Honourable Archpastors and Pastors, Dear Brothers and Sisters, Children of the Church:
+KIRILL,
His Holiness Patriarch Kirill. His Holiness Patriarch Kirill Appeals to the Entirety of the Russian Orthodox Church on Current Events in Ukraine / OrthoChristian.Com
There are three points to mark in Patriarch Kirill's appeal:
- He speaks of Kiev (the Church Slavonic name for the city, the same as in modern Russian; the Ukrainian name is Kyiv) as the birthplace of an Orthodox civilisation. But when Prince Volodymyr the Great was baptised in 988 there was no "Orthodox Church" - East and West were one and that part of it which evangelised what is now Ukraine, coming from the imperial centre at Constantinople, followed the Byzantine rite. Union between Eastern Byzantines and Western Latins, although intermittent, has been a factor in the Church's history in the region throughout its history, and the present day Catholic Byzantine Churches of Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, and elsewhere, are the heir and manifestation of that reality. They are as much a part of the original Christian civilisation derived from the "Baptism of Kievan Rus" as the Russian Orthodox Church which, rebased from Kiev in Moscow, subsequently claimed its independence of Constantinople as an autocephalous in 1589. Peter the Great abolished the Patriarchate in 1721, it was no revived until after the Russian Revolution and did not regain its independence from state control until the 1990s. The claim of the Russian Church and the Moscow Patriarchate to lead and preside over all the other heirs of Kievan Rus has no basis in realities much beyond 20 years ago
- He speaks of "a great civilisation which united the people of Holy Rus". Rus is a word that gives us Ruthenian, Belorussian and Rusyn as well as Russian. It is like saying "Germanic", or "Nordic" or "Romance" - there are common bonds of history, society and religion, and there are political , cultural and linguistic relations. But there are differences and separate identities and languages too. They can be harmonious and communicate with one another; but they are not to be rolled up into one. The region has never been one other than by force of arms - notably Russian Imperial and then Soviet; and likewise force of arms have torn it in different directions - Austrian, Polish, Lithuanian, Ottoman. Memories between closely related people run deep and stay alive. It is well said that good fences make good neighbours; hence the modern development of defined borders between sovereign nation states. While Patriarch Kirill speaks of unity in the Orthodox Christian faith within the Russian Orthodox Church whose presence lies across the region in numerous countries once belonging to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, it could be said that lesser men than he use the term "Holy Rus" to justify not a spiritual communion but a political entity, led by the Russian state centred in Moscow to which Belarus, Ukraine (included Kiev) would be tributary as in the past and satellite countries like Georgia, Moldova and the Baltic nations would be buffer states. It is important to recall that a month ago the Moscow-aligned Yanukovych regime in Kiev threatened the dissolution of the Ukrainian Catholic Church - as happened the last time Ukraine was subject to Russia and all its assets, goods and people forcibly aggregated to the Moscow patriarchate. The latter said in 2013 that it has no objection to the Ukrainian Catholic Church now - as long as it confines its operation to the West of Ukraine. By the same token, the Russian Church does not confine its activities either to the East of Ukraine - said to represent almost half its strength overall - or indeed within the boundaries of the Russian Federation. Yet, ominously, in 2014, officials of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Putin government have both blamed the protests throughout Ukraine (which are less to do with East-West struggles than with a young population, Russian and Ukrainian alike, resisting corruption and oppression by a government that has in the end turned armed force upon its people) on certain far right clergy in Western Ukraine (ie Catholic priests). Thus the Russian state perpetuates the libel that Western Ukraine's Byzantine Catholic Church, and the nation that resists rule by foreigners, is an agent of "fascism", its code for the godless evil of national socialism.
- His Holiness says that "our entire multi-national Church fervently prays for peace in the Ukrainian land". He also refers to his Church as a "local Orthodox Church" and calls to "the pastors and flock of the Russian Orthodox Church". Which is it - a Church for Russians, the Orthodox Church local to the Russian Federation, or a Church across boundaries of nation, ethnicity, land or nation, running across the world and run from Moscow and Russia?
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