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Caught up in the escalation, will Vladimir Putin dare to resort to nuclear strikes?
If he gives in to this ultimate vertigo, he will not fail to invoke Seraphim of Sarov, the Slavic Francis of Assisi whom Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow, consecrated as patron saint of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.
A controversial characteristic? The two potentates don’t need anyone’s help in order to be self-congratulatory. The pact that has bound them for 20 years has long had its share of kitschy devilry that is unintentionally comical. The war in Ukraine reveals its Luciferian dimension.
On February 23, the day before the invasion, Kirill issued a statement from his residence at the Danilov Monastery, congratulating Putin on the celebration of the “Defender of the Fatherland” holiday.
In his homily at Christ the Saviour Cathedral on the 27th, in the middle of the offensive, Kirill castigated the “forces of evil” that wanted to prevent Putin from achieving “the unity of all Russians.”
The Sunday before Lent is known in the Orthodox Church as Last Judgment Sunday. The civil and liturgical calendars collide in the deadly ballet for the latest heads of Church and State to have emerged from the homo sovieticus.
A legacy of the totalitarian era
This sacrilegious alliance is a legacy of the totalitarian era. After 1989, only the Patriarchate and the KGB have remained as institutions in Russia. But these are old ties.
Under Brezhnev, Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad (who died in 1978), who was a child of persecution, traded international collaboration for internal moderation.
His followers occupied the major seats of the Soviet Union, the vicariate of Moscow, and the bishoprics of Minsk and Kyiv.
Among them was Kirill of Smolensk, who took over the Russian Church’s Department for External Church Relations prior to being elected patriarch in 2009.
The ascensions of Kirill and Vladimir Putin have been parallel. The pontificate of one and the reign of the other eventually merged.
In order to grow with the new tsar, the patriarch not only blessed the political-religious mechanism of the Kremlin, but also maximised it.
He became a steward of minority faiths, a codifier of the sacred and morality, a chaplain to institutions and oligarchs, absolving widespread corruption while carving out a personal fortune.
Imperial restoration
But Kirill’s crucial mission in the service of imperial restoration also played out abroad. The Patriarchate of Moscow is the only entity that still covers the entire territory of the former USSR.
Kirill has endorsed Putin’s diplomatic aggressiveness. He has put into practice the ideology of the “pan-Russian world,” ensured docile hierarchies in Belarus and Ukraine, maintained ethnic dioceses from Estonia to Kazakhstan and united the refractory branches from emigration to the West, through bribes, if necessary.
But to assert his desire for power, Kirill will end up breaking Orthodox unity.
He has conflated the capacity for domination and its resulting damage ever since 2016 when he refused to participate in the great pan-Orthodox council convened by the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
He then turned to the Holy Land, where he sought to instrumentalise the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Embarking on the war in Syria, he tried to subjugate the Patriarchate of Antioch.
Taking advantage of the inroads made by Russia’s Wagner Group, a shadowy group of private military contractors helping the Kremlin exert its influence in Africa, he tried to torpedo the Patriarchate of Alexandria.
And when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, primate of the worldwide Orthodox Church, prophetically granted Ukraine the status of an independent Church in 2019, Kirill declared it “apostate” and entered into schism.
But this time it’s too much.
Even Metropolitan Onufriy, Kirill’s legate who heads the part of the Ukrainian Church that remains faithful to Big Brother, has just called for patriotic resistance. It was clear that deprived of its significant Ukrainian base, the Patriarchate of Moscow would become just another Orthodox Church.
It is done.
It is now up to Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis to act together so that the terrible conflict in Ukraine does not reawaken the murderous divisions of the past between Orthodox, Latin Catholics and Greek Catholics.
The future of Europe is at stake – the future of the lived Gospel.
- Jean-François Colosimo is an Orthodox theologian and historian of religions. He studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris, Fordham University in New York and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece).
- First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.
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