The Russian Orthodox Leader at the Core of Putin’s Ambitions

[(David P.)]

The Russian Orthodox Leader at the Core of Putin’s Ambitions
By Jason Horowitz, May 21, 2022, NY Times

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolded, Patriarch Kirill I,
the leader of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, had
an awkward Zoom meeting with Pope Francis. The two religious
leaders had previously worked together to bridge a 1,000-year-old
schism between the Christian churches of the East and West. But
the meeting, in March, found them on opposing sides of a chasm.
Kirill spent 20 minutes reading prepared remarks, echoing the
arguments of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that the war
in Ukraine was necessary to purge Nazis and oppose NATO expansion.
Francis was evidently flummoxed. “Brother, we are not clerics of
the state,” the pontiff told Kirill, he later recounted to the
Corriere della Sera newspaper, adding that “the patriarch cannot
transform himself into Putin’s altar boy.”

Today, Kirill stands apart not merely from Francis, but from
much of the world. The leader of about 100 million faithful,
Kirill, 75, has staked the fortunes of his branch of Orthodox
Christianity on a close and mutually beneficial alliance with
Putin, offering him spiritual cover while his church — and possibly
he himself — receives vast resources in return from the Kremlin,
allowing him to extend his influence in the Orthodox world.
To his critics, the arrangement has made Kirill far more than
another apparatchik, oligarch or enabler of Putin, but an
essential part of the nationalist ideology at the heart of the
Kremlin’s expansionist designs.

Kirill has called Putin’s long tenure “a miracle of God,” and
has characterized the war as a just defense against liberal
conspiracies to infiltrate Ukraine with “gay parades.”
“All of our people today must wake up — wake up — understand
that a special time has come on which the historical fate of
our people may depend,” he said in one April sermon. “We have
been raised throughout our history to love our fatherland, and
we will be ready to protect it, as only Russians can defend
their country,” he said to soldiers in another.

Kirill’s role is so important that European officials have
included him on a list of individuals they plan to target in
an upcoming — and still in flux — round of sanctions against
Russia, according to people who have seen the list. Such a
censure would be an extraordinary measure against a religious
leader, its closest antecedent perhaps being the sanctions the
United States leveled against Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei. For more than a decade, Kirill’s critics have
argued that his formative experience of religious repression
during the Soviet era had tragically led him into Putin’s
empowering and ultimately inescapable embrace, turning the
Russian Orthodox Church under Kirill’s leadership into a
corrupted spiritual branch of an authoritarian state.

Sanctions, while likely to be seen within Russia and its
church as merely further evidence of hostility from the
Godless West, have the potential to place a finger on the
scale of the shifting balance of power within the often
bitterly divided Orthodox Church. “This is new,” said Enzo
Bianchi, a Catholic lay monk who first met Kirill in the late
70s at conferences he organized to promote reconciliation
with the Orthodox Church. Bianchi worried that imposing
sanctions on a religious leader could set a dangerous precedent
for “political interference in the church.” Still, he considered
Kirill’s alliance with Putin disastrous. All of which has
raised the question of why Kirill has so thoroughly aligned
himself with Russia’s dictator. Part of the answer, close
observers and those who have known Kirill say, has to do with
Putin’s success in bringing the patriarch to heel, as he has
other important players in the Russian power structure. But
it also stems from Kirill’s own ambitions.

Kirill has in recent years aspired to expand his church’s
influence, pursuing an ideology consistent with Moscow being
a “Third Rome,” a reference to a 15th-century idea of Manifest
Destiny for the Orthodox Church, in which Mr. Putin’s Russia
would become the spiritual center of the true church after Rome
and Constantinople. It is a grand project that dovetails neatly
with — and inspired — Putin’s mystically tinged imperialism of
a “Russkiy Mir,” or a greater Russian world.

“He managed to sell the concept of traditional values, the
concept of Russkiy Mir, to Putin, who was looking for conservative
ideology,” said Sergei Chapnin, a senior fellow in Orthodox
Christian studies at Fordham University who worked with Kirill
in the Moscow Patriarchate.

Born Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev at the end of World War II,
Kirill grew up, like Putin, in a small St. Petersburg apartment
during the Soviet era. But while Putin has painted himself as a
brawling urchin, Kirill came from a line of churchmen, including
a grandfather who suffered in the gulags for his faith. “When he
returned, he told me: ‘Don’t be afraid of anything but God,’”
Kirill once said on Russian state television. Like practically
all elite Russian clerics of the era, Kirill is believed to have
collaborated with the K.G.B., where Putin learned his early trade.
Kirill quickly became someone to watch in Russian Orthodox circles,
representing the church in 1971 at the World Council of Churches
in Geneva, which allowed him to reach out to Western clerics from
other Christian denominations. “He was always open to dialogue,”
said Bianchi, who remembered Kirill as a thin monk attending his conferences.

Traditionalists were initially wary of Kirill’s reformist style — he
held megachurch-like events in stadiums and amplified his message,
and popularity, on a weekly television show, starting in 1994.
But there were also early signs of a deep conservatism. Kirill was
at times appalled by Protestant efforts to admit women to the
priesthood and by what he depicted as the West’s use of human
rights to “dictatorially” force gay rights and other anti-Christian
values on traditional societies.

In 2000, the year Putin took power in Moscow, Kirill published a
mostly overlooked article calling the promotion of traditional
Christian values in the face of liberalism “a matter of preservation
of our national civilization.” In Dec. 2008, after his predecessor
Aleksy II died, Kirill spent two months touring — critics say
campaigning — in the Russian monasteries that kept the flame of
conservative doctrine. It worked, and in 2009, he inherited a
church in the middle of a post-Soviet reawakening.

Kirill gave a major speech calling for a “Symphonia” approach to
church and state divisions, with the Kremlin looking after earthly
concerns and the church interested in the divine. At the end of
2011, he lent his voice to criticism against fraudulent parliamentary
elections by defending the “lawful negative reaction” to corruption
and said that it would be “a very bad sign” if the Kremlin did not
pay attention. Soon afterward, reports of luxurious apartments
owned by Kirill and his family surfaced in the Russian media.
Other unconfirmed rumors of billions of dollars in secret bank
accounts, Swiss chalets and yachts began to swirl. A news website
dug up a photograph from 2009 in which Kirill wore a Breguet Réveil
du Tsar model watch, worth about $30,000, a marker of membership to
the Russian elite. After his church sought to airbrush the timepiece
out of existence, and Kirill denied ever wearing it, its remaining
reflection on a polished table prompted an embarrassing apology
from the church. The Rev. Cyril Hovorun, an Orthodox priest who was
a personal assistant to Kirill for a decade, said the tarnishing of
the patriarch’s reputation was interpreted by Kirill as a message
from the Kremlin not to cross the state.

Kirill drastically changed direction, giving full support and
ideological shape to Moscow’s ambitions. “He realized that this
is a chance for the church to step in and to provide the Kremlin
with ideas,” said Father Hovorun, who resigned in protest at that
time. “The Kremlin suddenly adopted the language of Kirill, of the
church, and began speaking about traditional values” and how
“Russian society needs to rise again to grandeur.”

Father Hovorun, now a professor of ecclesiology, international
relations and ecumenism at University College Stockholm, said
Kirill took Putin’s talk of being a believer with a grain of salt.
“For him, the collaboration with the Kremlin is a way to protect
some kind of freedom of the church,” he said. “Ironically, however,
it seems that under his tenure as the patriarch, the church ended
up in a situation of captivity.” Steadily, the line between
church and state blurred.

In 2012, when members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot staged
a “Punk Prayer” in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral to protest
the entanglement of Putin and Kirill, Kirill seemed to take the
lead in pushing for the group’s jailing. He also explicitly
supported Putin’s presidential bid. His church reaped tens of
millions of dollars to reconstruct churches and state financing
for religious schools. The St. Basil the Great Foundation of
Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian Orthodox oligarch close to Putin,
paid for the renovation of the Moscow headquarters of the church’s
department of external church relations, which Kirill used to run.

Kirill raised taxes significantly, and with no transparency, on
his own churches, while his own personal assets remained classified.
Chapnin, who had been personally appointed by Kirill to run the
church’s official journal, began criticizing him & was fired in 2015.
Like Putin’s Kremlin, Kirill’s church flexed its muscles abroad,
lavishing funds on the Orthodox Patriarchates of Jerusalem and
Antioch, based in Syria. Those investments have paid off. This
month, the Antioch Patriarchate publicly opposed sanctions against
Kirill, giving a predicate to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary,
arguably the closest European leader to Putin, to this week vow that
he would block any sanctions against Kirill. But for Kirill,
Moscow’s status in the Orthodox world is perhaps of primary importance.

The Great Schism of 1054 split Christianity between the Western
church, loyal to the pope in Rome, and the Eastern church in
Constantinople. In the ensuing centuries, the Constantinople
patriarch, with his seat in present-day Istanbul, maintained a
first among equals status among Eastern Orthodox churches, but
others became influential, including Moscow. Moscow’s invasion
of eastern Ukraine in 2014 led the already unhappy Ukrainian
Orthodox Church to break from centuries of jurisdiction under
Moscow, costing it about a third of its parishes. Recognition of
the Ukrainian church by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constanti-
nople fueled tensions between Moscow and Constantinople. The
internal church war has also spilled into the military one, with
Moscow using the protection of the Orthodox faithful in Ukraine
who remain loyal to Kirill as part of the pretext for invasion.

Putin’s war and Kirill’s support for it now appear to have
diminished their shared grand project. Hundreds of priests in
Ukraine have accused Kirill of “heresy.” The threat of European
Union sanctions looms. Reconciliation with the Western church is
off the table. Yet Kirill has not wavered, calling for public
support of the war so that Russia can “repel its enemies, both
external and internal.” And he smiled broadly with other loyalists
in Putin’s inner circle on May 9 during the Victory Day parade in
Moscow. Some say he has no choice if he wants to survive.
“It’s a kind of mafia concept,” Mr. Chapnin said. “If you’re in,
you’re in. You can’t get out.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/21/world/europe/kirill-putin-russian-orthodox-church.html