While the leaders of Russia and Georgia exchange recriminations, Christians in the two nations are worrying about the damage that the bitter conflict has inflicted on the cherished unity of the Orthodox Church.
More than 100 million Russians affirm the Orthodox faith, making up the largest Orthodox Church in Christendom. The post-Soviet Russian government has re-embraced Orthodoxy as the national faith.
Moscow has used the religion to rally support on a range of issues — for Serbia, for instance, when it was being bombed by NATO in 1999, and in pressing Russia’s grievances against Ukraine, which includes parts dominated by Eastern Rite Catholics loyal to Rome and long at loggerheads with the Orthodox Church.
Georgia is equally identified with its Orthodox Church. But the supposedly unthinkable prospect of two Orthodox nations at war with each other failed to deter either Russia or Georgia from armed conflict last month.
The two churches expressed dismay. The patriarchs of both the Russian and Georgian Orthodox Churches issued immediate appeals for peace. The strong urgings were all the more striking for the Russian patriarch, Aleksy II, who rarely differs publicly with the Kremlin.
“Today, blood is being shed and people are perishing in South Ossetia, and my heart deeply grieves over it,” Patriarch Aleksy said in a statement on Aug. 8 as the fighting raged. “Orthodox Christians are among those who have raised their hands against each other. Orthodox peoples called by the Lord to live in fraternity and love are in conflict.”
Two days later, in a sermon in Tbilisi, Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church said that “one thing concerns us very deeply — that Orthodox Russians are bombing Orthodox Georgians.”
The church’s Web site said that he added: “This is an unprecedented act of relations between our countries. Reinforce your prayer and God will save Georgia.”
The ties between the Orthodox churches did prove strong enough to offer some relief to civilians swept up in the conflict. Bringing food and aid, the Georgian patriarch made a pastoral visit to Gori, a central Georgian city, while it was occupied by Russian forces.
According to Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department of external church relations, the Russian church facilitated the visit. He said the Moscow patriarchate also conveyed letters of appeal from Patriarch Ilia of Georgia to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Like other Russian politicians, the two leaders have in public made much of their Orthodox faith.
In his appeal, Patriarch Ilia said he was appalled that “Russian air forces have been bombing Georgian cities and villages, Orthodox Christians have been killing each other!” On his patriarchate’s Web site, he expressed sorrow at Georgian and Ossetian deaths and rejected as “a pure lie” Russia’s accusations that Georgia had committed genocide.
The Russian conflict with Georgia is the first fighting between nations peopled by a majority of Orthodox Christians and not under Communist rule since the Second Balkan War in 1913 pitted Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Romania against Bulgaria in a prelude to World War I.
Priests and others close to the Orthodox churches have lamented that while religion has recovered its stature in post-Soviet society, appeals to prayer could not prevent bloodshed between Orthodox peoples who share centuries of cultural, political and economic ties.
Anatoly Krasikov, director of the Center for Religious and Social Studies of the Institute of Europe in Moscow, said the fighting had punctured two myths: “The myth of unity of Orthodox peoples” and “the myth of the supreme peacemaking ability of Orthodox civilization.”
“Of course it is not Orthodoxy that is to blame for this collapse, but concrete people, functionaries of the church administrative structures of Russian and Georgian Orthodoxy,” he said.
For all practical purposes, they remained aloof, he said, and “did nothing to end a war that was unjust from all sides.”
The Russian Public Opinion Research Center found in a poll last year that about 75 percent of Russia’s 141 million people affirm the Orthodox faith, though only 10 percent say they are regular churchgoers. In the Orthodox world, the Moscow Patriarchate is a rival of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which serves a much smaller flock but is much older and regarded by many outside Russia to be symbolically more important.
Georgia has a population of fewer than 5 million, but it is one of the most ancient Christian countries. Its church dates from the 4th century, much older than the Russian church, whose roots go back only to the Baptism of Rus in 988, when Prince Vladimir of Kiev brought Orthodoxy to the banks of the Dnieper River.
In his statement on the conflict in South Ossetia, US Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, praised Georgia as “one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion.”
The history of the two churches is long and intertwined. In 1801 Russia annexed Georgia, then seeking protection from Persia, and absorbed its church. It abolished the Georgian patriarchate, which was restored, at least nominally, after the Bolsheviks came to power.
From czarist times through the Soviet era, Georgian clergy trained in Russia and Kiev. In Soviet times, Georgia became a refuge for Orthodox monks persecuted in Russia, said Nikolai Mitrokhin, a specialist on the Orthodox Church in the former Soviet Union.
“For Georgia, Russia is this love-hate relationship,” said Tamara Grdzelidze, a Georgian theologian, trained at Oxford, who now works at the World Council of Churches headquarters in Geneva and edited an English-language history of the Orthodox Church of Georgia.
The latest conflict has stirred ambivalent memories on both sides, she said.
“Our patriarch was educated in Russia, and this is the best he knows and he respects it highly,” she said.
“When Russia annexed Georgia in the beginning of the 19th century, it abolished the king, it abolished the patriarch in 1811, it persecuted the Georgian language at all levels, including the church,” she said.
Whatever the tugs of unity, the two churches have tended to side with their national governments.
Last week, Patriarch Ilia appealed unsuccessfully to Medvedev and Putin to refrain from recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.
“This will give rise to separatism in your country, and in the future you will have many more problems than we have in Georgia today,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. “This is worth meditating upon.”
The Russian church was tepid about Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
“The Moscow Patriarchate must take political realities into account,” said the Reverend Nikolai Balashov, the church’s secretary for inter-Orthodox relations.
But in resolving canonical jurisdiction over the two disputed territories, he said that “dialogue with the Georgian church” was more important. The Orthodox congregations in those territories would not necessarily come under Moscow’s jurisdiction, he said.
“This is an especially painful situation for us because four Orthodox peoples are in conflict,” said Deacon Andrei Kuraev, an outspoken Russian Orthodox missionary noted for his Web site, his books and his sermons at rock concerts by bands that have embraced Orthodoxy.
He said that Orthodox segments of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s populations did not wish to be under the Orthodox Church in Georgia.
Mitrokhin said that while the Russian church was imperial at heart, it had little to gain in the current conflict.
“It is the first time in a couple of decades that the foreign policy interests of the Russian Orthodox Church diverged with those of the state,” he said.
Grdzelidze predicted that Moscow would inevitably dominate.
“They use all means, and the church is one of the means,” she said. “They did it before in history. They will do it again. I have no doubt about it.”
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