RUSSIA RELIGION NEWS


Politics of the Ukrainian venture

POROSHENKO ENGINEERS DESPERATE, BUT PROBABLY HOPELESS, CHURCH REVOLUTION

by Andrei Melnikov

Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 23 April 2018

 

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UPTsMP) accused President Petro Poroshenko of exceeding his authority and interfering in church affairs. This is stated in an official declaration of the Department for External Church Relations of the UPTsMP, distributed on Saturday, 21 April. The day before a representative of the administration of the Ukrainian president was sent to Istanbul in order to convey to Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew an appeal with the request for granting to the Ukrainian church autocephaly—independence from the Moscow patriarchate.

 

Actually, the appeal was not signed by the UPTsMP but by alternatives to it, the Kiev patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Both are illegitimate from the point of view of the Orthodox community. However the real initiator is President Poroshenko, who reported to deputies of the Verkhovna Rada on Tuesday, 17 April, his intention to once again appeal to Patriarch Bartholomew. On Wednesday, Poroshenko received the heads of the three competing Orthodox jurisdictions, and it is impossible not to notice that in the official announcement on the president's website regarding this event, the head of the UPTsMP, Metropolitan Onufrey, was given humiliatingly little importance. The president merely informed the metropolitan about the request to Constantinople, for which it is the UPTsMP, in theory, that should have made the request. On Thursday, the people's deputies, with the exception of the "Opposition Bloc" fraction, signed the appeal to Patriarch Bartholomew. These circumstances strengthened in many the opinion that Petro Poroshenko has ventured a little victorious church war in order to attain his reelection to a second term.

 

Poroshenko could go down in history if his venture succeeds. However he had no possibility of postponing the project and the moment for gaining independence from the "Moscow" church was not very successfully chosen. Patriarch Bartholomew constructs his policy depending upon various influences, the most significant of which are the orders of Turkish authorities and Washington's opinion. On 14 April, the Constantinople church held a consultation with the head of the Department for International Religious Freedom of the American State Department, Samuel Brownback. But the State Department's advice may contradict the will of Turkish leadership. Disagreements between Washington and Ankara are ever more expanding—both on the Syrian question and the topic of Russian-Turkish cooperation and on the problem of extradition by the United States of the preacher Fethullah Gülen. Turkey even withheld gold reserve from the Federal Reserve System and it detains in custody Pastor Andrew Brunson, in whose defense American President Donald Trump tweeted on 17 April.

 

The attitude of the Moscow patriarchate to Poroshenko's Constantinople venture has manifested a broad range, from sarcasm to despair. There have been instances when the Constantinople patriarchate encroached upon the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, depending on political circumstances. For example, in Estonia, when this state acquired independence. On Thursday, Metropolitan of Tallinn and all-Estonia Kornily died. By his authority and services to Orthodoxy, this son of a tsarist colonel managed to resist competition from the direction of the Estonian Apostolic Church, which was created by Constantinople. Now concerns have arisen that the RPTs will place at the head of its Estonian structure a bishop from Russia, and the great-power style of the "Varangian" will provoke an exodus of believers into the alternative jurisdiction. Kornily's death may open a "second front" on the western borders of the Russian world. (tr. by PDS, posted 23 April 2018)


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