Putin and politics loom over the Pope and the Patriarch
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Pope Francis and Patriarch Kiril exchange a document on religious unity in Havana on Friday. It is the first meeting between a pope and a Russian patriarch
As the heads of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches met on Friday for the first ever such meeting, their aides aimed to keep things simple. “We don’t want this to become a big political show,” said Father Alexander Volkov, spokesman for the Moscow patriarchate.
And yet when Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill retreated into a room at Havana’s José Martí International airport in a renewed attempt to mend a troubled relationship that has split Christianity for almost a millennium, they had another man to thank, and a politician at that: Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Alexander Andreev, Russia’s ambassador to the Vatican, told Russian newspaper Kommersant that “personal contacts between the pontiff and [President] Putin and their mutual affection” had played a role in making the meeting happen.
The Kremlin said the meeting could have broader geopolitical benefits. Mr Putin’s spokesman described the event as “a mutual step to meet each other halfway” by Russia and an estranged west.
At the meeting brokered by President Raúl Castro, the two church leaders signed a joint declaration appealing for an end to “violence and terrorism” in Syria and Iraq, as well as “large-scale humanitarian aid” for afflicted populations and refugees.
The leaders also appealed “for the return of peace in the Middle East” and an end to persecution of Christians there.
“We deplore the hostility in Ukraine . . . we invite all parts involved in the conflict . . . to action aimed at constructing peace,” they added.
The men – the Pope in white robes and the Patriarch in black — agreed in their statement to “undertake all that is necessary to overcome the historical divergences we have inherited” and described themselves as “not competitors but brothers”.
Areas they agreed on included condemnation of the “unrelenting consumerism” of some developed countries, concern for the status of the family, which they said was “based on marriage . . . between a man and a woman” and the “inalienable right to life”.
This mixing of church and state is part of Mr Putin’s long cultivation of the Orthodox church, during which it has experienced a dramatic resurgence among Russians.
The president’s promotion of the church is arguably one reason why a large majority of Russians continue to see him as a worthy leader. Since he first became president in 2000, he has celebrated Orthodox Christianity as an important ingredient in Russian national identity and in his own hybrid political persona.
Surprisingly for a former chief of the KGB — the secret service responsible for organising much of the Soviet-era repression of the church — Mr Putin has cast himself as a believer. In January, he attended an Orthodox Christmas service, as he does every year, this time at a church north of Moscow where his parents had been baptised. He has repeatedly charmed Russians with the tale of how his devout mother had him secretly baptised against the will of his communist father.
In foreign policy, a demonstration of his faith helped break the ice with George W Bush, US president, in 2001. Mr Putin told Mr Bush that a cross his mother had given him had been rescued from a fire at his dacha — a story that prompted the US president to say he had got a “sense of his soul”.
The church itself has benefited from the president’s attention. According to Patriarch Kirill it is opening close to 1,000 churches a year on average — a development for which Mr Putin often takes personal credit.
Conservative Orthodox circles have gained access to the president’s inner circle through Vladimir Yakunin, a fellow former security services official and now a religious adherent, who headed stated-owned Russian Railways until late last year.
Since 2012, when Mr Putin began his third presidential term, the Kremlin has aggressively pushed an agenda of conservative social values close to the church leadership’s heart, such as curbing sexual minorities’ rights and censoring the arts.
A year ago, a production of the Wagner opera Tannhäuser in Novosibirsk was closed down after the church said it was blasphemous. Members of Pussy Riot, a feminist protest group, were sentenced to two years in a labour camp for staging a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Christ The Saviour cathedral. They appealed to the mother of god to rid Russia of Mr Putin.
In contrast, Dmitry Tsorionov, a rightwing Orthodox activist, served just 10 days in prison after smashing artworks he claimed were mocking Jesus at an exhibition in Moscow last year.
The Patriarch and President have repeatedly emphasised their esteem for each other in ways hard to imagine the Pope and a western leader doing. In 2012, Patriarch Kirill said Russia had managed to escape the upheaval of the 1990s “through a miracle of God, with the active participation of the country’s leadership”. He told Mr Putin: “You personally played a massive role in correcting this twist in our history.”
A year later, Mr Putin praised the Russian Orthodox church as having “been with its people throughout its entire history [and having] strengthened the moral foundations of our social life and our entire national statehood”.
Yet the symbiosis between Mr Putin and the church is no more than skin-deep.
In the Ukraine conflict their interests have diverged. While Moscow-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine have links to prominent Orthodox figures such as the investor Konstantin Malofeev, the official church has adopted a low profile. People close to Patriarch Kirill say Moscow’s role in the conflict has made it more difficult to resolve a dispute with Greek Catholics in Ukraine and has driven Ukrainian Orthodox believers away from the Russian church.
Some in the church also feel that by presenting his country as a defender of traditional values in contrast with a degenerate, weak and amoral Europe, Mr Putin has abused concepts promoted by the church to fan artificial hostility between Russia and the west.
“We do think that there is a crisis of morals in Europe, but that includes Russia,” said a person familiar with the patriarch’s thinking. “Europe has problems with drugs and abortion but so do we, and this is one of the issues we should be exploring together with the Roman Catholic church.”
Mr Putin sees the church as a servant of the Russian state and civilisation rather than a power in its own right. He has described the church’s mission as bringing together peoples and nations to unite the “Russian world” — a cross-border community linked by ethnicity, language or culture — and to bolster the Russian people’s spiritual strength.
Despite the church’s rapid revival, this limited role seems to chime with the beliefs of the Russian public. Although the proportion of Russians who identify themselves in polls as Orthodox Christians has more than doubled to 70 per cent under Mr Putin, only 50 per cent say they believe in God and the percentage of regular churchgoers is only a fraction of that. Since the Russian government introduced a choice between religious or secular ethics lessons in the schools in 2012, a majority of parents have opted for the latter.
For many, this weekend’s meeting is also more about Russian pride than religion. “Under our president, we are able to stand tall again,” says Andrei Sarnychev, a father of two in Moscow. “Our church has been a force for good throughout history, and it is time that it becomes more visible too.”
Additional reporting by Jude Webber in Mexico City
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016.
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