9 Matching Annotations
- Apr 2024
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Worth, Robert F. “Clash of the Patriarchs.” The Atlantic, April 10, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-ukraine-orthodox-christian-church-bartholomew-kirill/677837/.
A fantastic overview of the history, recent changes and a potential schism in the Orthodox Church with respect to the Russia/Ukraine conflict.
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Perhaps the most troubling possibility is that Kirill’s Church, with its canny blend of politics and faith, turns out to be better adapted to survival in our century than mainstream Churches are.
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Orthodox priests are more vulnerable to bribery than their Roman Catholic peers, Gregorios explained, because they are allowed to marry, and many have large families to provide for.
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In October 2018, just weeks after his tense meeting with Kirill in Istanbul, Bartholomew dissolved the 1686 edict that had given Moscow religious control over Ukraine.
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Putin’s decision to restore Orthodoxy to its old public role was a shrewd one, whatever his personal religious feelings. The Russian empire had collapsed, but its outlines could still be seen in the Russian Orthodox religious sphere, which extended beyond Russia’s borders and as far afield as Mount Athos and even Jerusalem. For a ruler seeking to revive his country’s lost status, the Church was a superb way to spread propaganda and influence.
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Bartholomew’s most distinctive effort to “update” the Church is his commitment to environmentalism. In the press, he is sometimes called the Green Patriarch. When, in 1997, he declared that abusing the natural environment was a sin against God, he became the first major religious leader to articulate such a position.
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a young man named Mykola Kosytskyy, a Ukrainian linguistics student and a frequent visitor to Athos. He had brought with him this time a group of 40 Ukrainian pilgrims. Kosytskyy talked about the war—the friends he’d lost, the shattered lives, the role of Russian propaganda. I asked him about the Moscow-linked Church that he’d known all his life, and he said something that surprised me: “The Ukrainian Orthodox Church”—meaning the Church of Kirill and Putin—“is the weapon in this war.”All through his childhood, he explained, he had heard priests speaking of Russia in language that mixed the sacred and the secular—“this concept of saint Russia, the saviors of this world.” He went on: “You hear this every Sunday from your priest—that this nation fights against evil, that it’s the third Rome, yes, the new Rome. They truly believe this.” That is why, Kosytskyy said, many Ukrainians have such difficulty detaching themselves from the message, even when they see Kirill speaking of their own national leaders as the anti-Christ. Kosytskyy told me it had taken years for him to separate the truth from the lies. His entire family joined the new Ukrainian Church right after Bartholomew recognized it, in 2018. So have millions of other Ukrainians.
Example of a church mixing religion with social and political order and resultant problems.
See also: scholasticism
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According to Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a scholar of Orthodoxy who teaches at Northeastern University, in Boston, the new converts tend to be right-wing and Russophile, and some speak freely of their admiration for Putin’s “kingly” role. In the U.S., converts are concentrated in the South and Midwest, and some have become ardent online evangelists for the idea that “Dixie,” with its beleaguered patriarchal traditions, is a natural home for Russian Orthodoxy. Some of them adorn their websites with a mash-up of Confederate nostalgia and icons of Russian saints.
Many in the southern United States are converting to Orthodox Christianity, a conversion which is tied into patriarchal ideas on the far right.
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But Bartholomew’s power is more limited than the pope’s. There are eight other Orthodox patriarchs, each of whom presides over a national or regional Church, and Bartholomew’s role is that of “first among equals.”
Tags
- environmentalism
- Russian Orthodox Church (Ukrainian Orthodox Church)
- Andrei Tkachev
- Ioannis Lambriniadis (Elpidophoros of America)
- read
- power over
- Orthodox Church of Ukraine
- Revolution of Dignity (Ukraine)
- religious leadership
- Patriarch Bartholomew
- Russia
- The Great Schism
- Ecumenical Patriarchate
- Vladimir Putin
- Oleksandr Drabynko
- Viktor Yanukovych
- Sarah Riccardi-Swartz
- Wagner Group
- primus inter pares
- Cyril Hovorun
- religious admixtures
- propaganda
- scholasticism
- families
- Yevgeny Prigozhin
- Orthodox priests
- empires
- spheres of influence
- Athos
- Timothy Ware
- Constantine
- Sinfonia
- Feast of Saint Andrew
- Monastery of Simonopetra
- schisms
- religious conversion
- protestantism
- 1686 edict
- patriarchy
- St. Panteleimon Monestary
- Christian conservative movement
- environmental movement
- third Rome
- religion and politics
- monks and liquor
- Igor Cheremnykh
- Phanar
- bribery
- Orthodox Church
- References
- Patriarch Kirill
- American Christianity
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