boom in rich Russian visitors to the peninsula
But most
importantly, it was a blow to Vladimir Putin, for whom the Russian Orthodox
church had come to symbolise Moscow’s sphere of influence in its near abroad.
While Ukraine hailed the tomos as “an event no less substantial than our goals
to join the EU and Nato”, Putin convened his security council in the middle of
the night to discuss a response. Russia and Ukraine both trace their history to
medieval Rus in Kiev, where Vladimir the Great baptised his subjects into
Orthodoxy en masse in 988AD. Today, there are about 300 million Orthodox
Christians around the world. Russia, which accounts for a third of those
followers, has long been the largest and most powerful group within the faith’s
14 jurisdictions. That pre-eminence — which prompted some theologians in
pre-tsarist Russia to call Moscow the “Third Rome” — made it a pillar of the
Russian empire, a status Putin has drawn on in building his modern state. Since
he came to power 20 years ago, Russian Orthodoxy has risen in status: tens of
thousands of churches have been built; oligarchs have sponsored church
charities; and Putin has regularly — and publicly — sought the advice of church
elders in matters spiritual and profane. He has used religion to highlight
divisions between Russia and the supposedly amoral west, and to elevate the
idea of the “Russian world”, a sort of spiritual dominion bringing together
Russian-speaking former Soviet citizens, that has been promoted by the church
and the state.
More than
1,000 male pilgrims are granted daily entry visas to the peninsula, which has
20 monasteries; Putin first visited in 2005. But Russia’s annexation of Crimea
in 2014 and five years of war on the eastern border turned public opinion in
Ukraine firmly against Moscow. The Russian church’s closeness to Putin meant
its own reputation suffered as a result of the Kremlin’s aggressive foreign
policy. The Russian Orthodox church declined to make senior priests available
for interview. But people close to the church — who were among several dozen
priests, oligarchs, theologians and officials the FT spoke to in Russia,
Ukraine and Greece — say Putin’s incursion into Ukraine caused a rift between
the Kremlin and the church. They add that the schism with Constantinople may
have made it irreparable. “Why would you summon the security council over a
church in a neighbouring country? It shows Ukraine that Russia is interfering,”
says Evgeny Nikiforov, head of Radio Radonezh, a state-funded Orthodox station
in Moscow. Still, losing what remains of a former imperial dominion is like
having a “phantom limb”, he adds. “Ukraine is so much a part of Russia that
people don’t understand how to live without it.”
2. Moscow
Outwardly,
Putin and the head of the Russian church, Patriarch Kirill, have presented a
united front. In late January, sweeping orchestral music played as the two men
entered the Kremlin’s main concert hall for a celebration of Kirill’s first
decade at the head of the Russian church. Kirill, in black robes and a
gold-embroidered white headdress adorned with a cross, thanked God and
“especially you, Vladimir Vladimirovich […] for this dialogue between church
and state” during his time as patriarch. “I would even dare say that church and
state have such relations for the first time in all the history of
Russia . . . Even in the times of the Russian empire, the church did not have
an equal partner in the face of the government.” The phrase “equal partner”
highlighted the extraordinary way in which the church has regained some of its
historic authority as one of the “three pillars” of tsarism under Putin’s rule,
after suffering persecution and interference for much of the 20th century.
Putin with Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian church, in 2017.
They
present a united front, but recent Kremlin foreign-policy decisions and the
post-‘tomos’ schism between Moscow and Constantinople have changed their
relationship In the years following the Russian revolution of 1917, the
communist government destroyed churches, executed priests and seized land in
its attempts to erase religion. By 1946, when Kirill was born Vladimir Gundyaev
in Leningrad, Stalin had adopted a new policy of allowing the church to play a
limited role in public life in return for political support. Kirill finished
studying theology in 1970, by which point the church was proving useful to the
state in another way: KGB files from the time reveal large-scale infiltration
of the Moscow patriarchate, with some priests acting as spies. Kirill quickly
rose through the church’s external relations department, which allowed him to
make frequent trips abroad. When the USSR finally collapsed in 1991, the
well-travelled Kirill could use his connections to help rebuild the church
financially. Meanwhile, some agents of the now-disbanded KGB — which Putin had
joined in 1975 — found themselves working odd security jobs to make ends meet.
Vladimir Yakunin, one of a number of KGB veterans who befriended Putin in St
Petersburg in the 1990s, when the latter was cutting his teeth in local
politics, says that the church became an unlikely haven for former communists.
“Even in rejecting religious faith, communists created a different, ideologised
faith — a faith in the bright future of communism. And suddenly, it turned out
that the only social institution where they could find sympathy and support, as
paradoxical as it sounds, was in church.” The church’s former oppressors soon
found themselves improbable figures in a religious revival. It helped that many
KGB officers knew the church’s leadership from their time running them as
agents. Yakunin says that he first came across Alexiy, Kirill’s predecessor as
Russian patriarch, through a close friend who knew him from his time heading
the KGB’s Leningrad directorate. As Putin climbed the rungs of power in the
1990s, more and more people in his inner circle took to religion. Perhaps the
most devout was Konstantin Goloshchapov, a massage therapist who became close
to Putin and his friends through Leningrad judo events, then later introduced
some of them to priests offering spiritual advice. “He’s a very spiritual
person. He helps people find the road to truth,” says Igor Divinsky, a Russian
MP and close friend of Goloshchapov. After the fall of communism, Goloshchapov
co-founded SMP Bank — still a top-20 lender in Russia despite US sanctions
against it over Ukraine — with Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood judo
sparring partner. He later reportedly played a role in determining numerous
early administrative appointments in the Kremlin. At some point in the 1990s,
Putin became close to Father Tikhon Shevkunov, who ran a monastery down the
street from the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service,
that was frequented by its top brass. Neither Putin nor Shevkunov have
confirmed persistent rumours that the monk brought him into the Orthodox faith
when Putin ran the FSB, and became his confessor, though Shevkunov once told a
newspaper that Putin “makes confession, takes communion and understands his
responsibility before God for the high service entrusted to him and for his
immortal soul”. The monk has accompanied Putin on several foreign trips during
his presidency, while Kremlin-run firms fund his charities and educational
projects. The power and the patriarchy Bartholomew of Constantinople, 79 From a
tiny Greek enclave in Istanbul, he is considered the ‘first among equals’ of
the Orthodox church. Gave autonomy to the church in Ukraine Kirill of Moscow,
72 Helped rebuild the Russian church after the USSR’s collapse. His patriarchy
has seen Kremlin support for Orthodoxy surge; he once said Putin’s rule was ‘a
miracle from God’.
Filaret of
Kiev, 90 Broke with Constantinople and Moscow to set up his own church in Kiev
in 1992 – but refused to step down as patriarch when Ukraine finally received a
tomos in 2019 Father Ephraim, 63 Rebuilt the Vatopedi monastery with support
from the EU and Russian oligarchs. Then fell foul of both, went to jail before
being acquitted – and lost his Russian followers by accepting Ukraine’s new
church.
Epifany, 40
Filaret protégé made head of the new Ukrainian church as a compromise
candidate. Once referred to parts of Ukraine still loyal to the Moscow
patriarchate as ‘Putin’s last outpost’ After Putin came to power in 1999, many
of his close confidants were part of an Orthodox elite that would exert
significant influence over Russian politics. Former KGB agents now in charge of
state companies began to donate their new-found wealth to church causes:
Yakunin, while head of Russian Railways, helped to bring holy relics from Athos
to Moscow and ferried the Eternal Flame from Jerusalem each year in special
canisters bought from Nasa. One Leningrad contemporary recalls visiting Igor
Divinsky, the Russian MP, at Gazprom, the gas monopoly where Divinsky was a
senior executive in the 2000s, and seeing priests roaming the corridors. “He
was a good guy. But he’d gone nuts. He’d grown this huge beard and there were
icons everywhere,” the contemporary says. Divinsky, whose office today is
adorned with Orthodox icons, Gazprom plaques and a model of a gas-flare stack,
plays down the influence of Putin’s religious entourage on the Kremlin, while
pointing to the church’s redemptive message.
“There are
so many people surrounding Putin. Every soul is important,” he says. “You start
to think about your soul and what man’s place in the world is . . . Charity is
one of the 10 commandments to rid yourself of sin. The holy sun won’t always warm
you, so helping the church is the easiest thing.” Under President Putin,
Kremlin mandarins, security service officials and oligarchs alike turned to
priests for spiritual advice. The church courted them by soliciting donations
and even adjusting church doctrine, particularly after Kirill became patriarch
in 2009. The state’s military ambitions took on sacred overtones. Fyodor
Ushakov, a legendary 18th-century admiral, was canonised in 2000, then made
patron saint of Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet. In 2015, Kirill and
the head of the FSB laid the cornerstone of a new church in Ushakov’s honour to
“pray for state security agents who died serving their motherland”. Meanwhile,
the Kremlin adopted a law that gave the church the right to reclaim its pre-revolutionary
property from the state and sponsored a programme to build hundreds of new
churches. When Putin announced a third run for president at the end of 2011,
conservative Orthodox ideology gave him a deep well of rhetoric from which to
attack western governments, which he was convinced had organised huge street
protests against him. A month before the election, Kirill said publicly that
Putin’s rule was a “miracle from God”. Kirill’s railing against the corrupting
force of social liberalism on Russian values heavily influenced Putin’s
subsequent turn towards what he called “spiritual bonds”. After the punk group
Pussy Riot protested against Kirill’s endorsement of Putin by performing in a
Moscow cathedral in 2012, three of the women were arrested and jailed. A new
law was introduced that criminalised “insulting religious believers”. Russian
monks from St Panteleimon waiting as a ferry docks. In February, following
Ukraine’s decision to break with the Russian church, the monastery turned away
a group of Ukrainian monks.
The first
member of Putin’s entourage to visit Athos was Goloshchapov, who returned
spellbound after a trip in 1998, according to friends. Others began to follow
suit. Putin made his first visit to the peninsula in 2005, where he attended
services at St Panteleimon and climbed the monastery’s bell tower.
Goloshchapov, Divinsky and Georgy Poltavchenko — another Putin confidant from
the Leningrad KGB — set up the Russian Athos Society to co-ordinate financial
support for the monasteries a year later. High-end tourism to Athos boomed.
Some pilgrimage agencies began to specialise in VIP tours for Russian officials
and state-run company executives, complete with luxury cells, helicopter
flights from Thessaloniki, speedboats to the monasteries and one-on-one
meetings with the elders. Despite the Russian Athos Society’s support of St
Panteleimon — and the fact it was one of the few monasteries not solely
subservient to Constantinople — many oligarchs were wary of the monastery,
which was then run by a Ukrainian abbot and heavily populated by Ukrainian
monks. Instead, the main beneficiary of Russia’s largesse was a monastery
called Vatopedi. It had been taken over by an abbot called Father Ephraim in
the 1980s in a state of near-collapse. Ephraim turned it into something more
akin to a bucolic boarding-school campus, complete with manicured lawns, olive
groves, a fish farm and high-end medical equipment for the elderly monks. The
ornate dining hall at Vatopedi; the monastery has long benefited from donations
from wealthy Russians seeking spiritual advice and guidance.
More and more prominent Russians visited
Vatopedi to receive Ephraim’s blessing and advice. “He has the gift of
foresight,” a regular Russian visitor says of the abbot. “I saw an oligarch
prostrate himself before him in a puddle.” The visitor adds that the
monastery’s services are “like seeing God for the first time. You wind up in a
world where the soul radiates.” He recalls one trip accompanying a “first-wave
FSB general”, who suddenly “started crying and crossing himself — it was like a
cloud had enveloped him”. In 2011, Yakunin paid for Ephraim to bring a holy
relic said to be the Virgin Mary’s belt for a tour across Russia, the first
time it had left Athos in more than 300 years. Putin kissed it in Moscow’s main
cathedral as crowds lined up for hours outside. The belt travelled as far as
Norilsk in the Siberian Arctic and Vladivostok on the Pacific coast before
returning to Greece. On his return, Greek police arrested Ephraim and charged
him with embezzling millions of euros in fraudulent land swaps with the
government. After a public outcry led by the Kremlin, the monk was released and
eventually acquitted in 2017. “He brought the Holy Mother’s belt here and it
healed a huge number of people. Tens of thousands travelled to see it. He
physically saved hundreds of people. And that’s why they arrested him,” says
the regular Russian visitor. “Heads of state come to see him, people send
private planes so he can touch people and heal them.”
3. Kiev
In the
summer of 2013, Kirill travelled from Moscow to Kiev in an armoured train,
ferrying a three-metre-high cross on which St Andrew is said to have died in
62AD. Yakunin had brought the cross from Greece to celebrate the 1,025th
anniversary of the baptism of Rus. Putin travelled to the Ukrainian capital to
pray alongside Kirill in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, the monastery topped with
spectacular golden domes that is Russian Orthodoxy’s holiest site. In a meeting
with Ukrainian church leaders, Putin talked of the importance of the
“Russian-Ukrainian friendship” that had survived many centuries of trials and
tragedies. “We built and protected our common Fatherland, Great Rus,
maintaining our faith, our unique historical experience and our destiny. This
is due largely to the entire Russian Orthodox church.” The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery
in Kiev. Topped with spectacular golden domes, the monastery remains Russian
Orthodoxy’s holiest site, despite Putin’s post-‘tomos’ efforts to undermine its
primacy © Ivor Prickett To some observers, Putin seemed to be positioning
himself as a modern-day Holy Roman emperor, whose spiritual authority could
stand in for the USSR’s lost domain over its former periphery. “The idea was:
the [Soviet] state collapsed, we think it was a geopolitical catastrophe, but
look, the church is still there,” says Sergei Chapnin, a former editor of the
Moscow patriarchate’s magazine, who was fired in 2015 for criticising the
church’s leadership. “That’s why the patriarch here in Moscow isn’t just the
patriarch in Russia, but […] the whole post-Soviet space as well.
And,
obviously, this meant a lot to the Kremlin.” The Kiev trip was part of an
attempt to dissuade Ukraine’s then president Viktor Yanukovych from deepening
the country’s ties with the EU. On a visit to Moldova later that same year,
Kirill urged the former Soviet nation to reject a similar EU agreement on the
grounds that “religion is simply disappearing” in the west. But Ukraine and its
church were already restive. In 1992, the Russian church’s bishop in Kiev, a
priest called Filaret, had set up his own breakaway church after losing the
election to become patriarch of Moscow. Bartholomew refused to recognise the
new church and excommunicated Filaret, who lost control of the Lavra.
Moscow-loyal parishes still outnumbered the new Kiev patriarchate by a factor
of three to one, but by creating a rival Ukrainian Orthodox church, the seed of
a threat to Moscow’s power had been sown.
A rebellious priest who broke with Moscow and
Constantinople in 1992, he is now honorary patriarch of the new Ukrainian church.
Yanukovych
backed out of the deal with the EU at the last minute, seemingly handing Putin
a victory. In response, protesters set up an encampment on Kiev’s central
square, the Maidan. When riot police attacked them several days later, some of
the protesters took refuge inside St Michael’s, a cathedral run by Filaret. The
violence galvanised the movement against Yanukovych and made Filaret one of its
most prominent supporters. When, weeks later, riot police tried to clear out a
much larger encampment on the Maidan in the dead of night with bulldozers,
Filaret’s churches rang bells to alert protesters to the danger. The Maidan
movement put Filaret and Kirill on opposite sides of the barricades. Though the
Russian church’s Ukrainian branch operated largely independently from Moscow,
its leadership was seen by ordinary Ukrainians as being close to Yanukovych and
supportive of Russian interests. The Ukrainian press frequently wrote stories
about Pavel, the Lavra’s Moscow-backed abbot, highlighting his fleet of expensive
cars, lavish parties and state-funded businesses, which eventually became the
subject of a criminal investigation. The monk, who was not charged in the case,
frequently cursed his enemies and claimed in an interview this year that at
least four of them died as a result.
“The Lord says that if you do not repent, you
shall perish,” Pavel told the FT. “If anyone accuses me that I said this and
they died, then it’s a good thing that you’re scared of me. I have nothing to
be afraid of. It’s not me doing it. It means God is shortening your life.”
Oleksandr Drabinko, a rebel priest who joined the church created by the tomos,
claims Russia was using its Orthodox churches in Ukraine to influence policy.
“They were using priests and the faithful as an electoral base. There’s a
Russian church, so if you’re Orthodox, you have to support our Orthodox
president Yanukovych,” Drabinko says. “They told us we can’t have any
integration [with the EU], we should support Mother Russia.”
Oleksandr
Drabinko, a former bishop at the Lavra, who now presides over a newly built
church on the outskirts of Kiev. He expects other priests to join him once
‘their psychology changes’ © Ivor Prickett Kirill thought his status as
post-Soviet patriarch would earn him a key role of peacemaker, according to
people close to the church. But when Russia annexed Crimea in February 2014, a
rift opened between Kirill’s and Putin’s conceptions of the “Russian world”.
Keenly aware that Putin’s actions severely undermined his authority in Ukraine,
Kirill refused to absorb Crimea’s parishes and boycotted a ceremony in the
Kremlin to celebrate Russia’s annexation. Later that year, Putin underscored
the rift by declaring that the Crimean town of Khersones — where Vladimir the
Great, the first Christian ruler of Rus, was baptised in 988AD — was “Russia’s
Temple Mount”. The notion has no grounding in Orthodox theology and, by
implication, undermines the primacy of Kiev and the Lavra.
According
to Roman Lunkin, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences in
Moscow, it was an attempt to justify the annexation by presenting Putin as the
protector of all Russian-speaking people. The growing divide between Ukraine
and Russia was underscored by the war with Moscow-backed separatists in eastern
Ukraine shortly afterwards, where more than 13,000 have died. Filaret backed
Ukraine’s offensive, saying the local population “must pay for their guilt [in
rejecting Kiev’s authority] through suffering and blood”. Rebels in Donetsk,
meanwhile, enjoyed support from Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch and
prominent member of Moscow’s Orthodox elite. Worshippers at one of the Lavra’s
churches. Abbot Pavel’s lavish lifestyle often made headlines in Ukraine and
was the subject of a criminal investigation, although the monk was never
charged © Ivor Prickett After Yanukovych was ousted as Ukrainian president,
his successor, the pro-western oligarch Petro Poroshenko, signed the EU deal
in 2014. Ukraine argued that the church was Russia’s major remaining avenue of
influence. “It was a security issue. Russia was the one interfering, and their
priests would refuse to bury Ukrainian soldiers,” or deny them communion, a
person close to Poroshenko told the FT.
4. The
‘tomos’
In June 2016, Orthodox church leaders were due
to attend a historic meeting in Crete to demonstrate unity across their
jurisdictions. The event had been 55 years in the making; the last such
gathering happened in 787 AD, and it was a project close to Patriarch
Bartholomew’s heart. At the last minute, the Russian church announced that
Kirill would not attend. Though the reasons for the snub remain obscure,
Bartholomew would not forget it. Filaret’s poor relationship with Patriarch
Bartholomew had ruined earlier pleas to recognise his church: he even made a
furtive attempt to reconcile with Moscow as late as 2017, though Kirill doubted
his intentions were genuine. But from 2018 onwards, events began to swing in
Filaret’s favour. Poroshenko, after four years in power, was polling single
digits. He seized on the possibility of a tomos as a key plank of his upcoming
re-election campaign and duly joined Filaret’s church, despite having received
a blessing from Pavel at his inauguration. In dozens of villages across
Ukraine, villagers seized their local churches over the summer and installed
priests loyal to Filaret. In August last year, Kirill visited Istanbul himself,
confident that he could avert a crisis and that Bartholomew would not readmit
the Ukrainian schismatics he had himself excommunicated. To Kirill’s shock,
Bartholomew told him he had already decided to give Ukraine a tomos. According
to a leaked transcript of their meeting, Bartholomew said the war had
effectively ended Kirill’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Ukraine, and
accused the Russian church of trying to undermine Constantinople’s authority.
Bartholomew signed an agreement with Poroshenko with one further condition:
convince Filaret to step down, disband his church and set up a new one under an
archbishop answerable to Constantinople. But when Ukrainian bishops convened in
December to elect the new archbishop, Filaret arrived and demanded to know why
he wasn’t a candidate, say people close to the new church. After four hours of
furious discussion — during which Poroshenko intervened to talk Filaret down —
they settled on Filaret’s private secretary Epifany as a compromise candidate.
To pacify Filaret, the nearly 90-year-old was made honorary patriarch of the
new church and promised he could soon return to the Lavra. The Ukrainian government
began encouraging parishes across the country to embrace their new leaders.
Ultimately,
backing the ‘tomos’ did not help Poroshenko; he was beaten in an election in
April by a comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky
Drabinko
was one of two bishops who left the Moscow-backed church for the new one under
Constantinople. He has bid farewell to the grandeur of the Lavra for a newly
built church on Kiev’s southern outskirts. Inside, he has built a small museum
dedicated to Vladimir, the late head of the Moscow-backed Ukrainian church,
complete with his robes, priestly paraphernalia and an exact replica of his
study which Drabinko now uses as an office. He says he expects more priests to
join him “later, when their psychology changes”. In the Lavra, Pavel, the Russian-backed
abbot, began a state of siege that is still ongoing. “They can’t kick us out.
This is our home,” he told the FT. “We have always been here for a thousand
years of Kievan Rus, and always will be.” Pavel sent text messages to the two
defector bishops condemning them for joining the new church. “I asked Drabinko
how the blessed [archbishop Vladimir], who never ran away and never switched
sides in the most difficult of times, can lie in his grave now. He didn’t
reply,” Pavel recalled.
5. A divided
church
In the end,
the tomos did little for Poroshenko. In April this year, the comedian Volodymyr
Zelensky won 73 per cent of the Ukrainian vote. But the damage to Russia’s
influence had been done. Theologians and Kremlinologists alike believe that Putin
and the Russian church had for some time hoped to promote its ecclesiastical
authority at the expense of Constantinople’s as part of a broader attempt to
build out the Russian sphere of influence. But the impact of the rift may have
been to undermine the Orthodox church itself, forcing all its jurisdictions
into the uncomfortable position of choosing between loyalty to Russia or to
Constantinople.
Epifany was
installed as a compromise candidate to pacify Filaret; he was the patriarch’s
former private secretary © Ivor Prickett In January, Bartholomew asked Ephraim,
the abbot at Vatopedi and confessor to many prominent Russians, to attend
Epifany’s inauguration as head of the new Ukrainian church in Kiev. The request
put him in a bind: either offend the Russian church by legitimising the new
Ukrainian archbishop, or directly disobey Constantinople and risk losing his
job. After consulting several elder monks, Ephraim made the journey to Kiev,
but was felled by a heart attack before he could attend the ceremony. His
supporters took this as a sign from God. He was flown to Geneva on a private
jet to recover before returning to Athos. Father Matthew, an American monk at
the Vatopedi monastery in Mt Athos. He says that recent events have divided the
Orthodox community on the Holy Mountain: ‘There is great pain spiritually’
On the Greek peninsula, the Ukrainian monks who had been barred from St
Panteleimon received different treatment at Vatopedi: Ephraim welcomed them and
allowed them to kiss the monastery’s holy relics. Seven Russian-speaking monks
quit Vatopedi in protest. “The devil is working hard to divide us, and he works
particularly hard against us on the Holy Mountain,” says Father Matthew, an
American monk at Vatopedi. “There is great pain spiritually. People are being
separated from Christ.” In Ukraine, the schism devoured itself. After Zelensky
took office, Filaret refused to dissolve his church and give up his status as
honorary patriarch. He then held another holy synod to reject the tomos,
claiming that he had not known what accepting it would entail when he voted for
it. But when Filaret invited his former charges to pray alongside him on an
important saint’s day, only four bishops showed up. No other Orthodox churches
have recognised Epifany’s authority. Some close to Russia, including the
Serbian and Cypriot churches, have publicly refused to do so. But the schism
between Moscow and Constantinople remains. “This could drag on for decades,”
says Roman Lunkin, the theologian. Within Russia, it has also changed the
relationship between Putin and Kirill. Last year, Kirill abruptly reassigned
Shevkunov, Putin’s reputed confessor, to the crumbling backwater parish of
Pskov with a day’s notice. The monk felt “crushed” by the decision, according
to a friend, and held a last-minute night-time farewell service. Months later,
however, Putin made an unannounced visit to Pskov — a clear show of support for
the monk in semi-exile. Some theologians and Kremlin-watchers believe the
Moscow-Constantinople rift could ‘drag on for decades’ and leave the Orthodox
church uncomfortable and undermined
In May this year, thousands clashed with
police in Ekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, over plans by two
oligarchs to build a new church on the site of a popular park. Kirill
personally lobbied Putin to push the construction through. But the church’s
rhetoric about “traditional values” seemed to have lost its use to Putin, who
is facing his lowest approval ratings in well over a decade as poor living
standards have wiped out the euphoria from Crimea. In a rare concession to the
protesters, he ordered a halt to the plans. The church had to abandon the
project. “The state starts treating the church differently, because if the
Russian church is collapsing, if some Greeks and the local president could pull
this [the tomos] off, then what’s the good of the church?” Chapnin says. “The
Kremlin has seen how weak the patriarch is.”
Max Seddon
is the FT’s Moscow correspondent
