The Global Pretensions of the Russian Orthodox Church

Jerry G. Pankhurst is professor emeritus of sociology and of Russian and Central Eurasian studies at Wittenberg University.

In global affairs, Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church operate in several arenas of action, and their actions are carried out on interrelated moral, normative, canonical, legal, political, and economic dimensions. We might imagine a globe with the headquarters of the Moscow Patriarchate at the center of a worldwide system of converging vectors of action on all these dimensions. (Imagine a huge spider sitting in Moscow with its many legs stretching around the world in all directions.) The vectors originate at the point of convergence, which is His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, surrounded by his most faithful assistants in ROC leadership. The vectors stretch out to points around the globe where the ROC has significant interests and attempts to exert influence on others.

One might imagine such a global vectored arrangement for many global organizations from businesses to international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), but the multiplicity of arenas of action in which the ROC acts is noteworthy; indeed, the ROC must worry about a large number of arenas of action that grow from its particular nature and global position.

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The Russian Orthodox Church and Inner-Orthodox Relations

Thomas Bremer is a Roman Catholic theologian and professor emeritus of the University of Münster.

Even before the Russian aggression against Ukraine, world Orthodoxy was in a crisis that made its normal functioning impossible. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) refused the autocephaly that the Ecumenical Patriarchate (EP) had granted to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in early 2019, and the ROC eventually broke communion with the EP and three more (out of some fifteen) Orthodox Churches.

The ROC resisted the autocephaly of the OCU for four interconnected reasons, all diametrically opposed to the position of the EP:

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The Russian Orthodox Church and the Holy See: 70 Years of Political Ecumenism

Pavlo Smytsnyuk is a Mary Seeger O’Boyle Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University.

The Russia-Ukraine war has posed a significant challenge to relations between the Holy See and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Although the Vatican’s position on the war has been criticized by some as ambiguous and overly neutral, certain war-related comments by Catholic leadership have been interpreted negatively by the ROC. The Pope’s warning that Kirill must not serve as Putin’s “altar boy” was followed by an accusation by Cardinal Kurt Koch (Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, the main Vatican body on inter-confessional relations) that the ROC was in a state of “heresy,” in light of its justification for the war in Ukraine.

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