Orthodoxy: the new great schism in Russia

If you live long enough, almost anything is possible. It is now possible, for example, to hear the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, describe a former KGB agent and avowed atheist as a “miracle of God.”

The miracle in question, Vladimir Putin, made his career in the Soviet secret police before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which meant he had to be a member of the Communist Party. As a loyal Communist, he had to struggle against the evil influence of religion, the ‘opium of the people’, and as an ambitious careerist he did just that.

But the regime changed in 1991, and Putin had to carve out a new political career in a post-Communist Russia. So he got religion, or at least pretended to, and made an alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church. That’s why he is now warning that there may be bloodshed if the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is allowed to break away from the Moscow patriarchate.

What has upset Patriarch Kirill and his colleagues is that last weekend Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople granted a ‘tomos of autocephaly’ to Metropolitan Epiphanius of the newly formed Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Which probably needs a bit of translation.

The Ecumenical Patriarch is the head — or rather, the ‘first among equals’ — among the heads of the various national Orthodox Christian churches. ‘Constantinople’, actually now Istanbul, is still the headquarters of Orthodox Christianity although it has been under Muslim control for over 500 years.

The Ukrainians had asked Patriarch Bartholomew if they could have their own church back, and after due consideration he decided they should. The tombs of autocephaly (independence) was the document that contained his decision. He was just putting things back the way they were.

Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine, was the first capital of the Russian state, and naturally the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church as well. But Kyiv was destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1240, and for centuries afterwards the new centres of Russian civilization were in the forests far to north.

In 1686, when Muslim slave-raiders from Crimea were still operating regularly in the vicinity of Kyiv, the patriarch in Constantinople officially transferred the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church from

Kyiv to Moscow. All that’s really happening now is that Kyiv is getting its own patriarch back.

For three centuries after 1686, Ukraine was part of the Russia empire and its successor, the Soviet Union. It was the Russian Orthodox Church that made the religious decisions for everybody, and received the revenues from the 12,000 Orthodox parishes in Ukraine. But since Ukrainian independence in 1991, all that has been in question.

The question became more urgent with Russia’s unilateral annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine since then. Moscow wanted to keep control of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, since it was a way to influence Ukrainian opinion in Russia’s favour. But for the same reason, it was a priority for Ukrainian nationalists to expel the Russian influence.

Ukraine won, and Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, thanked Patriarch Bartholomew last weekend “for the courage to make this historic decision ... Finally, God sent us the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.” (Is Poroshenko really a believer? Maybe, but he’s certainly running for re-election in March.)

Putin and Poroshenko are both using religion for their own purposes, but Bartholomew just did what was right. That has a cost: the Russian Orthodox Church accounts for almost half of the 300 million Orthodox Christians in the world, and the hierarchy in Moscow has now broken off relations with the patriarchate in Constantinople. This is a schism that may take a long time to heal.