Moscow vs. Constantinople: An Orthodox Fracture with Major Consequences

First Things ^ | Sep 2018 | George Weigel

[CondoleezzaProtege]

While Catholicism has been embroiled in a crisis of sexual abuse and episcopal malfeasance reaching to the highest levels of the Church, Eastern Orthodoxy may be on the verge of an epic crack-up with major ecumenical and geopolitical consequences.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople has indicated that it is considering a proposal to recognize the autocephaly, or independence from Moscow, of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. The Moscow Patriarchate has responded with fury.

First, the Moscow Patriarchate is terrified. Moscow's claim to be the “third Rome” would be gravely imperiled. Russian Orthodoxy would shrink drastically by the loss of the large Orthodox population in Ukraine, and the Moscow Patriarchate’s claim to a kind of de facto hegemony in the Orthodox world would be badly damaged.

Second, Russian Orthodoxy, continuing a long, unhappy tradition of playing chaplain-to-the-czar (whatever form he takes), has provided putatively religious buttressing for Vladimir Putin’s claim that there is a single Russkiy mir (“Russian world” or “Russian space”), which includes Ukraine and Belarus. And in that “space,” Ukrainians and Belarussians are little brothers of the Russians, the true inheritors of the baptism of the eastern Slavs in 988. That is a falsification of history. Yet it has underwritten Russian imperial claims for centuries, and it continues to do so today.

A reunited and independent Ukrainian Orthodoxy centered on Kyiv (site in 988 of the baptism of Prince Vladimir and the tribes that eventually became Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarussians) would empirically falsify what serious historians have long known is a dishonest narrative. Moscow and Russia are not the sole inheritors of the baptism of the eastern Slavs, and Russian imperial claims (like those that have underwritten the invasion and annexation of Crimea and the Russian-sponsored war in eastern Ukraine) rest on a false story.

[lightman]

Excellent article.

Thanks for the link.

[AdmSmith]

Russian President Vladimir Putin will go down in history as having “lost Ukraine” for good. Putin has experienced two “geopolitical tragedies” with the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 and disintegration of the Russian world in 2018.

Before today’s move, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which came under the Moscow Patriarchate accounted for a third of its total parishes and their loss reduces the size of the Russian Orthodox Church to that of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Within Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church will become a minority church with its influence severely curtailed. In the political domain, its main supporters—Party of Regions and Communist Party—belong to pre-2014 Ukrainian history while its current allies, the Opposition Bloc, are bitterly divided and weak.

Autocephaly adds to the deterioration of Russian soft power in other areas. On December 20, 240 parliamentary deputies voted to require the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (the official name of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine) to re-register as a Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church. As most of their parishes are in western and central Ukraine, a large number of patriotic Ukrainians will desert it because it will be henceforth openly linked to Russia. Two-thirds of Ukrainians view Russia as an “aggressor country.”

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how-putin-lost-ukraine-for-good

[AdmSmith]

Background

Ukraine Orthodox Church granted independence from Russian Church

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46768270