Orthodox Times, a reliably impartial source for Orthodox news from around the world, published a brief report by Kostas Onisenko on Feb. 8 entitled Russian Orthodox Church to maintain restrictions in churches until pandemic is over. While I have written extensively on these pages and on Orthodoxy in Dialogue to criticize the Moscow Patriarchate’s full complicity in Kremlin geopolitics under the guise of “Byzantine symphonia”—and especially in Russia’s ongoing violence against Ukrainian national and ecclesiastical independence—I am happy to share the news on the seemingly rare occasion when the institutional Russian Church gets something right.
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev of Volokolamsk, whose interview with Rossiya 24 Onisenko quotes in his report, serves as chair of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations (DECR) and, in this capacity, as the international voice for Russian church policy (and propaganda) on ecclesiastical and geopolitical matters. In August 2018, he accompanied Patriarch Kirill of Moscow to Istanbul to register their opposition to the imminent grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. Alfeyev quickly became the voice of the Moscow Schism on the world stage.
The Moscow Patriarchate’s continued adherence to reasonable COVID-19 protocols in its churches must surely come as a blow to certain far-right types in the US—both laity and clergy—who convert to Orthodoxy for validation of their nationalism, white supremacism, religious supremacism, and COVID-19 denialism. (See Sarah Riccardi-Swartz’s recent essay at Religion Dispatches and Lydia Bringerud’s at Orthodoxy in Dialogue.) Many of these American converts openly profess to being monarchists on their social media and blogs—they dream of pre-Soviet, Russian-style autocracy in their fevered religious imaginary, not the pabulum of “constitutional” monarchy—and, almost universally, they look to the current Russian Church and church-state relations in Russia as the pinnacle of “muscular Orthodoxy.”
On the clergy side of COVID-19 denialism in American Orthodoxy we have, perhaps most famously, Father Josiah Trenham, previously profiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch Staff, who ironically contracted COVID-19 himself; and perhaps most prominently on the lay side, Michael Sisco, who threatened the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America with a financial boycott of dioceses and parishes that refused to bow to his demand to break the law.
What must these and their ilk in American Orthodoxy think of the Russian Church’s common-sense response to Covid and its risks for the faithful? Note in the Onisenko report that the Moscow Patriarchate went so far as to instruct the elderly to stay home from Christmas services on Jan. 6-7 of this year.
Far-right extremism and its handmaiden, anti-intellectualism, are not the monopoly of a certain kind of American convert. As I wrote on these pages in June 2019, the Ukrainian Church has its own grave challenges to deal with. In a June 2020 report for Balkan Insight, Madalin Necsutu wrote on the Moldovan Church’s plan to ward of Covid with religious processions, notwithstanding Moldova’s having the highest Covid rate in Europe at the time.
The Orthodox Church around the world has its work cut out. A breath of fresh air comes from Metropolitan Alexander Gianniris of Nigeria, a bishop of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, whose article for Orthodoxy in Dialogue made him an overnight sensation in global Orthodoxy.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian of Ukrainian and Lemko descent on his mother’s side, founding editor of the world’s most popular independent Orthodox blog, and Ph.D. candidate in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He is writing a doctoral thesis entitled “Conjugal Friendship and the Sacrament of Love: Father Pavel Florensky’s Orthodox Theology of Same-Sex Love.” See his previous articles for the Kyiv Post here, and follow him on Twitter @GiacoSanfilippo.
