If the dialogue between the Churches was a way to get out of the tensions of the world wars of the 20th century, the current conflicts show that the efforts of this great work could not eliminate the reasons for the divisions, often very little spiritual and rather related to historical-political circumstances, as in fact occurred in ancient schisms.
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity has just ended a few days ago and, beyond the numerous and meritorious meetings, in the Catholic and Protestant churches it has become evident that “classical” ecumenism, inaugurated at the beginning of the 20th century by Evangelicals and progressively assumed by Orthodox and Catholics, has been definitively exhausted. The almost total absence of representatives of the Orthodox Churches, devastated as never before by wars and schisms, has revealed the impotence of all confessions that refer to the Gospel, unable to find the path of peace and reconciliation.
The “holy war” of Russia, blessed and proclaimed by the patriarch and almost the entire Russian Orthodox clergy, has returned the Christian world to the experience of a conflict that seemed buried for centuries, the clash between peoples and religions. Many have called for an explicit condemnation of Patriarch Kirill’s “imperialist heresy”, and the Ecumenical Council of Churches has in recent months discussed the possible expulsion of the Russian Church. Pope Francis condemns the war at every opportunity, while trying to keep the door open to dialogue with the Muscovite “brothers”, but the jubilant greeting “We are brothers!” that Bergoglio directed to Kirill himself on February 12, 2016, at the historic meeting in Havana. In a few days the anniversary of that event will be fulfilled, although it seems that it was a thousand centuries away.
The Ukrainian Orthodox, although they try to unite to face the warlike and ideological invasion of Russia, fail to find a formula that can really represent all of them together. The Ukraine continues to be the land with the largest number of Orthodox jurisdictions, and any attempt to recapitulate them into a single Church ends up generating more dispersion and division. The “autocephalians” have recently obtained from the State the exclusive use of the most prestigious headquarters, the Lavra of the kyiv Caves, expelling the metropolitan and the pro-Russian monks, who in turn are divided into “Kyrillians”, “Onufrinians” (supporters of from moderate Metropolitan Onufryj) and neutral or “almost autocephalous”. The jurisdiction historically linked to the Muscovite patriarchate, with its 13,000 churches (more than in Russia itself), declared itself “autonomous” in June, but it seems that the most appropriate definition would be “anarchic Church”, without points of stable reference.
In the convulsive circumstances of the war, even reciprocal “ecclesiastical sanctions” accumulate, the purpose of which is to exclude any type of rapprochement between Christians who fight for their lands, their churches and monasteries, even on the dates of the great liturgical festivals. From kyiv, anathemas rain down against the Russian patriarch and his acolytes, including relatives and acquaintances, and a thirty-year “sentence” was even handed down against Metropolitan Ilarion (Alfeev), one of the most bitter historical enemies of the “non-Muscovites” Orthodox. all types. The condemnation came to him in Hungary, where the patriarch Kirill himself has exiled him for rather obscure political-ideological reasons.
Furthermore, the crisis of ecumenism is not the result of what has happened between Russians and Ukrainians in recent years, but rather is partly the consequence of a much longer and more extensive process. If the dialogue between the Churches was a way to overcome the tensions of the world wars of the 20th century, the current conflicts show that the efforts of this great work could not eliminate the reasons for the divisions, often very little spiritual and related to rather with the historical-political circumstances, as in fact occurred in the oldest schisms
Already before the great political changes at the end of the century, which led to the fall of the “cold war” wall and the redefinition of the world order, an increasingly intricate and contradictory climate began to be perceived in the various forms of dialogue interfaith. From the 1980s onwards there has been no real progress in understanding and cooperation between the churches, for reasons that are now clearly evident when Russia justifies total war as a reaction to the “loss of traditional values” in the rest of the world. The process of secularization and the overcoming of historical prohibitions such as divorce and abortion, homosexual unions and the female priesthood, inspired by social movements and demands that have also found forms of expression in the ecclesiastical sphere, has provoked an increasingly radical in the ecumenical sphere.
The ecumenism of dialogue and openness to the demands of modernity has been increasingly replaced by the attempt to form conservative and anti-secularist alliances, of which the apocalyptic vision of Russian Orthodoxy is the final version. The dream of unity between the Churches has faded to give way to the choice of a side, where what matters is not internal unity but common opposition to the external enemy. 2016 was the emblematic year that consecrated this radical turn: in February, the Patriarch of Moscow met the Pope of Rome, as the culminating moment of the Catholic-Orthodox alliance, and in June the Pan-Orthodox Council of Crete failed miserably, where the Churches of the East clashed precisely over the ecumenical question.
The historic meeting in Cuba had already provoked very negative reactions among the Orthodox, in Russia and elsewhere, with criticism of “compromising with heretics” that Kirill tried in vain to justify with the need to collaborate to save the ancient traditions. The days before the Council, an event that should have summed up a whole millennium of divisions in unity, the Churches of Bulgaria, Antioch, Georgia, Serbia and Russia withdrew. Then the Serbs changed their minds and went to Crete, precisely to destroy the document on “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the rest of the Christian world.” Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople then put aside all internal diplomacy and when the Council ended, he launched the procedure that led two years later to the proclamation of Ukrainian autocephaly, definitively breaking relations with the “degenerate daughter” Church of Moscow.
The Churches are no longer “mothers and daughters”, they are not even “sisters”, but only allies or adversaries. Catholics and Protestants witness this denaturing of the “family” of Christians -who instead would like to defend the values of the “natural family” against the new forms of proclamation of rights and freedoms- without knowing how to recover the formation in a common front , and end up messily taking sides on the battlefield. Along with the radical and anti-ecumenical orthodox, the great conservative Pentecostal movements are increasingly aligned, very active when it comes to supporting sovereignist and intolerant policies, but also many Catholic communities that feel little represented by the current Roman hierarchy and go on to reinforce the Fundamentalist protest chorus.
The motto of classical ecumenism, “unity in diversity”, is applied to a pluralistic and inclusive vision of the relationship between Christians, which corresponds to a dialogical and non-invasive presence of the Church in contemporary society. This approach already led Georgians and Bulgarians to leave the World Council of Churches in 1997, highlighting the malaise that exists throughout the Orthodox world, very traditionalist by its very nature. Since then, attempts have been made to live a “local ecumenism” or “from below”, limited to fraternal relations between the different confessions present in specific territories, with uneven results and with the tacit recognition of the impossibility of unification at a general level. Some Lutheran theologians have defined this crisis as the transition from a unitive ecumenism to a simply interdenominational one, as two variants already incompatible with each other.
One of the most important Russian Orthodox hierarchs, Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), also known as “Putin’s spiritual father”, has repeated in recent days that he sees “no real future for the idea of ecumenism in the Church”. Faced with attempts at “ecumenical homologation”, in his opinion, there will always be a “defensive reaction of the believing people”, which advances “without delay and in a very determined manner”. Many Russian priests, Tikhon observes, “remember the ecumenical prayers of Soviet times, which the clergy were obliged to join by the decision of the state.” The theology of ecumenism is “sad and affected, lacking any real foundation”, while true orthodox theology is “inspired and based on the traditions of the Fathers”. One of Kirill’s closest theologians, protoirej Aleksandr Lebedev, defines ecumenism as a “terrible spiritual disease, which has long infected all Churches.”
At a recent conference in Rome, Orthodox priest Cyril Hovorun, a prominent Ukrainian ecumenical theologian, urged everyone not to be discouraged by the failure of dialogue and the Russians’ attempt to involve everyone in metaphysical warfare. He affirmed that “excluding a brother is not the path to reconciliation and that dialogue also means inviting repentance and change, metanoia, beginning with the conversion of one’s own heart.” Ecumenism must start again from scratch, invoking the redemption of all, because it is inevitable for humanity, wounded by original sin and by the sin of Cain.
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