Churches and States

Patriarch Kirill (WSJ)

Three years ago the Ukrainian Orthodox church split off from the Russian Orthodox church. "Putin bitterly resented" the separation, which may have been a factor in his decision to annex portions of Ukraine. [Note: in Ukraine "almost two-thirds of Orthodox churches are still formally aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church."]

After it began, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox church has supported the invasion to such an extent that it threatens a division in the wider Eastern Orthodox church:

In sermons broadcast on dedicated Orthodox TV channels and YouTube, the 75-year-old patriarch, who has led the church since 2009, has portrayed the war as a holy struggle against the West to preserve what he calls the russky mir—Russian world—uniting East Slavic lands including Ukraine under Moscow’s spiritual and political fold. The concept, which the patriarch has espoused with particular fervor since 2012, is an undercurrent to much of Mr. Putin’s rhetoric...

Outside of Russia, the patriarch’s loyalty to Mr. Putin has aggravated splits in the broader Eastern Orthodox community of some 220 million faithful. In the face of criticism, he has doubled down. Returning to the Armed Forces Cathedral on May 8, he gave another sermon dismissing as nonsense the accusations that his speeches are militaristic and calling on Russians to “consolidate all our forces, spiritual and material, so that no one dares encroach upon the holy borders of our fatherland.”

European Union officials said this month that the bloc is considering sanctions on Patriarch Kirill, including a potential asset freeze and travel ban, for his role as a leading advocate of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The war has revived rumors that the Russian Patriarch was a KGB agent:

Born Vladimir Gundyaev, Patriarch Kirill is widely believed by many church historians to be a former agent of the KGB, where the president himself served...

Patriarch Kirill was born in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1946. After he graduated from the Leningrad seminary in 1970, he rose in the church’s ranks and joined the foreign-relations department, a position that allowed him to take frequent trips abroad at a time when fellow Soviet citizens were banned from doing so.

Evidence from Soviet-era files that emerged publicly in the 1990s suggests that Patriarch Kirill was a KGB agent with the code name “Mikhailov.” While he isn’t named directly, several documents refer to a “Mikhailov” who represented the Russian Orthodox Church at the Switzerland-based World Council of Churches, traveled to international church conferences and provided information to KGB handlers. That lines up with the biography of Patriarch Kirill, who was just 24 when he became the church’s representative to the WCC in 1971.

“There’s absolutely no doubt that Kirill was an agent of the KGB,” said Felix Corley, a U.K.-based author who has researched KGB links to church leaders. By the late Soviet era, it was typical for senior leaders of the Orthodox Church and other faiths to work with the secret police, though the degree of collaboration varied, Mr. Corley said.

The separation of Church and State in America is a constant irritant to political activists of all stripes. Church leaders run the gamut of politics, from opposition to the use of American troops to abortion, from preaching against economic inequality to transgender philosophy, from supporting freedom of speech to decarbonizing the atmosphere.

The separation of Church from State can be frustrating, but Russia has shown what can happen if the separation did not exist.