Orthodox Schism, Orthodox War
I have written a great deal on this blog before over the Orthodox Schism between Moscow and Constantinople, which was for several years one of the biggest Christian news stories in the world and one of the least reported on or discussed. In the last year, however, this story has mutated in ways that would have been impossible to predict, entirely because of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
(If you have no idea what I'm talking about in regards to an "Orthodox Schism," I suggest you go and read this helpful explainer I wrote at the time of the initial break).
Put simply, the war has transformed the schism and now looks to extend it so far that global Orthodoxy is now perhaps on the verge of dissolution.
As I chronicled here, the early years of the Schism--once the OCU had been formed and Moscow had broken all communion and ties with Constantinople--featured increasingly extreme and increasingly ineffective efforts by Moscow to gain the allegiance and support of other autocephalous churches in the presumed hope of some form of sanction or excommunication of the Patriarch of Constantinople. After the general failure of these efforts and increasing successes by Constantinople in getting autocephalous churches to recognize and enter into communion with the OCU, Moscow shifted tactics decisively towards aggression and attempts to divide the other churches from within.
Even in the first phase, Churches that entered into communion with the OCU saw the ROC break off all ties with them--increasingly, though, Moscow began to aim at internal division of these Churches, selectively breaking communion with some bishops while retaining others. This culminated in the decision in January of this year to create an entirely new schismatic offshoot of the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria under Russian control--an act without precedent in modern Orthodoxy.
Meanwhile, however, while Moscow had largely failed in its efforts to gain the support of other autocephalous churches out of Eastern Europe, it had succeeded within Ukraine to a much greater degree than most observers would have predicted. The new independent, Constantinople-sanctioned "Orthodox Church of Ukraine" had suffered from significant growing pains, including problems caused by its relatively young and inexperienced leadership, the loss of its main political sponsor Petro Poroshenko, disappointment with the merely metropolitan and not Patriarchal status granted by Constantinople, and a painful internal schism that drew away many adherents. The old Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, meanwhile, had reasserted itself strongly thanks to its seasoned episcopal leadership, the loyalty of its believers, and a massive infusion of cash from Moscow, challenging the transfer of parishes, making the government step back from open support for the OCU, and rapidly building new parish buildings to replace their losses.
By earlier this year, then, the Schism seemed to be cementing a new longterm status quo, ending in what was more or less a draw on the initial terms of the conflict. Constantinople had succeeded in retaining its position as primary leader and point of contact for most autocephalous churches, fending off the clumsy Russian attempts to claim the status of alternative leader of global Orthodoxy; the ROC, meanwhile, had succeeded in retaining the key dioceses and parishes in Ukraine necessary for it to continue being the dominant force by population in Orthodoxy. Both had suffered significant losses--Constantinople in the loss of its ability to speak for and act in relation to the roughly half of all Orthodox believers in the ROC and in the dividing and diminishment of already-weak autocephalous Churches in the Middle East and Africa and Europe, Moscow in the halving of its parishes and population in Ukraine and the loss of positive contacts with most of the rest of global Orthodoxy--but both had retained the things most essential to their continuing existence. So it seemed it would proceed for the foreseeable future.
Then, of course, the Russian government invaded Ukraine.
The breakout of the war quickly did a number of drastic things. Least importantly, it cemented the complete alienation of the ROC from other Orthodox Churches outside the direct sphere of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe, as these churches condemned the invasion and cut ties even further. Within Ukraine, meanwhile, it drastically and decisively undercut the position of the UOC-MP, as the seasoned clerics, who had successfully declared their allegiance to Ukraine and their religious position, now found themselves uncomfortably coupled with a primary religious and ideological supporter of the invasion. They have done, consistently, what they could to denounce the invasion and reject claims of disloyalty; but they have not broken communion with Moscow. The OCU was suppressed in conquered territories; and defections from the UOC-MP to the OCU increased.
Still, while the invasion drastically increased religious conflict and subsumed it to an extent as one dimension of a broader and overwhelming military conflict, it has not, until recently, produced a truly new configuration of schism. Given some end to the war, the long-term religious situation in the region and in global Orthodoxy would be basically similar, if more extreme, as before the war: an isolated Russian Orthodox Church with close ties to the Russian government exercising regional hegemony set against a disparate coalition of autocephalous churches under the primacy of Constantinople and increasingly dependent on Western backing, with both possessing strong religious footholds in a religiously divided Ukraine.
However, in the last few days, the Ukrainian government has announced a set of proposed actions that, if implemented, would represent the most important religious action in the conflict so far, presaging far worse things for Orthodoxy going forward. Zelensky declared his intentions to completely ban the UOC-MP.
This is a remarkable move, and, I must say, a truly awful one. Even setting aside all interest in and concern for Orthodoxy or Christianity, there are many straightforward political and moral and strategic reasons why this is a bad idea:
(1) Putin has justified his invasion by claiming the Kyiv government has been persecuting the UCO-MP; and now, the Kyiv government will be living up to Putin's claims by executing a real, old-style persecution against Russian Orthodoxy. Likewise, Putin has justified his annexations by arguing the Kyiv government is persecuting the Russian ethnic minority dominant in the East; now, the Kyiv government is helpfully opening a front of active religious persecution primarily against Russian-speaking believers in the East.
(2) The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is not just the church of ethnic Russians--it is or was the largest religious body in the country. Kyiv will be presumably engaged in seizing property, imposing clergy, and trying to compel individual parishes to switch jurisdictions to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine; this will be a messy and ugly process that will open up an internal front of conflict and division and likely even violence.
(3) The UOC-MP is strongest in the Eastern part of Ukraine that has been the principal battlefield in this war. Most people in this part of the country belong to the UOC-MP, and have their entire lives. The suffering of these people during the last ten years of intermittent warfare and during the recent invasion and occupation has been unimaginable--and now, the Ukrainian government has decided to all but declare war on the Church to which they belong. This will make their efforts to reincorporate the East into Ukraine much harder and more brutal, and give the conflict in those regions a much uglier note.
(4) It will undermine military morale. Many many soldiers fighting on the front lines belong to the UOC-MP; and now, their government has declared war on their Church.
(5) It will push Ukraine farther away from Europe and the West. As Zelensky all but acknowledged in his speech, this wholesale repression of a religious body is contrary to the main European human rights regimes and the Council of Europe. European integration has been a long-term goal of the Ukrainian government, and this is directly contrary to that goal. Likewise, Ukraine's pitch for Western military aid has relied on the claim that they, in contrast to Russia, are allied with Western political values of democracy, freedom, religious liberty, etc. By this move, though, they will all but declare the opposite, that they are merely another Eastern European nationalist regime with the expected goals and methods.
(6) It imitates Putin, uses his tactics, and bends to his logic. Putin has consistently repressed the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in territories he has controlled. He has done this on the general Russian assumption that religion is politics by another name and these religious organizations are in reality political organizations affiliated with the Ukrainian government. Now, the Ukrainian government is all but declaring that Putin was right, that the OCU is in fact a state-favored organization inextricable from Ukrainian nationalism, and that conquest of territory must involve expunging of hostile religious bodies.
However, all these essentially political dimensions of this move pale before its essential religious meaning, which presages horrible things for Orthodoxy going forward.
By openly declaring that Ukrainians cannot owe any religious loyalty to the Patriarch of Moscow, Zelensky has decided to turn a political war for territory in Eastern Ukraine into what will be for all intents and purposes a real, violent Orthodox Civil War. Believers who are conquered by one side or other will now be forced to switch their ecclesiastical allegiance; and the ecclesiastical bodies, Russian and Ukrainian, will be, not just implicitly, but explicitly masks for national allegiance, and tools for national conflict and Imperial conquest and assimilation.
A schism over religious doctrines is far from unprecedented, alas, in global Christianity. A schism over questions of jurisdiction and over control of parishes and institutions has been for a long time now a very normal and unremarkable occurrence in modern Orthodoxy. Even a schism that follows the lines of a political and nationalistic conflict and asks as a mask and means for that conflict is, alas, not new in modern Orthodoxy and modern Christianity; consider the current Orthodox schism between Serbia and Montenegro, or the famous genocidal conflict between the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs. Even these conflicts, however, pale before what looks to be the new configuration of modern Orthodoxy.
On the local level, once Orthodoxy in Ukraine and Russia has been reduced to a husk masking pure national and imperial allegiance in the context of a bloody war, one result, at least, will be easily predictable. Parishes and believers that are being fought over not only by words and lawsuits, but actually by arms, will not long retain faith in their religion. The other Orthodox countries, like Serbia, that have used Orthodoxy as a tool for their national and imperial conflicts, have all rapidly secularized; and if this happens in Ukraine, it too will rapidly secularize. Russia, of course, is already thoroughly secularized; Ukraine, meanwhile, has been relatively religious in comparison to the rest of Eastern Europe, one of the few remaining bastions of a more devout and active Orthodoxy. Given the continuation of this religious war, that will no longer be the case.
The global consequences will likely be extreme also. Between them, Russia and Ukraine contain the majority of Orthodox believers in the world; and these believers will be at war with each other, pervasively and universally, divided and pitted against each other by national allegiance and jurisdiction. Other autocephalous churches will pick sides, as they are already beginning to do, justifying one and condemning the other, largely, one imagines, largely based on whether their own nation-states and national governments have sided with Russia or Ukraine. The "global Orthodox Church" will be, more than ever before, not merely a loose coalition, not merely an uneasy alliance of competing powers, not merely even a divided house pitting Russia and her allies against Constantinople and hers on a broad religious playing field: global Orthodoxy will be a war.
The long term results of this are difficult to predict, but it is hard to imagine very much remaining of the institutions which Patriarch Bartholomew has spent a lifetime trying to build into an ordered global Church, free from identification with any state or Empire, existing in broad imitation and analogy to modern Catholicism. At the very least, this incipient global Orthodox Church will have much to overcome.
This is all dispiriting indeed, and calls for prayer.
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