Moscow Patriarchate hasn’t Yet Come to Terms with Demise of USSR, Koskello Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 17 – The Moscow Patriarchate hasn’t come to terms with the demise of the Soviet Union and so insists that all the countries which have emerged from it are the church’s “canonical territory” -- despite both the diversity of Orthodox churches there and the Moscow church’s branches beyond those borders, Anastasiya Koskello says.

            And its insistence on this term, the Russian journalist says, constantly lands it in trouble with churches and governments beyond the borders of the Russian Federation viewing such assertions not unreasonably as a form of Russian imperialism from which they want to escape (ng.ru/ng_religii/2024-09-17/9_580_process.html).

            Koskello notes that the Moscow Patriarchate made the idea of canonical territory central not when separate Orthodox churches emerged in the 1990s but in 2002 when the Roman Catholic Church established four bishoprics in the Russian Federation. But in 2013, it included the idea of the Moscow church’s canonical territory in the ROC MP’s rules of order.

            But since that time, the Moscow Patriarchate has been involved in “an active search” to define just what the meaning of “canonical territory” is for a church that is neither a national one, nor a state church, “nor even a church of the CIS countries.” And it has sought to draw on ideas about the Russian world Putin is pushing and the older idea of Holy Rus.

            Insisting that its canonical territory is larger than Russia allows the ROC MP to avoid charges of ethnophyletism or of the insistence of many that it is “’an appendage of the Russian state.’” But the term “canonical territory” remains murky, Koskello says, and suggests only “an extra-territorial and non-national cultural community.