Speaking at an Abu Dhabi conference modestly called “For a Reasonably Open World”, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew fired a salvo at the Russian Orthodox Church.
But did he also hit the Anglican Church by ricochet? For Bartholomew castigated the Russian Church from the standpoint of Gospel universality.
The Patriarch condemned the very idea of a church circumscribed by ethnic culture and language. While his verbal shells exploded in Moscow, the fragments reached London too, or so it seemed to me. But let’s take things in turn.
His All-Holiness Bartholomew I is the spiritual leader of Eastern Christianity that, unlike the Catholic Church, has no single institutional head.
It’s structured as a number of independent (autocephalous) patriarchates, of which the senior ones are those of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The Constantinople patriarch, currently Bartholomew, is known as primus inter pares (first among equals), whose spiritual authority is recognised universally.
Or almost so: the Moscow Patriarchate severed its ties with Constantinople after Bartholomew granted autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2018.
However, the relations between Constantinople and Moscow haven’t been especially cordial since 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. Since then the Moscow Patriarchate has been claiming leadership of Orthodox Christianity with ever-increasing clamour and persistence.
A century later Moscow began to describe itself as ‘the Third Rome’, political heir to the Byzantine Empire and spiritual heir to Constantinople. Officially the claim was based on a dynastic link: Tsar (or rather Grand Duke) Ivan III was married to the last Byzantine princess Sophia Paleologue. But in reality Moscow’s claim to ecclesiastical supremacy was increasingly linked to its imperial ambitions.
That came to the fore in the early 18th century, when, under Peter I, Russia indeed became an empire. At that point, the state hugged the Church close to its chest, but there was a kiss of death implicit in that embrace.
Step by step, the Church, its hierarchy at any rate, became an extension of the state, practically its Department for Religion. As such, it was turned into an instrument and promulgator of state policy, with imperialist expansion at its core.
Russia used her Third Rome rhetoric to appoint herself as the leader of the Slavic world, its Orthodox part for starters. Orthodox doctrine was fused with the ideology of pan-Slavism, and the former played second fiddle to the latter.
In 1872 the Constantinople Patriarch denounced that travesty as a heresy, that of ethnophyletism, a form of ecclesial racism. Yesterday Bartholomew reiterated the message: “It is in flagrant contradiction with the universalism of the Gospel message, as well as the principle of territorial governance which defines the organisation of our church.”
The Russian Church, its clergy and parishioners, suffered unimaginable persecution during the first 25 years of Soviet rule. It was only during the Second World War that Stalin sought to reverse the initially catastrophic setbacks suffered by the Red Army by drumming up support for traditional patriotism.
To that end, the Church was taken out of its collective concentration camp and co-opted to serve the cause of Stalin’s victory. Alas, though it agreed to sup with the devil, the requisite long spoon stayed in the drawer.
From then on, the Church hierarchy fell under the aegis of the KGB, whichever moniker it went by. For example, the current Moscow Patriarch, Kirill, is a career operative, known in the KGB archives by his codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’. When he stood for the post in 2009, his two rivals were also his colleagues in the secret services.
Given that affiliation, the Russian Church naturally has issued a blanket blessing to every aggressive foray of the Putin regime, including its current genocidal raid on the Ukraine. And yesterday Bartholomew didn’t pull punches when condemning the splinter patriarchate playing lickspittle to an evil regime:
“It actively participates in the promotion of the ideology of Rousskii Mir, the Russian world, according to which language and religion make it possible to define a coherent whole encompassing Russia, Ukraine, Belarus as well as the other territories of the former Soviet Union and the diaspora.
“Moscow (both political power and religious power) would constitute the centre of this world, whose mission would be to combat the decadent values of the West. This ideology constitutes an instrument of legitimisation of Russian expansionism and the basis of its Eurasian strategy.
“The link between the past of ethnophyletism and the present of the Russian world is obvious. Faith thus becomes the backbone of the ideology of Putin’s regime.”
Just so. The shell of patriarchal wrath was aimed at Moscow, and it exploded with a bang reverberating throughout the world. But what about the ricochet?
Far be it from me to draw a direct parallel between the Russian Orthodox and Anglican Churches, and Bartholomew certainly didn’t mention any such similarity. The ROC has become an instrument of evil, while the Church of England is still, despite everything, a force for good.
Yet isn’t it too guilty of parochial ethnophyletism? The argument that Anglicanism is practised all over the world has always struck me as somewhat disingenuous.
Its spread is so wide because Britain used to be “an empire on which the sun never set”, so called in the wake of the colonial expansion following Britain’s victory in the Seven Years’ War. Anglicanism is now practised almost exclusively in the Anglophone world, the fragments of the Empire that may or may not belong to the Commonwealth.
And of course in Britain herself the C of E is the state religion, of which the monarch is the Supreme Governor, secular head. That, to me, constitutes a problem – similar to the one the Constantinople Patriarch had with the Russian Church in the 19th century, when he condemned it as heretical.
How can any denomination be a state church? In John 18:36, Jesus says: “My kingdom is not of this world.” And the synoptic gospels quote Jesus as saying: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
These were unequivocal statements of separation between the sacred and profane realms. And the sacred realm, as Paul explained to the Galatians, was universal, transcending all secular incidentals: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
This was what Bartholomew had in mind yesterday, when he yet again condemned the ROC for the heresy of ethnophyletism, as expressed through an evil secular regime. Can’t we, with equal justification, apply the same thinking…
I’d better stop here, for fear of losing all my English friends. So let’s keep it strictly personal, without drawing broad theological conclusions: this is one of the reasons I left the Church of England.
As to the ROC – well-done, Your All-Holiness! Now let’s do something about your environmentalism, which clearly needs work.
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Religion is pernicious nonsense!
Would that the pope would speak out in such a fashion! Imagine him condemning the Russian Orthodox Church and secular leaders instead of condemning Ukrainians for fighting back!
The Church of England suffers from the ills as all other Protestant faiths. One man decided to throw out some rules and maybe some books of the bible. Who is he, then, to say that some other man may not throw out other rules (or books) and make another new faith? On and on it goes until we have some 35,000 denominations (though there are arguments about what defines a distinct denomination and how such are counted).
As much as I am able, I stick to Latin Mass and a mix of Latin and English prayers outside Mass. (If I had the brain power, I would stick strictly to the Latin.)
Why doesn’t God come down and settle the debate?
He trusts us to make our free choice, but we keep letting Him down. Not always though: He must be smling at Bartholomew.
The difficulty for us Orthodox believers is that the All-Holy Patriarch of Constantinople, while he can express his condemnation of any or all of his fellow Patriarchs for heresy or wickedness just as anybody else can (and with greater moral effect), has no canonical power to interfere in the internal affairs of their jurisdictions. Thus he had no power to recognise the autocephaly of the “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” without the consent of the Patriarch of Moscow. Bartholomew is not a Pope, and the fact that he has a history of behaving like one is unhelpful. This is why only three of the numerous other independent Orthodox churches (only Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus) are in communion with the breakaway O C of U.
A big problem for all churches, which you discuss but don’t name, is caesaropapism (in England sometimes called Erastianism). Patriarch Bartholomew’s Second Rome has suffered from it as much as Patriarch Kyrill’s Third Rome. How often does His All-Holiness criticise the Turkish government’s increasing oppression of Christians? And aren’t both the Pope of Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury enthralled by the state-worshipping ideology of socialism?
Caesaropapism is a problem for some churches, especially those going back to Byzantium where the practice originated. And some churches are indeed led by socialists or even at times dubious Christians. But not all churches ally themselves with the most evil organisation the world has ever known. That distinction only belongs to the Moscow Patriarchate of the ROC, ably led by ‘Agent Mikhailov’, him of the disappearing watch fame.
I suppose caesaropapism isn’t a problem for adherents of the Patriarch of Rome, who rules his own little secular state and used to rule a much bigger one, with his own army and everything.
Every candidate for a bishopric in the USSR used to be required to join the KGB. The alternative to joining the KGB was to leave one’s flock without a shepherd. What a monstrous dilemma that must have been! I’m increasingly inclined to think that the future Patriarch Kyrill joined the KGB with joy, but I’m not sure that all his contemporary fellow-bishops deserve to be tarred with the same brush.
The Pope is hardly a caesar and Vatican is hardly a state, much less an empire. The Church did assume, much to its long-term detriment, many state-like secular functions in the past, especially in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Carolingian one. The Church had to step in during the interregnum to prevent Europe from sinking into a blood-soaked chaos.
As for the ROC facing an awful choice, this is a stock argument and perhaps the only possible one. But it isn’t valid. The history of both the Western and Eastern (including Russian) Churches is full of saintly martyrs who chose death over a compromise with evil. When the Russian Church was being turned into an extension of the state, thousands of Old Believers immolated themselves rather than striking a deal with what they saw as the Antichrist. Throughout the existence of the Soviet Union, an undergound church was active, whose priests and parishioners risked (and lost) ther lives ro remain independent of the KGB. With the arrival of the post-communist KGB banditry, heroic priests like Alexander Men continued to serve God, rather than the KGB – and to lose their lives in that service. And, as any reader of the Mitrokhin Archives will confirm, there’s no need to tar all the ROC hierararchs with the same brush. They do a good job of it themselves.
The Pope remains a secular potentate, albeit on a small and benign scale. I don’t object to this, any more than I’d object to the former secular power of the Archbishops of Cologne and Bishops of Durham, but I think you’re inconsistent in not objecting to it.
There were no ethnophyletists more ethnophyletical than the Old Believers, who defended traditional (and erroneous) Russian practices against the importation of foreign ones. Like you, I find them admirable, but then I don’t find ethnophyletism as intrinsically objectionable as you and Patriarch Bartholomew do.
All these disputations will be resolved when Our Lord returns, and while I’m not in the business of working out the date of His return, it would be especially appropriate on a Christmas Day which is also a Sunday.
“He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”