The Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch has urged the Russian Orthodox Church to accept the loss of its authority over the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, after signing an accord with Ukraine’s head of state.
“The Ecumenical Patriarchate weakened itself by freeing people in the Balkans and recognising their right to self-government,” Patriarch Bartholomew said in Istanbul on Monday.
“By the same token, Moscow should recognise that the 50 million people of Ukraine, who were under its jurisdiction and management for centuries, now also have a right to independence and church autocephaly.”
The Patriarch was speaking after talks on Saturday in Istanbul with President Petro Poroshenko, when an agreement was signed establishing the conditions for a united Ukrainian Church under its own Patriarch in Kiev.
Meanwhile, an Ecumenical Patriarchate official, Archbishop Job of Telmessos, reiterated that Ukrainians wishing to remain “in unity with the Russian Church” would have an opportunity to do so, but all Orthodox hierarchs in Ukraine would be subject to Constantinople following the cancellation of Moscow’s jurisdiction, and would have “to await a directive on their future functions”.
The Russian Orthodox Church’s foreign relations director, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, rejected this. He said the role of the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a “co-ordinating centre with the consent of local churches” had been destroyed by Bartholomew’s “purely political decisions”.
“Having embarked on a path of schism, the Patriarch of Constantinople has now taken another step towards opposing the Orthodox Church’s fullness,” Hilarion said in a website statement on Saturday. “Bartholomew voices a new model of church structure, previously unknown to Orthodoxy, by which one primate becomes superior and makes sole decisions, while others obey silently, bowing their heads in sacred trembling”.
The Russian Orthodox Church severed ties with the Ecumenical Patriarchate in retaliation for Bartholomew’s decree of 11 October. This abrogated a 1686 ordinance vesting jurisdiction over the Church in Ukraine with the Moscow Patriarchate, and recognised the country’s two breakaway Orthodox communities. Speaking in Kiev on Monday, the chairman of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrei Paruby, said he now expected a unification council to proclaim the Church’s independence before the end of November.
In his first direct comment on the dispute, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the “common duty” of Russians was to “preserve spiritual and historical unity”. He said “political manoeuvrering” around church loyalties would have “serious consequences”. Moscow Patriarch Kirill has insisted plans for a self-governing Ukrainian Church were “doomed to fail”. Metropolitan Hilarion last week praised the “very balanced position” adopted by the Pope during the intra-Orthodox conflict.
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