Crucea.ro

Un articol recent publicat in gazeta The Economist (cu supratitlul The future of Russia’s resurgent faith) sugereaza, desi e clar ca publicatia nu are nici un fel de reper duhovnicesc  din spectrul acceptabil pentru un ortodox, ca Biserica Rusa va abandona calea de mijloc. Articolul, care descrie fara s-o numeasca obirsia KGB-ista a fostului patriarh rus, aminteste cinic un episod “tipic pentru calea de mijloc a lui Alexei”, anume:

“reactia sa la inmormintarea in 1998 a oaselor (ramasitelor) pe care guvernul, dupa teste DNA, le-a prezentat ca apartinind familiei regale ucise. Conservatorii bisericii au spus ca oasele nu sint ale Romanovilor, dar Boris Yeltsin voia o (astfel de) inmormintare. Alexei a refuzat sa se pronunte in legatura cu identitatea ramasitelor dar, oricum,  a fost de acord cu inmormintarea lor.”

Oricum, mi se pare limpede ca interesele publicatiei anticipeaza de pe pozitii bancar-apusene viitoarele episoade ale noului razboi rece pe care il insinueaza in acest articol. Pastrez aceasta “analiza” ca pe un exemplu tipic de manipulare prin presa.

Russian Orthodoxy
Farewell, middle roads

Dec 11th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Russia’s next patriarch may be harder-line than Alexy II

LIKE most Orthodox Christian rites, the funeral of Patriarch Alexy II on December 9th was a mix of choreography and spontaneity. Massed choirs and sad dignitaries, including Russia’s political leaders, packed the incense-laden interior of Moscow’s cathedral of Christ the Saviour: not the loveliest but perhaps the best-known of the 20,000 or so Russian Orthodox churches to be built or rebuilt on the patriarch’s 18-year watch. For all the formality, there was nothing scripted about the way Alexy’s fellow bishops took turns to lean over his open coffin and sob as they bade farewell. In the Russian Orthodox world, many will miss the prelate who oversaw the church’s revival after acting, in his early life, as a loyal servant of the Soviet state.

But people outside that world may ask—miss him for what? By no Western standards could the patriarch be described as an enlightened or reformist figure. Westerners who welcomed the restoration of religious freedom in post-Soviet Russia were often dismayed by the cosy relations that Alexy’s church enjoyed with the Kremlin. They winced when he disciplined or defrocked liberal Russian priests; they were disappointed by the church’s support for a 1997 law that curbed the activities of “non-traditional” faiths—like non-Orthodox forms of Christianity.
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Inside the church, things looked rather different. On the church’s ultra-conservative fringe, Alexy was excoriated for being too pro-Western. An emollient speech that he made to New York rabbis in 1991—stressing the common past of Christians and Jews—was held against him by zealots. When he merely disciplined liberal priests, the hardline camp said that he should have excommunicated them. Typical of Alexy’s “middle road” was his reaction to the burial in 1998 of bones that the government, after DNA tests, deemed to be those of the slain royal family. Ecclesiastical hardliners said the bones were not those of the Romanovs, but Boris Yeltsin wanted a funeral. Alexy declined to pronounce on the bones’ identity but agreed to their burial anyway.

What lies ahead for the Russian church, which has seen a surge in its visible strength—at the price, some say, of forfeiting all ability to speak truth to power? In late January bishops from Russia, Ukraine and the Slavic diaspora will meet to elect a new patriarch. The ostensible favourite is the current locum tenens, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk, a tough and sophisticated practitioner of geopolitics as well as politics of the ecclesiastical sort. He has fought Moscow’s corner in a contest with the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarchate for sway over eastern Christianity. (Curiously, Britain is one of the arenas where that competition is going on. An English court is due to rule next year in a dispute over the assets of a diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, whose acting leader, Bishop Basil Osborne, left Moscow’s jurisdiction for Istanbul’s in 2006, along with a group of priests and faithful. The bishop has said he wishes that the matter could be solved by negotiation or arbitration.)

Other bishops in the running to take over from Alexy include two senior insiders: Kliment, seen as a cautious conservative, and Juvenaly, a veteran of the Soviet era who has epitomised the enigmas of Orthodoxy by seeming to be a loyal son of the state, while acting in private to protect the church’s liberals. People make similar claims of Metropolitan Filaret, head of the church in Belarus. And some say of the patriarchate the same thing that Kremlinologists often say of Russia: the next leader could be a dark horse, so conservative that today’s players will seem like bleeding-heart softies.

Gheorghe Vanau