Moscow, Kiev in tug-of-war over religious future of Ukraine

Houston Chronicle ^ | August 27, 2018 | Raphael Satter

[CondoleezzaProtege]

As Kiev and Moscow clash on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, a new front has opened up in the religious sphere.

...A campaign to persuade Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I to grant Ukrainian clerics full ecclesiastical independence from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Ukrainian politicians see such a declaration, known as a "Tomos of Autocephaly," as a key step in consolidating their country's national identity.

To hear the religious leaders in Moscow tell it, separating the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russia would spark the worst schism since Orthodox and Catholic Christianity parted ways nearly 1,000 years ago.

More immediately, the move would dramatically shrink the size and influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Even though Ukraine's population is several times smaller than that of its large Slavic neighbor, it is widely considered the more observant of the two and accounts for something like a third of the Russian Orthodox Church's approximately 35,000 parishes.

Perhaps just as important, the Russian Orthodox Church would lose its link to centuries' worth of tradition tied up in Ukraine's shrines and monasteries — a heavy symbolic blow.

"When a new state appears, when it becomes stable, it's a normal procedure for the Orthodox church believers to separate their church from the others," said Ukrainian historian Kyrylo Halushko. "This happened a few times in the 20th century: in Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, etc. So it's a very logical step for independence to be given to Ukrainian Orthodox Church."

It may be logical, but it's not simple.

It's in the midst of this religious tussle that The Associated Press has discovered a Russian digital espionage campaign targeting Bartholomew's top aides.

[DuncanWaring]

Ping.

[vladimir998]

Long overdue.