ANALYSIS: Moscow's complaints reflect Byzantine politics of Orthodoxy

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
New York

On day three of Benedict XVI’s Nov. 28-Dec. 1 trip to Turkey, I found myself in the press center early in the morning at the Istanbul Hilton, chatting with a couple of colleagues. That morning, the pope was to join Bartholomew I, the Patriarch of Constantinople, for a divine liturgy in the Patriarchal Church of St. George, while the afternoon would bring visits to Hagia Sophia and to the Blue Mosque.

The consensus in the press room was that the day’s big story would come in the afternoon, above all the drama of “the pope of Regensburg” setting foot inside one of Islam’s most storied mosques. (The question, by the way, wasn’t what the day’s story should be, but rather what it would be given the way the news business works).

As a thought exercise, a couple of us asked if there was anyplace on earth, outside of Turkey, where the encounter with Bartholomew would actually be news. The answer came almost at once: Moscow and Athens.

That instinct reflects the uniquely complex politics of Orthodoxy, for which the word “Byzantine” was coined. Though Bartholomew I is in theory “first among equals” among Orthodox prelates, in reality there has long been a three-way contest to determine which voices carry the most weight in Orthodox affairs. The Patriarch of Moscow, whose see is known traditionally as the “Third Rome,” believes that because the Russian Orthodox Church is the largest and wealthiest – numbering, at least according to baptismal counts, more than 130 million out of Orthodoxy’s estimated global total of 250 million – Moscow is actually the most important Orthodox see. The Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, on the other hand, generally insists that the church in Greece has preserved the most pure form of the Orthodox faith, which gives it a claim to preeminence.

Hence, any gesture from Rome towards one of these three figures is, unfortunately, often viewed dimly by the other two, who think of themselves as the most decisive interlocutors with the Catholic Church. In recent years, Moscow has played this card most effectively; while John Paul II visited both the Phanar in Istanbul and Athens, the Russians kept him at arm’s length, creating a sense of drama around Catholic/Russian Orthodox affairs that endures to this day.

Thus it is perhaps no surprise just five days after Benedict and Bartholomew appeared on the balcony of the Phanar, arm-in-arm, giving the assembled crowd a victory wave, and signing a Common Declaration committing both churches to unity, that the Patriarch of Moscow has sent a further “shot across the bow” to the Vatican, reminding the Catholic Church that Bartholomew doesn’t speak for everybody.

On Tuesday, Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow called upon the Catholic Church to stop its “unfriendly” policy towards Orthodox churches in Russia and the former Soviet Republics.

“The Catholic mission continues to target people baptized in the Orthodox Church in Russia and other ex-Soviet nations, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church maintains its unfriendly policy in relation to the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” Alexy II told an annual meeting of the Moscow clergy.

“I hope the Vatican will take measures to improve the situation,” Alexy II said, adding that otherwise contacts between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches would be merely protocol and would “bring no relief to people hurt by the unfriendly actions” of Catholic missionaries.

The comments are part of long-standing complaints from Moscow about Catholic “proselytism” in Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of the former Soviet empire.

Ironically, it can be quite difficult to find evidence of a general policy of Catholic proselytism on the ground. In fact, the Vatican has an official slow-growth policy in the former Soviet domain, which is explicitly policed in these countries by the papal nuncio. If a Russian, for example, shows up at a Catholic parish and expresses interest in becoming Catholic, the priest's first response, according to the official line, should be: ‘Why don’t you go back to the Orthodox church?’ In any other country, a small Catholic community struggling to build itself up would trumpet conversions and baptisms; in the former Soviet territories, Catholic officials do everything possible to play them down.

Meanwhile, there is proselytism going on in the former Soviet sphere, but it’s not from the Catholics. Sociologist of religion Nikolai Mitrokhin, who directs the Institute of the Study of Religion in the CIS and Baltic Countries, told me in 2004 that denominations such as the Pentecostals, the Baptists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses expanded at a clip of 20-25 percent a year during the 1990s. Today, Mitrokhin believes there are at least one million practicing Protestants in Russia, and he calls their growth “the most important religious trend” in the country.

So why is Alexy II directing his ire at Rome?

In part, there is a real fear about the future of Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church currently receives about one-third of its funding and one-third of its clergy from Ukraine, and it would be a crippling blow to Moscow should Ukraine, which it sees as part of its “canonical territory,” slip outside its sphere of influence. Currently, there are three branches of Orthodoxy in Ukraine: a branch linked to the Moscow Patriarchate, a “Kiev Patriarchate” under Metropolitan Filaret, and small breakaway “Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.” In addition, the 5.5-million Greek Catholic Church, concentrated in Western Ukraine, follows Orthodox liturgical and doctrinal traditions but is in full communion with Rome.

There’s little evidence that the Greek Catholic Church is actively “proselytizing,” in the sense of attracting large numbers of Orthodox converts. Yet no doubt the Greek Catholics represent a pro-Western force in Ukraine hostile to Moscow’s influence; many Greek Catholics, for example, played leading roles in the “Orange Revolution” that brought reformer Viktor Yushchenko to power in 2005. The long-term project of some Greek Catholic intellectuals is to promote a unified, autocephalous Orthodox church in Ukraine, bringing together the various branches of Orthodoxy along with the Greek Catholics, which would then enter into communion with Rome while preserving its own traditions.

How realistic that vision is remains to be seen, but given the implications for finances and personnel, one understands why it makes Moscow nervous.

Beyond Ukraine, however, there is a basic anti-Roman instinct in Orthodox politics that is perhaps especially strong in Russia and Athens, both churches that see themselves as Orthodoxy’s last line of defense against Western colonialism. Certainly the more hard-line faction in Alexy II’s own Synod breathes this air.

Thus it was, for example, that at the Sept. 18-25 meeting of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church in Belgrade, Serbia, it was the Russians who seemed most resistant to any accommodation.

Russian Orthodox Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria, for example, protested afterwards against the use of voting instead of consensus, especially with regard to a section of a draft document on the authority of the Ecumenical Councils. That draft states, among other things, that after the break in communion between East and West in the ninth century, “an ‘Ecumenical Council’ in the strong sense became impossible,” but that “both Churches continued to hold ‘general’ councils gathering together the bishops of local Churches in communion with the See of Rome or the See of Constantinople.”

The Russian Orthodox objected to this formula, which they contend assigns too much preeminence to Constantinople.

Metropolitan John of Pergamon, co-chair for the Orthodox side and a member of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, suggested a compromise that was unacceptable to the Russian Orthodox. The Catholic co-chair, Cardinal Walter Kasper, put the matter to a vote, and the majority of the Orthodox participants voted in favor of the Metropolitan's position.

Hilarion, however, insisted that no vote could force a church to betray its ecclesiological self-understanding, especially to accept a role for the Patriarch of Constantinople in the East analogous to that played by the pope in the West. Kasper indicated that he would take the protest under consideration at the 2007 meeting.

In that context, Alexy II’s complaints on Tuesday of “unfriendly” actions by the Catholic Church were perhaps imminently predictable.

This is likely to be the short-term future of ecumenism – a step forward with one church will sometimes come at the cost of a step back with another, and there’s a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in some circles which will take time, perhaps even generations, to overcome.

The split between East and West is conventionally dated to 1054, though in fact its roots are still more antique. The modern ecumenical movement, on the other hand, is barely a century old. If it takes another couple of centuries to put the divided Christian family back together, from a historical point of view that may ultimately seem like the blink of an eye.

In the meantime, however, observers should not be seduced by tantalizing gestures of unity, such as those shots of a beaming pope and patriarch embracing and swapping kisses of peace. Underneath such symbols, very real challenges remain.