In his 1996, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” Samuel P. Huntington predicted the rise of Russia’s “political Orthodoxy” as a global geopolitical threat no less worrisome than political Islam. Some 15 or so years later, Patriarch Kirill and Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the transplant of “Byzantine symphonia” — a model of church-state “co-voice” which produced ambivalent results in Orthodox Byzantium — in 21st-century Russia. The current escalation of Russian military aggression against Ukraine on the eve of the Ukrainian Church’s reception of autocephaly from Constantinople leaves us no choice but to take them at their word: Patriarchate and Kremlin speak with one voice in Russia.
This brief essay focuses on the Patriarchate’s half of that unified voice.
In the wake of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s announcement that it intended to move forward with the grant of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Church, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations, responded swiftly with a “prediction” of violence in Ukraine and a worldwide schism “worse than 1054.”
I say “prediction” in quotation marks because his words rang out ominously like a threat. They stood in sharp contrast with Patriarch Bartholomew’s appeal to avoid violence and the forcible takeover of church properties, and his insistence that the Ecumenical Patriarchate intended to break communion with no one by its actions in Ukraine. Rather, it restored an enormous swath of the Ukrainian population to communion with the Orthodox Church around the planet. (Moscow’s responsibility for precipitating the Kyiv Patriarchate’s “schism” falls beyond the scope of this essay.)
The Moscow Patriarchate wasted no time in confirming the presentiment of a threat.
To be clear, no one with knowledge of church history—and especially Russian church history, with its “Third Rome” pretensions since at least the 15th century—doubted that Moscow would respond forcefully to Constantinople’s plan to proceed with Ukrainian autocephaly. What shocks is the sheer magnitude of Moscow’s response. One might have expected, at most, a temporary break in concelebration at the primatial and episcopal levels, and perhaps even the clerical level, with the corollary removal of Patriarch Bartholomew’s name from Patriarch Kirill’s diptychs: this means simply that, for the nonce, Kirill would no longer commemorate Bartholomew at the moment in a primatial Divine Liturgy when the primates of the other autocephalous churches are named and prayed for. (In the Russian tradition, with which I am most familiar, the names are chanted by the senior deacon one by one—followed by “Many Years!”—and repeated by the choir. This occurs after the troparia and kontakia of the day and immediately prior to the Trisagion Hymn.)
Moscow went to much greater lengths than this. It forbade its bishops and clergy to concelebrate with those of the Ecumenical Patriarchate anywhere in the world. It forbade them to participate in any commissions and committees of any kind, anywhere in the world, in which bishops and clergy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate take part. This includes not only various ecumenical commissions, but also the regional Assemblies of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, established beyond the borders of historically Orthodox lands around the world for the purpose of working toward a unified, canonically structured Orthodox Church in each region. Most stunning of all, it forbade its laity to take Holy Communion or even to attend divine services in parishes and monasteries of the Ecumenical Patriarchate anywhere in the world. This absolute prohibition for the laity extends even to Russian pilgrims to Mount Athos.
As if these restrictions did not already move the Moscow Patriarchate beyond the pale of all reason and ecclesial dignity, Moscow has also threatened the Patriarchate of Jerusalem with dire financial consequences if bishops and clergy of the newly autocephalous Ukrainian Church are admitted to serve liturgically anywhere in the Holy Land.
The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia—itself schismatic for many decades until 2007—has fallen predictably into lockstep with the Moscow Patriarchate.
On the other hand, Metropolitan Anastasios of Tirana, primate of the Orthodox Church of Albania, wrote to Patriarch Kirill to deplore his use of the Eucharist as a weapon. (See his letter here.) More recently, Patriarch Daniel of Romania hosted Patriarch Bartholomew to consecrate the newly constructed national cathedral in Bucharest.
The facts seem clear: Moscow has wilfully created and orchestrated a global schism the scale of which we have never seen in Orthodox history—worse than 1054, as promised. These do not look like the actions of a church motivated by pastoral concern for anyone at all, but the retaliation of a thug who sees his power slipping through his fingers. In a twist of supreme irony, the Moscow Patriarchate has only proven the need for the Ukrainian Church to break free from its canonical control, even as the Ukrainian nation liberates itself from the Kremlin’s political and military stranglehold.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian of Ukrainian and Lemko descent on his mother’s side, a Ph.D. student in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and the founding editor of Orthodoxy in Dialogue. Earlier in life he completed the coursework for the M.Div. at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary near New York City. Orthodoxy in Dialogue has published extensively in support of Ukraine’s political and ecclesiastical independence from Moscow.
