Moscow – Hundreds of Russian Orthodox Church electors convened Tuesday in Moscow for the first election of a patriarch since the fall of the officially atheist Soviet Union.
The 711 electors, which include prominent businessmen and political figures as well as monks and priests, have until Thursday to pick a successor to Alexy II, who died Dec. 5 at age 79. Alexy II had served since 1990 as spiritual leader of the world’s largest and richest Orthodox patriarchate.
The new patriarch will be crowned next Sunday in Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral and will wield enormous spiritual power. But he will also preside over the patriarchate’s vast business empire, built with the aid of tax breaks and other government concessions since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.
The church insists it is not appropriate to compare the selection process to a secular election because a new patriarch has already been chosen by God.
But in practice, the patriarch’s electors will include some of Russia’s politically connected elite: a tobacco-company owner, a governor’s wife and the son of the president of Trans-Dniester, a Russia-dominated breakaway province of Moldova.
The presence of political figures among the electors only reinforces the impression that politics will play a major role in the naming of the new church leader.
Interim leader Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad is the favored contender, but he faces at least two challengers and electors can also propose their own candidates.
Kirill, 62, received the most votes – 97 – in a secret ballot by church leaders Sunday. The two other candidates chosen by the Bishops Council were Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk, who received 32 votes, and Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk, with 16.
Kirill is seen as more likely to assert independence from the Kremlin and to work for improved relations with the Vatican. He faces opposition from a strong fundamentalist movement within the church that sees him as too modern and too eager for a rapprochement with Roman Catholics.
The Kremlin is not openly backing any of the contenders. But President Dmitry Medvedev is said to be close to Metropolitan Kliment, 59, who is supported by church fundamentalists.
Filaret, 72, is the top cleric in Belarus and maintains good relations with Alexander Lukashenko, that country’s authoritarian president.
Church and state are officially separate under Russia’s post-Soviet constitution, but the Russian Orthodox Church has served the state for much of its 1,000-year history and ties have tightened since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.
Some nonreligious Russians complain that the church has tailored its doctrine to suit the current government, which has justified Russia’s retreat from Western-style democracy by saying the country has a unique history and culture.
Underlining the close ties, state television broadcast the council session live.
In lengthy opening remarks, Kirill elaborately thanked Medvedev’s administration for “warm and very benevolent greetings.”
The Russian Orthodox Church counts its flock as more than 100 million in Russia, though polls show that only about 5 percent of Russians – mostly low-income rural dwellers and urban intellectuals – are observant believers.
Two-thirds of the electors are clerics, but the other third are laymen. Dioceses across the fomer Soviet Union sent businessmen, government officials and their relatives to vote for the new patriarch – an unprecedented move the church calls an “award” to supporters and sponsors.
The decision to open the voting to powerful lay people has drawn some sharp criticism. “This is a vanity fair,” theologian Andrei Kurayev was quoted as saying in the daily Kommersant.
But church leadership has shrugged off the criticism. “What are we to do if these people are part of our society and our church?” Father Vsevolod Chaplin, a church spokesman, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
Associated Press
Associated Press writers Nataliya Vasilyeva and Jim Heintz contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Beliefnet
Advertisement
posted January 27, 2009 at 7:15 pm
“mostly low-income rural dwellers and urban intellectuals – are observant believers”
Interesting combination. And it doesn’t sound like either will be voting as much as the politicians and rich people.
posted January 27, 2009 at 8:48 pm
It will be interesting to see if the fellow, Kirill gets elected. He apparently wants to make nice with the Vatican and get the church farther away from the government. I wonder if the Kremlin can “allow” the church to be farther away from their influence.
It is also interesting that lay folks are in on the voting for the big dude in a church. Unlike the RCC who has all the Cardinals do the voting.
posted January 28, 2009 at 1:01 am
The Russian church is pretty unique in the degree to which it’s open lay voting, pagansister, and some worry that how it plays out in practice in this situation isn’t going to be entirely positive, since it’s most men of influence who are doing the voting. The first moves toward a more egalitarian form of lay input happened right at the time of the Russian Revolution, but the last 90 years of Soviet and post-Soviet history has set the church back from some of promising progress it was making before the persecutions started and the Orthodox intellectuals were kicked out of the country.
posted January 28, 2009 at 10:44 am
This is a fascinating way to determine the head of a Church. My own democratic inclinations prefer more inout from the less influential movers & shakers, but this method does allow fro some lay involvement.
Nate,
If you are comfortable with answering this, I am curious to know of which -orthdoxy you come. It is simply a question of pure curiosity. I have had infrequent, irregular, and unusual contact with folks from various -doxies. As with any situation, some have impressed and even inspired me and some have left me shaking my head in wonder. But the same is true within my own denomination. Anyway, I am intersted in getting a clearer sense of your orientation – it may help me appreciate your perspectives on things. But please – as brevity is wit, be witty. I have only brief spurts of time to read B’net postings.
posted January 28, 2009 at 11:39 am
I’m a pure-blooded American convert, so I gravitate towards the less ethnic churches in whatever area I happen to live in at the time. I first entered the Antiochian Orthodox Church and now I’m in the Orthodox Church in America, which has Russian roots. Orthodox don’t technically belong to any particular ethnic church but are free to come and go at any. But I long for the eventual creation of a genuinely American Orthodox Church.
Some converts to Orthodoxy tend to have excessive zeal and take on a hatred for anything Western or modern. They can certainly make your skin crawl. I strive to distance myself from such people.
posted January 28, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Nate,
Thanks for your response – it helps. My contact has been mostly with ethnic Orthodox of various sorts. I will make time to learn more about the Orthodox Church in America (a philosophical query, does the OC,A now constitute its own Orthodox Church? I wonder just what that would look like in every way, from architecture to paraments and vestments)
posted January 28, 2009 at 2:49 pm
The Russian church has granted the OCA autocephaous status, but most of the other national churches haven’t fully recognized that status yet. I think the immigrant situation in America causes some unique problems for the Orthodox ecclesiastical structure. Since the majority of churches are still various immigrant churches that are just as much about preserving a cultural heritage as they are about the Orthodox faith, it’s going to take a bit of time for all the churches to come to an agreement about how to organize a true American Orthodox Church.
As far as what a truly American church would look like–well, I’m curious myself. My guess is that, like the other churches, it’ll be some blend of Byzantine and native traditions and styles, but how exactly that’ll play out over the next couple of generations, only time will tell.