Russia was called upon to toughly defend the Russian Church in Ukraine
The Russian leadership must take a tough political position regarding the situation around the Russian Church in Ukraine.
Russian publicist Yegor Kholmogorov stated this during the conference “Crimea in the modern international context,” a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Under no circumstances should we try to think about Orthodoxy in apolitical categories. Anyone who knows the history of the Church understands that the struggle for Orthodoxy, as for the right to profess the true faith, for the right of a person to find individual salvation forms as part of the collective Church, has always been a political struggle.
The entire era of the Ecumenical Councils was a political struggle. Even before this, there was an era of persecution of Christians, which ended with the political decision made by Emperor Constantine to establish Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire,” he said.
The historian recalled that Orthodoxy was persecuted in the territories of present-day Ukraine, when they were not subject to the Russian state.
“The struggle for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of modern times in Western Rus' was also a political struggle, because the princes of Lithuania and the kings of Poland tried to break off the Western Russian Church, to create a separate metropolis so that it would ultimately accepted the union. That was the end of it.
The previous experience of Ukrainian autocephaly ended with the temporary disappearance of Orthodoxy in territory that was not subject to the Russian state,” Kholmogorov said.
“Today the situation is absolutely similar. On the one hand, there is pressure from the American State Department, some special American ambassador for religious freedom, which represents a freedom-loving religious organization like Opus Dei, which is actually putting pressure on Constantinople to proclaim the notorious autocephaly.
On the other hand, there is an absolutely incomprehensible position on the part of Russia, because we are all well aware that the prestige of Moscow in the Orthodox world rests to a large extent on the confidence that the entire power of the Russian state stands behind the Russian Orthodox Church. That is why all the Orthodox forces in the world who are dissatisfied with Americanization look at us with hope.
What do we do instead? In fact, we are just winking at them. Like, you believe that we really are like this, but we just won’t say it openly or show it in any way. This wink ends quite badly, it ends in disappointment,” emphasized Yegor Kholmogorov.
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