Of all of Pope John Paul II’s accomplishments in his rich 19-year reign, no disappointment has been greater than his failure to come into “total communion” with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Today that long-cultivated dream lies all but dead.
“Remember in the ’60s, we were talking about it as if it could be done very soon,” Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Dutch-born Father General of the Jesuits, reminisced with me recently, sitting in his simple office just off St. Peter’s Square. “The idea then was that the divisions in the faith are a scandal, but that is now a little bit disappearing.
“The Holy Father is disappointed. He has wanted to go to Russia to meet the Orthodox patriarch. This summer, he wanted to meet him in Vienna, but the Russians said, `No, let us be.’ In addition, the Russians are saying that the pope started the war in the Balkan countries by recognizing Slovenia and Croatia.” He added thoughtfully, “Now the Russians can be Russian again.”
The idea of their “being Russians again” is not something to take lightly, for it adds profound complexities to attempts to deal with the Russian church, and also with the Russian government, in this supposedly conciliatory post-Cold War world.
“Remember that the pope is a Slav, and that the Polish poets from his own country had written that the Poles and the Russians are not two peoples but two ideas thrown into the sea of the Slavic people,” said Professor Rocco Buttiglione, the erudite philosopher and Christian Democrat politician who is considered the pontiff’s closest friend and interpreter. “The Poles represented freedom; the Russians, slavery.
“On the other hand, we must never forget the two great traditions of Orthodoxy. One was centered around St. Cyril, who believed in inner freedom and the conciliatory kingship of the Christian who speaks truth to power. The second school believed in compliance with state power and order guaranteed through the state.
“It seems that in Russia today, the second position has prevailed. The result is a closing in upon oneself and an attempt to re-create the link between politics and religiosity.”
What has actually happened with the Orthodox church does not, I think, reflect well on them or their intentions.
In the 1960s and ’70s–when first the Catholic Church, and then later this pope, were trying, in dozens of private meetings and conferences and pronouncements, to bridge the gap between the two churches–the Orthodox churchmen were all openness and friendliness toward the West. Already compromised by their ugly connections with communism, they quite simply needed it.
But once Russia began to implode in upon itself after 1985, those same churchmen first discarded their ties with the West. In 1991, they refused to attend one of John Paul’s most important synods; in 1993, the famous Russian Orthodox writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally agreed to meet the pope, but really came only to complain about Catholic “expansion” into Russia. Since 1995, there have been no more meetings.
Then they began to make, not only acts of omission, but acts of commission.
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Instead of welcoming, for instance, ties with their communist-era “friends” in Rome and in the Protestant churches, the Orthodox Church immediately began fighting against any kind of freedom of religion in Russia at all. Today, that fight has culminated in the law passed this year by the Duma prohibiting, among other things, proselytizing and meeting by any churches except the major historical ones such as Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Judaism.
The Russians’ explanations are that these foreign faiths, and particularly “sects,” are coming to “conquer” Russia and that the pope showed his Catholicism during the Bosnian War by recognizing Slovenia and Croatia in 1992, thus taking sides against the Orthodox Church of Serbia.
These accusations are false at best and cynically self-serving at worst. (The pope, for instance, was rightly and honorably horrified at the massacres being perpetrated by the Serbs.)
The purposes of the Orthodox Church in Russia today reflect most of its history. It wants to keep total power and exclude from its midst any other belief systems or reflections of conscience that might in any way threaten it.
“Through the Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church came to terms with the modern world,” the Denver-born Archbishop J. Francis Stafford, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, mused with me. “We finally came to a willingness to test the waters of the Enlightenment culture against the ancient tradition of faith. The pope today is preoccupied with the relationship between freedom and truth, which is one of the primary issues raised by the Enlightenment.”
That noble preoccupation unfortunately has not as yet traveled eastward–and, indeed, there are no indicators that it will do so. Meanwhile, it would be good for those other Westerners who still dream of rapid change in Russia to study the Catholic-Orthodox case. It might instill in their hope a touch of reality and also remind them that the historical Russian propensity to protect power by remaining isolated and to keep out all those hated “foreigners” is hardly a thing of the past.