Prayers for the Orthodox faith under fire
Russia’s attack on the Church in Ukraine is horrifying Christians, says
The onion domes of Orthodox churches are as much a feature of the Ukrainian skyline as steeples and spires are in the English countryside. Over the past 1,000 years-plus of Christianity in the country, they have survived persecutions and even Stalin’s attempts in the 1930s to erase them completely – but this Easter they are firmly in the sights of another Russian leader.
In the month of March, almost 60 religious buildings, mostly Orthodox churches, some large, some small, some ancient, some new, have been damaged or destroyed by Vladimir Putin’s invading army. Their stainedglass windows have been smashed, their holy icons scattered and, in one case, an Orthodox priest, Father Rostyslav Dudarenko, murdered – shot by Russian soldiers as he raised the cross above his head to confront tanks rolling into his village of Yasnohorodka, 25 miles west of Kyiv.
The siege of Mariupol (named in the 18th century after the Virgin Mary) is thought to have killed up to 20,000 of its civilian inhabitants and reduced much of the port city to rubble. Putin has not spared its landmark Orthodox Cathedral of St Michael the Archangel, which sits right next to the Sea of Azov.
Pictures have emerged of gaping holes blown in its red-brick walls, while the largest of its six domes is a shredded mass of steel. Next door, the administration building, where at Easter (celebrated a week later in Orthodoxy than Western Christianity) they would usually be baptising children, holding Sunday school and distributing festive cakes to the poor and needy, lies abandoned after shells ripped through its roof.
Under international law, the targeting of a country’s historical and cultural heritage, including its holy sites, is a war crime. But President Putin has shown little inclination so far, in what he describes as a “special military operation”, to respect such rules. The list of civilian targets shelled, mass graves uncovered and horrifying accounts of rape and murder committed by his troops grows by the day.
In this context, his attack on churches, their custodians and those who seek shelter in them – including the shelling in Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv of the 17th-century Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition, where civilians had sought sanctuary – should come as no surprise. Except that Putin misses no opportunity (as when taking a ritual dip, bare-chested, in Lake Seliger in the Volga Basin during celebrations of Orthodox Epiphany in January of 2018) to portray himself as a devout believer.
Yet it is practising what you preach that marks the true Christian from the false prophet. “It’s horrible, it’s unhuman,” Father Sergiy Berezhnoy, an Orthodox priest in Kyiv, told the BBC of the devastation of Ukraine’s spiritual sites. “I don’t know why Russian troops shoot at churches. If we’re Christians, we should care about peace.”
Despite the very public support given to the war by Patriarch Kirill, the leader of Russia’s Orthodox Church, as a young KGB officer in the last days of the old Soviet Union, Putin was part and parcel of its vicious oppression of all forms of organised religion.
His apparent Road to Damascus conversion – like St Paul, championing those he previously persecuted – appears to cloak a calculated justification for war with Ukraine. It has, he has said, embraced “godless” Western secularism and needs to be brought back into the “shared spiritual space” of Orthodox Christianity.
The hollowness of Putin’s claims to be on some sort of God-given mission is exposed by his willingness to destroy the very churches he says he wants to be the pillars of a new, holy Ukraine. There will be no Easter celebrated this year in these ruined buildings.
In Zhytomyr province, close to Kyiv, for example, the clapboard, 19thcentury Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in modest Viazovka was destroyed by Russian artillery fire as they attempted to encircle the capital. Only its belfry now survives unscathed. In nearby Hostomel, where the Russians held the local population hostage during a 35-day occupation before withdrawing, they left behind the dome and the cross that topped the town’s church mangled in the middle of the main road.
In the same newly liberated areas, the bright blue Church of St George in Zavorichi, built in the 1870s, had been burnt down after being shelled by the Russians. And in Bobryk, a Russian missile smashed into the more modern Church of the Ascension of the Lord just minutes after the congregation had filed out after service.
Even among those churches that have so far been spared, there is now a powerful sense that the sanctuary usually accorded to houses of God counts for little among Putin’s latterday crusaders. In Lviv, in the West, those attending services in its 18thcentury baroque Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary will do so with its Unesco-listed stained-glass windows boarded up, and its statues and icons swaddled in protective wraps, in case a missile should strike the building.
At least they have a roof over their heads for now as they pray. Many Ukrainian Orthodox Christians this Easter will be gathering in the shadow of their mutilated churches, next to the mass graves of those who lost their lives in the Russian assault.
It was such suffering that, last week, prompted an inter-faith group of international religious leaders, including Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, to travel to Ukraine to express their “solidarity”. Lord Williams has called for the Russian Orthodox Church – which continues to offer vocal support for Putin’s war – to be excluded from the pan-Protestant World Council of Churches.
Already, 300 of the minority of Orthodox priests in Ukraine who continued to accept the authority of Patriarch Kirill have been so horrified by the devastation of their country and its churches that they have announced they are joining the separate Ukrainian Orthodox Church, headed by the quietly-spoken Patriarch Epiphanius.
The structure of Eastern Orthodoxy is complex, with a dozen selfgoverning branches, including Russia, which until 2019 included Ukraine. However, in that year the spiritual head of Eastern Orthodoxy, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, granted Ukraine its independence from the Moscow Patriarchate.
His decision was seen by some as restoring the situation that had existed in the 10th century as Orthodoxy spread eastwards after the conversion of Volodymyr, a Kyiv prince (now saint), to Christianity in AD988. The Ukrainian Church only came under Moscow’s jurisdiction in 1686.
The Russian church’s outrage at losing its control of Ukraine’s Orthodox community segues easily with Putin’s fury at Ukraine’s independence from Russia’s empire. Together, both appear hell-bent on the revival of a political and spiritual entity they refer to as “Mother Russia”, which includes a subjugated Ukraine.
Bombing churches is a peculiar way to rescue the faith. Yet Putin has failed to understand that Christian identity, at its core, lies not in buildings. However terrible their loss, recent decades of history in Ukraine show that faith endures through tribulation, and that churches can one day be rebuilt.
Instead, Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has a surer grasp of the powerful bond between religion and national identity. “Even if you destroy all our Ukrainian churches and cathedrals,” he has rebuked Putin, pointedly, “you will never be able to destroy our profound faith in Ukraine and God.”
It seems the sanctuary usually accorded to Houses of God counts for little with Putin’s latter-day crusaders