Why Kirill will not condemn Russia’s invasion

Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has insisted that President Vladimir Putin is fighting to defend the historic unity of their country with Ukraine. But Kirill is also fighting to save his authority personally and his Church’s power as a whole.

Their situation is almost impossible. Kirill and his Church have everything to lose if Putin loses. But they also have much to lose if Russia wins. Nevertheless, history may yet work a surprise that is to the Russian Orthodox Church’s ultimate good.

Kirill argues that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples emerged out of a common baptism into Orthodox Christianity, when Vladimir (Volodymyr, in Ukrainian), Prince of the Eastern Slavs, converted in 988 AD in what is now Crimea. Since then, Orthodoxy has shaped not only the worship, but the art, architecture, music and literature of this part of the world. With the rise of the Russian Empire in the seventeenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church, with a Patriarch in Moscow, became the dominant form of Orthodoxy also in Ukraine.

After the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolsheviks brutally liquidated religion, which Marx had called the opiate of the people. Of 75,000 places of Orthodox worship, only one to two hundred remained open in 1939, at the end of Stalin’s Great Terror. Every monastery had been closed; no seminary remained.

Strangely, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 saved the Church. The German authorities allowed churches to reopen in areas that they controlled, and Stalin soon followed suit. Still, when the reformist Gorbachev allowed the Church to celebrate its millennium in 1988, fewer than 7000 parishes—and only seventeen monasteries and five theological schools— were operating.

Since then, the Church has grown to 37,000 parishes, nearly 1000 men’s and women’s monasteries, and several dozen seminaries. Orthodox believers observe the rhythms of Christmas and Pascha (Easter) without fear that others will belittle them.

The church is able to conduct social work, including cutting-edge drug rehabilitation programs and hospice care. It has created new educational initiatives include Sunday Schools, publishing houses, television and radio stations and institutes of higher education, including the academically prominent St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University in Moscow. Ancient iconographic traditions have been recovered.

Kirill and his Church hope that Russia can again become Holy Rus’, a land that shows forth heaven on earth. However, the price that they are paying (cooperation with Putin and his authoritarian government) is very high.

On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, state officials visited leaders of all the country’s major religious organizations and instructed them to issue public statements of support. The Lutheran bishop refused and fled the country.

Kirill has remained with his flock. The war for him is nothing less than a defense of Orthodoxy and its moral values against a “decadent West.” He but rails against the “dark forces” of NATO and the U.S. that have set Ukrainians against Russians.

If Russia loses, Kirill loses. His bishops, priests, and people will not forgive him for a humiliating defeat. But Kirill also loses if Russia wins. Already the bishops of the 12,000 parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine have condemned him for supporting the war and have declared their independence from him.

Tragically, Kirill would also lose if he chose to speak out against the war. Were he and his church to become a political opposition, they would sacrifice the privileged position that the Russian state has given them. All the gains of the last thirty years would be in jeopardy. The dream of making Russia a truly Orthodox land again would lie shattered.

History will have the last word. Ironically, a Russian loss in Ukraine could be good for the Russian Orthodox Church. As many as 70% of Russians call themselves Orthodox, but fewer than 1% regularly attend services.

Orthodox believers could finally face the truth and seek a different way into the future. They could learn that it is more blessed for them to be a creative minority in their society than a paralyzed, imaginary majority.