Everyone wants the war to end, but it can’t just be a matter of surrender or compromise, identity and dominance on the battlefield. It is an internal war, which takes place in the churches and in the consciences, in the universities and in the schools, in the streets and in the homes of all the countries of the East and the West.
According to Russian customs, spring begins in March, although winter frosts can continue to cover the land until May. However, the days are getting longer and that allows us to start thinking about how to face the new year, which until then remained hidden in the dark. And in the current circumstances of the Russian war in Ukraine, frozen since November on the banks of the Dnipro River, tempers are rising to make sense of the immense destruction and unnecessary loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
The greats of the earth meet and sound out in India, where it seems to be news until an exchange of glances between the US secretary Blinken and the Russian minister Lavrov. The impotence of weapons, less and less effective and increasingly reproached by both sides, is consummated in the ballet of drones that are launched at each other between attacks on the defenseless population and provocations to unleash the belligerent fury of those who want to execute once and for all the massacre and annihilate the enemy. Putin watches with apprehension from his bunker the unstoppable rise of “cook” Prigozhin, the black soul of mercenary Russia who fascinates even rebellious teenagers.
While waiting for the movements of the armies, the Orthodox also begin their Lenten fasts and prayers, reciting in the churches of Russia and Ukraine the Great Penitential Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete. The extremely popular patristic text is made up of nine songs that summarize the biblical stories from the creation of the world to the Assumption of Our Lord Jesus Christ, rewriting the entire history of humanity and especially the history of salvation. It is sung in four parts during the vespers of the first days of Lent to express the pain caused by the many sins of men: “For what act of my life will I cry? / What notes will I write as a prelude to my lament ? / I did not imitate the justice of Abel / I have squandered the riches of my life in the bottomless void / I am the wretch whom the thieves assaulted / And thieves are my thoughts, which strike and wound me”, always concluding with the invocation “Bend down on me, Christ the Savior”.
The Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, His Beatitude Svjatoslav Ševčuk, expressed the wish that “the entire Christian world make a real assessment of the ideology of the Russian World, because if this form of genocide was generated by a Christian Church, then it is fair to doubt the entire ecclesiality, the entire historical form of Christianity.” The patriarch of the Uniates, as his faithful recall in the liturgies, compares the war-religious propaganda of the Muscovites with the expressions of radical Islamism, in the face of which “even Muslim scholars have found the strength to reject and condemn this ideology.”
Shevčuk’s claim consists, in his words, of “a challenge of the present time to the entire Christian world”, which cannot be hastily dismissed as a submission of the Russian Church to the will of the dictator, but must question everyone about the “authentic fidelity to the Gospel of Christ for the man of the third millennium, a task that goes beyond the limits of the individual Churches”. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonishes: “Therefore, if when you are going to put your offering on the altar, you remember at that moment that your brother has a complaint against you, leave your offering by the altar and go first to reconcile with your brother, and then return to present your offering.” He does not say if you hold a grudge against him, but rather if you are aware that you have offended him.
Without being blinded by the dust of state propaganda about “NATO and Western provocations” and “the dominance of globalization’s economic overlords”, or equally grotesque flashes of patriarchal propaganda against “caving in to ideology”. of gender” and the “destruction of traditional values”, it is necessary to respond sincerely to the challenge of the Archbishop of Kiev, in the spirit of the Gospel. What is it that makes the Russian brother so angry, regarding the Ukrainian brother or the Western brother? How can we reconcile with him, to prevent the conflict from becoming more tragic?
Condemning the “Russian world” only achieves its further affirmation, insisting on the incompatibility between Christians on the two shores. The “traditional Christian civilization” of Moscow cannot and should not be incompatible with the “decline” of Europe and the United States, prey to secular liberalism. It is an image blurred by the violence of power and by the delusions of grandeur of the untouchable castes of oligarchs and officials of political regimes, or the claims of success of the masters of the markets. There is no “sinless Russia” against an “immoral West”, but we must return to the admission of Saint Andrew of Crete, “thieves are my thoughts”, we are all equally guilty before God.
If there is no doubt about the roles of the attacked and the aggressor, the invader and the resister, in addition to these military and geopolitical considerations, the Christian conscience requires above all the demystification of guilt and innocence, which the English historian and theologian Joshua T. Searle calls it a “special theological operation.” We have to ask ourselves if Christian orthodoxy, and not just that of the Russians, is really so incompatible with Western liberalism, and this is a question that cannot be reduced to the war attacks of 2022, but rather requires a synthesis of the relationship between Christianity and the modern world.
Everyone wants the war to end, but that can’t just be a matter of surrender or commitment, identity and dominance on the battlefield. It is an internal war, which takes place in the churches and consciences, in the universities and in the schools, in the streets and in the homes of all the countries of the East and the West. Searle launches the provocation that “the secular humanism of contemporary Europe is essentially more Christian than the religious nationalism of the Kremlin,” and of many other theocratic or “symphonic” regimes. The latent atheism of secularism, to which Protestants and Catholics seem to adapt, collides with the sacrilegious atheism of those who subordinate God to a political and power project, or simply to an affirmation of themselves against the entire world. As the professor at the multi-ethnic Sturgeon College explains, “Christian nationalism has nothing to do with authentic orthodox Christian doctrine. It owes its appearance to a revival of pagan myths about blood and soil, and certainly not to the biblical tradition of the dignity and freedom of man and people.
Many have contributed to fueling the myth of “holy Russia” and “religious renaissance”, even in the West, perhaps inspired by the prophecies of Our Lady of Fatima. The time has come to also recognize this guilt, which unites Russians and Ukrainians, Europeans and Americans: wanting to reintroduce religion in today’s world as a factor in conflict with other ideologies and lifestyles, or else to homologate it with them, as if they were The two faces of the same coin. The rereadings of ancient and medieval history that are at the base of the moral justifications of warlike actions can also influence the present, even admitting that with history an unimprovised confrontation is always required. In reality, what is needed is an honest attitude to question oneself about the present from one’s own condition and one’s own identity, before pointing the finger at the presumed or inevitable adversary.
Putin’s Holy Russia is an ideal that attracts and fascinates, in different versions, many conservative sectors of the Catholic Church and evangelical communities, scattered throughout the planet. It will be possible to dialogue with Russia, beyond the results of the war, only when we are able to confront each other on these dimensions of the soul. The famous American preacher Pat Buchanan, the inspirer of so much Western policy, after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 defined Putin as “a true Christian crusader”, who had known how to “raise the Russian flag over the principles of traditional Christianity”, and did not they may underestimate the more or less hidden currents of this typical “Church militant” mentality, which united Christians and communists in the last century.
No wonder Putin’s propaganda finds its way so easily into Western societies, beginning with extreme left and right political sectors, united in nostalgia for the student barricades and street clashes of their youth. The religious-ideological substratum is equally evident in what the Russians contemptuously call “LGBT propaganda”, that is, in the claims for rights understood as war victories, rather than as recognition of personal and community reality. True liberalism does not despise or offend traditions, true traditionalism does not oppress consciences and communities, and therefore does not invade neighboring countries.
“RUSSIAN WORLD” IS THE ASIANEWS NEWSLETTER DEDICATED TO RUSSIA
DO YOU WANT TO RECEIVE IT EVERY SATURDAY IN YOUR MAIL? SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER AT THIS LINK
