Russian Church has blundered by backing Putin
Institution will lose support, writes Elie Mikhael Nasrallah.
When Pope Francis publicly warns the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, not to become “Putin's altar boy” through his support for the invasion of Ukraine, you know there is something terribly wrong. The Russian Church has blundered.
Both Russia and Ukraine have shared a common heritage of faith in the Orthodox tradition for centuries. Now, there is a raging “civil war” between the Russian Orthodox Church and its rebellious sister in Ukraine. In 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared its independence from the Russian Orthodox establishment. The head of the international Orthodox Church in Constantinople, Bartholomew I, gave his blessing for that independence, challenging Patriarch Kirill.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants
God and the Russian Orthodox Church on his side. We cannot read the mind of God, but we can certainly read the mind of Kirill. He once described Putin as a “miracle of God.” The subservient role of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Russian state has long historical roots in culture, politics, faith and history. Sergei Chapnin, a Russian writer called it “Church of Empire.”
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Chrissy Stroop argued that this “represents a return to the Orthodox Church's historical role, despite some tensions and resistance from within, of functioning as an effective arm of the Russian state in matters both domestic and foreign.”
The war against Ukraine resulted in a clear choice by the Russian Orthodox Church to support a savage conflict. This historic blunder will result in making the Orthodox Church a pariah internationally. It will lose its standing with the new generation of youth, deplete its credibility, tarnish its image as a defender of true Christianity, align itself with a losing cause, be on the wrong side of history and the future, bleed its resources and lose the goodwill of its adherents. It may never recover from this ongoing drama of the intersection of politics, religion and warfare.
They are now divided in their views about the atrocities committed in Ukraine.
Domestically, the Russian Church, one of the most conservative and obdurate establishments, has had a tough time dealing with modernity. Its opposition to feminism, homosexual rights, secularism, diversity, changes in modern family structure and so on puts it on a collision course with most western values and modern ways of thinking. This has been used by the Putin government to justify anything he wants from the church leadership.
Writing in The New York Times on March 16, Steven Erlanger brilliantly stated, “The idea of Russia as a separate civilization from the West with which it competes goes back centuries, to the roots of Orthodox Christianity and the notion of Moscow as a `third Rome,' following Rome itself and Constantinople. (Yale Prof. Timothy) Snyder has examined the sources of what he has called a form of Russian Christian fascism, including Ivan IIyin, a writer born in 1883, who saw salvation in a totalitarian state led by a righteous individual.”
In 2010, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life invited the late Christopher Hitchens to address the question of religion in Russia. He said, “I think we don't pay anything like enough attention to this fusion of traditional great Russian chauvinism and police regime with the clerical bodyguard … when Putin wants to make someone prime minister, and when he says, how can he make himself czar again down the road — all these inaugural ceremonies are attended by black-cowled patriarchs swinging their incenses, demanding and getting in return privileges over other churches and other religions in Russia.”
The Orthodox Church has about 300 million believers worldwide. They are now divided in their views about the atrocities committed in Ukraine by their brethren in faith.
Their leadership has failed them miserably and they are going to pay a heavy price morally, intellectually and materially. A blunder is a blunder.