Moscow Patriarchate Entering Dual Crisis as Pandemic Ebbs, ASK Analysts Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 2 – The pandemic and the Moscow Patriarchate’s response threatens to reduce the official church to a pagan-style state cult and to lead to the rise of an influential “catacomb” church consisting of believers and clergy who reject the official hierarchy’s deference to the state, according to the Agency for Strategic Communications (ASK).

            As reported by Milena Faustova of NG-Religii, the pandemic and the way in which the church in the view of the ASK has responded to them have simultaneously exacerbated a variety of trends that had first earlier and made them more visible to state and society (ng.ru/ng_religii/2020-06-02/10_487_crisis.html).

            The research center concludes that after the pandemic, the ROC MP will be entering “an era of a serious church crisis” consisting of two parts, “an external one” between the religious organization and the Russian state and “an internal one arising from the split between ‘the party of power’ and the church ‘dissidents.’”

            The Moscow Patriarchate has responded to the pandemic about as badly as it is possible to imagine, first ignoring official guidance and then slavishly following it, infuriating bishops, priests and the laity and creating a situation in which 43 federal subjects kept churches open while 42 shuttered them and shifted to services online.

            As Faustova puts it, “this fact has still further increased the break” between those who have supported the church as an institution and the committed believers. “If the first are completely satisfied with Internet services, then the second have begun to openly condemn the authorities who have prevented them from going to church.”

            Government officials aren’t happy about this either because it highlights the extent to which the church’s “vertical” has broken down and those at the bottom are now out of control. And many Russians are furious that the church hierarchy now seems concerned only with defending its property rather than promoting any social or theological message.

            That is sparking more anti-clerical attitudes in society and leading to suggestions that the patriarch needs to be replaced and believers need to break away from the ROC MP structures, ASK says. That latter attitude is infecting entire congregations who find themselves at odds with the patriarchate and even their own bishops.

            Complicating this picture, ASK continues, are the so-called COVID dissidents” from among the clergy who “assert that the quarantine measures adopted by the government are no more than a conspiracy intended to frighten believers, create a world government, and drive the church and faith to the sidelines of social life.”   

            As a result of these crises, the analysts continue, “it is not excluded that on this basis will appear a new ‘catacomb’ church as an alternative to the Moscow Patriarchate,” especially as the ROC MP seems to be heading toward “a certain quasi-religion” externally Orthodox but “in fact professing militarism, patriotism and the indisputable authority of the supreme civil power.”

            That many in the hierarchy are prepared to move in that direction, ASK says, has been on display in the discussions about the new cathedral for the Russian Armed Forces, itself “an incarnation of a new and profoundly Russian neo-paganism” which deifies “Russian history and political leaders like Stalin, Putin and Shoygu.”