I stand corrected

When I met Metropolitan Hilarion in February, 2014… Hold on, I know time flies, but this isn’t just fast. It’s bloody supersonic.

If asked, I would have guessed the meeting took place some five years ago. But it was almost 10 – and I wrote about it at the time: (http://www.alexanderboot.com/the-c-of-e-and-the-kgb-converge-on-traditional-values/)

Anyway, at that time Hilarion was head of the Church’s External Affairs Department, a post traditionally seen as the anteroom of the patriarchate. (For example, it used to be held by the current KGB patriarch, Kirill.)

That job, alas, also presupposed not just links with the KGB/FSB, but practically full-time employment in it. I regretted that at the time because I found Hilarion to be a truly impressive man.

Anyway, everyone knew he was on a fast track to become the next patriarch. But then everyone had to eat humble pie. About a year ago, Hilarion was abruptly removed from his high perch and exiled to the comparatively minor post of metropolitan of Budapest and Hungary.

Again, everyone, including me, wondered about his demotion. And, explained a friend of mine, everyone, including me, was wrong again. That wasn’t a demotion. It was a special assignment.

Unlike me, this friend is an Orthodox scholar, which means his antennae are more finely attuned to the toing and froing within that church. What he told me brought back to mind the story of Nikolai Berdyayev, one of the Russian thinkers exiled in 1922 on the infamous “philosophers’ steamer”.

His first stopover was Prague, at that time the nerve centre of Russian emigration. On his first night there, Berdyayev attended a meeting held in the house of Anton Kartashev, the last Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod.

He and other renowned Russian exiles were discussing ways of fighting Bolshevism. Suddenly, quite out of the blue, Berdyayev delivered an oration to the effect that, rather than fighting Bolshevism, they should cooperate with it.

Everyone present was stunned. Then Kartashev delivered his verdict, so much more poignant in Russian than in translation: “I thought they’d exiled [vyslali] you. But in fact they’ve implanted [zaslali] you.”

That’s exactly what my learned friend told me about Hilarion. According to him the FSB Collegium, the Politburo of Putin’s Russia, was seeking to turn Hungary into the centre of pro-Kremlin subversion in the EU.

Though Hungary is a predominantly Catholic country, its president, Orbán, is a known stooge to Putin’s regime. It was hoped that, working in ecumenical tandem with Hilarion, he could subvert European opposition to Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine.

I didn’t argue with my friend – I never argue with anyone who clearly knows more about a subject than I do. I just said something along the lines of “let’s wait and see”.

Well, we have waited, and we have seen. Last week Pope Francis visited Hungary on, as he declared, a secret mission to stop the war. “Peace,” said His Holiness, “is always achieved by the opening of channels.”

He then held a meeting with Orbán and Hilarion where “all that was discussed”. All three parties, added the pontiff, “are interested in finding a road to peace”.

Blessed are the peacemakers and all that, but this side of absolute virtue we live in a world of endless relativities. Even such a seemingly indisputable virtue as seeking peace can be mired in a relativist quicksand.

Peace may always be achieved by the opening of channels, but what kind of peace? In a world ruled by absolute goodness, the two sides use those channels to kiss and make up. They each retreat to their pre-peace positions and live happily ever after, exchanging postcards every Christmas.

Alas, history shows that in our relativist world such an outcome is rare, if not entirely impossible. Typically, said channels are used to negotiate one side’s defeat and the other side’s victory. So what kind of peace does that triumvirate have in mind?

Now it took His Holiness seven months after 24 February, 2022, – and eight years since the annexation of the Crimea! – to describe Russia as the aggressor. But even now he waffles at regular intervals that the issue is not as clearcut as all that, Nato is also at fault, Putin might have overreacted but he had been provoked – and so on, Kremlin propaganda almost verbatim, but with a pontifical touch.

As to Orbán, his line is that, since the Ukraine can’t possibly win the war against Russia, the West should withdraw its support that does nothing but prolong the bloodshed. However, all European countries, moans Orbán, except Hungary and Vatican City, continue to send arms to the Ukraine. That, according to him, makes nuclear holocaust not only possible but likely.

Meanwhile, his country is churning out maps of Greater Hungary, incorporating parts of the Carpathian Ukraine. To make that a reality, Orbán continues to buy Russian oil, effectively running the economic blockade of the aggressor.

All this should give you an idea of what Francis, Orbán and Hilarion mean by peace. It’s exactly what Putin means: the Ukraine permanently cedes her territories currently occupied by Russia, disarms and agrees to become a Belarus Mark II, effectively Russia’s puppet.

In return, Putin would agree to cease hostilities. In effect, that would mean he’d lick his wounds, regroup, replenish his arsenal and choose the propitious moment to strike again.   

Yet there is that obdurate warmonger Zelensky, who stubbornly refuses to accept that kind of peace. Fancy that.

In short, that tripartite meeting shifted my position on my friend’s suggestion from “You may be right” to “You definitely are right”.

Exactly 100 years after Berdyayev was sent to the West as a fermenting agent of pro-Bolshevik sentiments, Hilarion seems to have been given a similar mission. He and Orbán are on assignment from Putin, and part of it seems to be running the Pope “in the dark”, which is the KGB jargon for an unwitting agent.

Did you notice how I keep repeating the word ‘seems’? Yes, though I’ve come down from the fence, I’m still holding on to it with one hand. A part of me seems to cling to the hope that Hilarion, a brilliant man and my former Moscow neighbour, isn’t a Putin agent.

Oh well, hope’s cheap.