Paul Goble
Staunton,
January 6 – There is no question, Russian commentator Stanislav Belkovsky says,
that the grant of the tomos of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is
“the beginning of the end” of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow
Patriarchate, something all the more likely because Moscow didn’t think Ukrainian
autocephaly would happen.
That
is just one sign of how out of touch the church hierarchy is and how it failed
to make an argument with the Universal Patriarch in religious terms but limited
itself to politics alone, an approach, Belkovsky says, which almost certainly
guaranteed its loss on Ukraine and more besides (afterempire.info/2019/01/05/belkovskiy-rpc/).
The hierarchy of the ROC MP around
Patriarch Kirill thus has shown itself to be more an arm of the secular authorities
than a religious organization, perhaps not surprising, the commentator says, because
“faith in God is not an obligatory condition for membership in the Orthodox
Church in present-day Russia.”
The ROC MP was set up “as is well
known by Joseph Stalin in September 1943 as atype of ministry which should
fulfill specific subfunctions in the general system of state power” in the USSR.
Only at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s did it separate in fact
from the state. But very rapidly, the ROC MP returned to being what it had been,
an arm of the state.
That origin and that return,
Belkovsky says, has played “a bad joke” on the ROC MP: its subordination to the
Kremlin in all things including in particular the 2014 invasion of Ukraine has
led “the inevitable recognition of Ukrainian autocephaly” first by the
Universal Patriarch in Constantinople and soon by Orthodox churches throughout
the world.
Before 2014, few considered
Ukrainian autocephaly possible, “but everything changed after 2014 precisely
because the ROC MP not only did not distance itself from the Putin state but
demonstrably deepened its dependence on it.” The ROC MP has no right to
complain about the OCU’s ties with Kyiv given that its own with the Kremlin are
far tighter.
Now, if
Putin wants to replace Kirill with Tikhon as patriarch, there is nothing
standing in his way; and that shows to all the world that the ROC MP has lost the
right to present itself as a religious organization. It is that only for some
of its hierarchs, some of its priests and some of its laity. For most of all
three, it is something else, a political body.
That condemns it to lose status at
home and abroad and means that when the current Russian government passes from the
scene, so too will the ROC MP. It has no basis for an existence independent of the
state and so will live and die with it, Belkovsky suggests.
Many commentators in Ukraine and
even in Russia have adopted an even more negative line about the ROC MP. Perhaps the most damning are those
who suggest that while the OCU received its tomos from the Universal Patriarch,
the ROC MP received it not from a church official but from Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin (e.g., bitvazaurozay.livejournal.com/698691.html).
Such observations will do little to
keep the ROC MP alive as a church, although they may lead the Kremlin and its
security services to double down on their defense of their own ideological
branch.
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