NEWS STORY: Bombing prompts Russian Orthodox to stress ties to Serbs

c. 1999 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ The Russian Orthodox Church has made a rare foray into international politics with angry denunciations of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia and by stressing solidarity with fellow Orthodox Christian Slavs.”What is being done is a sin before God and a crime from the point of view of international law,”Patriarch […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ The Russian Orthodox Church has made a rare foray into international politics with angry denunciations of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia and by stressing solidarity with fellow Orthodox Christian Slavs.”What is being done is a sin before God and a crime from the point of view of international law,”Patriarch Alexii II, leader of the 80-million member Russian church, declared in a statement.”It is perfectly clear that the Serbs will never agree with the estrangement of the Kosovo region, which is and was their spiritual center from time immemorial.” At demonstrations against the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia outside U.S. embassies and consulates, hundreds and sometimes thousands of Russian protesters have carried banners emblazoned with Orthodox religious symbols and appeals for a stop to the slaughter of”brother Slavs.” A mass prayer service set for Sunday (March 28) in Moscow is expected to draws thousands of Orthodox believers who have been asked in radio appeals to bring food, clothing and medicine for shipment to Yugoslavia.

In a telephone interview from Belgrade, Father Andrej of the Orthodox Church of Serbia’s foreign relations department said Friday (March 26) that the support of worldwide Orthodoxy was vital to his church.”The Orthodox patriarchates around the world and even on Mount Athos have received our public statement and have expressed their dismay at the military action,”he said.


A statement by the Holy Synod _ or ruling body _ of the Serbian church read in part:”We cannot believe that the international community has become so impotent in finding the ways to a peaceful and humane settlement that it is now resorting to dark and humiliating means of great violence, both for its individual and national honors, so as to prevent a lesser evil and violence.” By objecting to the NATO attacks, Andrej said world Orthodoxy was showing,”it is a criminal action.” He said the patriarchate, or headquarters, of the 8-million member Serbian church in Belgrade had been untouched so far by bombing, but that a large airport a few miles away had been the target of numerous NATO attacks.

In Russia, home to the largest of the world’s Orthodox concentration, the church has taken pains to avoid even a remote association with the NATO action.

Wednesday, for example, a delegation of Orthodox clergy bound for the Vatican from Moscow was recalled at the last minute from the airport where the group was set to board a flight to Rome. A Russian Orthodox bishop from Ukraine on his way to the same Vatican talks was also ordered to head home by Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, who heads the church’s powerful department of external church relations.

A Russian Orthodox Church official took pains to explain that Kirill’s decision to skip the twice-annual Russian Orthodox-Catholic dialogue was in no way intended as an affront to the Roman Catholic Church.”It was not directed against the Catholic Church … It has to do with the overall situation,”said Father Hilarion Alfeyev, head of the secretariat for inter-Christian relations.”It was decided best not to have a high-level delegation from our church present … at a time when the bombing of Yugoslav territory would be conducted by warplanes leaving from Italian territory.” The Vatican’s envoy to Moscow, Archbishop John Bukovsky, said the cancelled visit”means nothing”for relations between the Vatican and Moscow. Of Kirill’s decision, Bukovsky said,”I think he felt obliged to stay in the country, like Primakov,”referring to the Russian prime minister’s trip to the United States this week that was aborted in mid-flight over the Atlantic Ocean.

In Moscow, communist and nationalist political leaders have made much of the religious and ethnic ties binding overwhelmingly Orthodox Russia and Yugoslavia. Some have called for extreme measures like moving nuclear weapons west from Russia to Belarus and thus closer to member countries of the NATO alliance. Russia’s independent television network, NTV, reported that hundreds of young Russian men have volunteered to fight in Yugoslavia.

Father Gleb Yakunin, a dissident Orthodox priest defrocked by the Russian church for his political activity and now a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kievan Patriarchate, denounced Russian politicians’ use of religious ties to solidify their own positions.”They protest against the bombing of Serbia but they have not repented for the genocide in Chechnya,”said Yakunin, speaking of the civil war in the break-away Islamic Russian republic.”It is a disease of Orthodoxy to support this kind of nationalist, imperialist tendencies. It is not Christianity.” On the opposite end of the Orthodox spectrum from Yakunin is Yevgeny Nikiforov, who heads the Radonezh Orthodox Brotherhood that operates two radio stations, publishes a newspaper and is perhaps the leading conservative force in Russian Orthodoxy today. Nikiforov said listeners had been calling clamoring for some kind of organized protest to the bombings.”They are indignant not just because they are killing our brothers but because they are breaking international laws,”said Nikiforov.

Nikiforov’s radio stations and newspaper are usually harshly critical of the Roman Catholic Church, which is viewed as stealing souls on Orthodox territory. But Thursday he said Radonezh would welcome ecumenical support protesting NATO’s action.


In the western Ukrainian city of Lvov, located precisely on the religious fault line between Orthodoxy and Western Christianity, one of the local Orthodox archbishops said he was deeply suspicious of NATO’s decision to bomb Yugoslavia.”There is a double standard at work here. Look at northern Ireland, the Kurds in Turkey or Israel. NATO does nothing there,”said Archbishop Avgustin in a Friday telephone interview.”When NATO and the West need to choose a target, it is strange that they choose the Serbs.” Solidarity by the world’s Orthodox churches in the face of such action is logical, Avgustin said.”If the Jews can support each other, if the Arabs support each other, then I think the Orthodox can support each other, too,”the archbishop said.

IR END BROWN

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