Archpriest Andrei Tkachev (MP) mocking quarantine protection measures.
The pandemic now ravaging the Orthodox Church is
not only COVID-19 but also fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a sort of populism
for the church. It is based on post-truth and conspiracy theories. Although it
pretends to be pietistic, it is quite secular and secularizing. I would apply
to fundamentalism the phrase once coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “cheap grace.”
Fundamentalism is a cheap spirituality and a cheap substitute for genuine
ecclesial existence.
The circumstances of the COVID 19 epidemic
demonstrate that fundamentalism not only corrupts minds and muddies faith, but
can also kill bodies. It is time to treat it as a virus--one which can be more
dangerous than SARS-CoV-2.
Fundamentalism is like dry grass through which
the coronavirus is spreading in the Churches like wildfire. As a result, the
hotbeds of fundamentalism have turned into the hotspots of the deadly disease.
This can be observed not only in the Orthodox Church, but also in other
religions and confessions. However, the Orthodox Church features some specific
forms of corona-fundamentalism, which I will explore in what follows.
The alarm sounded when many or most of the monks
and nuns in conservative monastic communities in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus
tested positive for COVID-19; many were hospitalized, and some died. Such
monasteries as the Caves and St Iona in Kyiv, St Sergius near Moscow, Diveevo
near Nizhny Novgorod in Russia, St Elizabeth in Belarus (and others) became
hotspots of the epidemic. Some of them, such as the Lavra of Pochaiv in western
Ukraine, caused entire towns to be locked down as pilgrims who had visited the
monasteries spread the virus further. Outbreaks of the disease in the
monasteries do not mean that all monks and nuns there are fundamentalists. Many
of them are good Christians who care about others and whose spirituality cannot
be called cheap. Nevertheless, they become infected from their less wise
brothers and sisters. Tragically, quite a few seminarians were forced to stay
in those monasteries to help with singing and hierarchal services, and now they
are ill. They fell victim to unhealthy ideas of fundamentalists and to the
carelessness of the seminaries’ leaders.
It is not a secret that fundamentalism, a minor
movement in global Orthodoxy, has been gradually gaining ground in the majority
of the local Churches in recent years. It’s presence, for example, became a
reason or an excuse for some Churches not to show up at the Panorthodox Council
in Crete in 2016. Some churches--the Ecumenical Patriarchate, for instance--try
to resist it. Some gradually yield to it. And some, such as the Russian Orthodox
Church, venture to use it for their own purposes.
The Church leadership in Moscow is far from
being fundamentalist. However, it early realized the promising potential of
using fundamentalism to mobilize both individuals and the masses for its
causes. For instance, after the death of Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv, the
new Metropolitan Onufry clearly demonstrated signs of fundamentalism. Moscow
used his sincere fundamentalist sympathies to tie him closer to Moscow and made
him a battering ram against initiatives of other Churches. He was one of the
most outspoken hierarchs of the Russian Church against the Panorthodox Council.
The leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate, in cooperation with the Kremlin,
utilized fundamentalism to mobilize mass support for the Russian military
campaigns against Ukraine. Some ideologists of Russian aggression and many
Russian fighters in Ukraine are typical religious fundamentalists. After the
Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine,
fundamentalism became the last resort of resistance to this autocephaly. When
other arguments against the autocephaly, both theological and canonical, did
not work, only artificially cultivated fundamentalism could prevent people from
switching from Moscow Patriarchate to the independent jurisdiction in Ukraine.
Fundamentalism was a sort of virus which Moscow kept in a test tube and
released when useful to attack others or defend itself.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, this virus escaped
the test tube and backfired at those who had cultivated it. Nowdays the
Orthodox fundamentalists in Russia accuse the Patriarch and those bishops who
issue reasonable warnings for people to be cautious of betraying their faith.
Many fundamentalists believe in conspiracy theories. At first they claimed that
the US government or the assumed “global government” or both, in collaboration
with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, attacked Russian Orthodox civilization and
promoted Ukrainian autocephaly with no other goal in mind than undermining this
civilization. Now they believe that the same players launched the virus attack
against Russia to keep its churches closed down. They laughed at the Ecumenical
Patriarchate for its early measures to protect the faithful against the
coronavirus which had just begun to spread. I read a Facebook post by a bishop
from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, who mocked
Constantinople for that very reason. He was soon hospitalized with COVID-19
himself.
I am sure a similar situation exists in many
other Orthodox churches who now have to pay for their flirtations with
fundamentalism in the past. Now is the time to stop that flirtation. We have
seen that fundamentalism kills, literally. It is time to unite the efforts to
contain not only the coronavirus, but also the virus of fundamentalism.
The Very Reverend Dr. Cyril Hovorun is
Expert and Contributor at Encyclopedia Britannica, Associate Dean of St.
Ignatios Theological Academy (Sweden), Director of Research at the Institute of
Theological Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
(Ukraine), and Acting Director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola
Marymount University (USA). From 2007 to 2009, he chaired the Department of
External Relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. From 2009 to 2011, he was
the first Deputy Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox
Church.
