Church
Russia

A LIVING TREASURE
A fragile thread that survived Communism, the Russian Church has safeguarded man and his faith up to the present, amid turmoil in Moscow, social imbalance, and the “political” axis between clergy and those in power. Here is a brief journey that brings us closer to a world that is not so distant, after all, into the relationship between Orthodox and Catholics, a movement of life and people.

by Martino Cervo

Stalin had big plans for the squares in Moscow: he wanted to level the buildings that surrounded them in order to have more room for military parades–starting, of course, with Red Square. One day, he had a scale model made: it was all there, from the walls of the Kremlin to Saint Basil’s Cathedral. The dictator picked up the church and weighed it in his hand, tossing it a few inches into the air, a half smile visible under his moustache. Then he put it back in its place. And thus, what is perhaps the most famous building in Russian Christendom was saved.
Orthodoxy has something in common with this episode. Crushed under the heel of a regime whose alternative to submission was physical cancellation, the Christian faith survived thanks to those who preserved and defended their tradition, and with it the possibility to experience it concretely.  There is no account of this bloodbath more incisive than the icon of the New Martyrs of the 20th century, kept in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, not far from the famous Tretyakov Gallery. And there is no more striking witness than the three cathedrals of the Kremlin (dedicated to the Dormition, the Archangel Michael, and the Annunciation), which are still in place despite the fact that, for almost 30 years, the square that hosts them was reserved for Stalin’s private walks.
The Russian Church under Communism was a powerful and fragile thread that preserved beauty and, above all, desire in the Russian man. It safeguarded the beauty of song, art, liturgy–and with all this, the irreducibility of the person–in spite of everything. The passage to freedom for the Church involved the labors and repercussions, retreats and pains of the whole society, in a country whose history, by Western standards, seems like an engine that sputters, but still manages to run. In trying to understand, it is helpful to start from an episode whose resonance abroad consisted mostly of grotesque echoes, but which tied some painful knots in the relationship between Church, society, those in power, and the people.

Political mechanism.On February 21, 2012, a few days after the vote that saw Putin’s victory amid serious protests and accusations of intrigue, the militants of the musical group Pussy Riot–Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevitch–burst into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and staged a kind of punk “prayer.” What is certain is that, by playing off of Prime Minister Medvedev, Putin managed to present himself as the “guardian” of the violated sacredness, guaranteeing a media explosion around the girls’ trial that eclipsed other, more substantial legal proceedings relevant to political stability. At the same time, the president deftly allowed himself to be passed on the right by some members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The penal proceedings did, in fact, lead to the mildest possible punishment for that type of crime (offenses to religion) allowed by Russian law: two years–which, however, two of the women  are serving in particularly hostile places.
    The principal consequence of the entire operation was to reinforce the “political” and, as some say, almost “state-idolatrous” axis between part of the clergy and those in power. The second consequence can be measured by the “monstrification” of the anti-Putin protest that had grown heated in the months prior to the arrest. Despite the fact that these movements represented an absolute novelty in Muscovite society by involving, for the first time, the intellectual bourgeoisie, those in power tried to reduce the entire upheaval to the events of the blasphemous scene. Not by chance was it this intellectual bourgeoisie, composed by believers as well, that was making an appeal to Patriarch Kirill that he pardon the band members–an appeal that fell on deaf ears. In this context, and exacerbated by the media, a climate of attack on the Church developed, which directly involved the Patriarch. A much-disputed photograph of an encounter between Kirill and Russian Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov, in which the head of the Church wears a Breguet watch worth $30,000, generated outrage, and attempts  at clarification did nothing but worsen the situation.
This is what a political-sociological gaze would give us: a country in the grips of serious imbalance, in which those who hold power have a strong interest in keeping large sections of the population in conditions of economic and cultural underdevelopment. Then there are the lives, the people, who bring us closer to a world that is actually much less distant than the thousands of miles that separate it from us. “If not the Church, then who would bring Christ to Russia?” asks Father Dimitri Sverdlov, a priest who is often less than gentle with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. And, put like this, the question immediately takes on a new aspect: the “political” frame (very complex in the Orthodox background)  gives way to a question about personal consistency.        

Invisible drops. “And we’ve seen what Russia without Christ is destined to become: a bloodbath at the hands of barbarians,” he continues. It is a profound mystery, but this “mission” which gives rise to and justifies, by itself, the yearning for the unity of the Church, surpasses but cannot be separated from the humanity of those who make it up–sins included. “Bestial as always before…”–Eliot’s overused phrase accurately describes this vivifying scandal which hits close to home for both Orthodox and Catholic Christians. As Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, Orthodox journalist in Moscow, explains, “If we looked at the Church as an organization or a political party, then there would be reasons to leave it. But the Church is a mystical body, and if I left it, I would lose myself.”
   A journey into orthodoxy is a journey into self-awareness for this reason. The Russian Church’s difficulties and wounds are not structurally different from the difficulties and wounds in anyone’s heart. What is faith? What is the relationship between its individual and communal dimensions? How to walk the line between power, people, and the experience of faith? Few places raise these questions and begin to answer them like Russia. And here the dimension of personal work, rooted in thought, inevitably comes into play. According to Sergei Capnin, director of the historical Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, “Twenty years after the fall of Communism, we are still unable to overcome this incapacity for thought. We still live in a society that does not know the freedom of Christian thought. And this absence of freedom distorts both the past and the future.” The relations between Catholics and Orthodox, which on a macro level are in a phase of discrete openness under this pontificate, are the terrain on which to measure the distance between the abstract approach and the dimension of what is lived. The Biblioteca dello Spirito (Library of the Spirit), founded by Russia Cristiana, Catholic Charities of Moscow, and the Orthodox Theological Faculty of Minsk, has resided in its current headquarters in Moscow for eight years. It vibrates in the heart of the capital, and Father Dimitri defines it “the most Orthodox of cultural centers.” It was born from the experience of faith of a group of Catholics educated by Father Romano Scalfi, including the fiery Jean-François Thiry.
The heart of the Biblioteca is the deepening of the dialogue with the Orthodox Church: a journey that recently went through an important phase with the second session of a conference put on by Russia Cristiana, spread over three days in the middle of last November, entitled: “East–West: The Crisis as Test and Provocation.” It is within encounters like these, invisible drops in the sea of the former Soviet Union, that one hears, for example, Catholic  and Orthodox priests presenting together the Russian translation of the collected works of Saint Ambrose. And if the environment of an unforeseen friendship weren’t already evident, then it would almost sound provocative when Father Francesco Braschi recalled the example of the Bishop of Milan giving lessons in laity to the Emperor Theodosius.
The miracle of change is a faith that guides life–through a series of personal meetings, moments, that are naturally stronger than ideas, projects, or schemes. In the space of just a few minutes, during a strangely mild November for Moscow, one hears Professor Uberto Motta (an Italian import to Switzerland’s University of Fribourg) describe the nature of the Church in the figure of Federigo Borromeo who encounters the Unnamed in Manzoni’s The Betrothed (not a work that is exactly well-known in Russia), and the intellectual Tatiana Kasatkina (the force behind the recent exhibit on Dostoevsky at the Rimini Meeting) praise secularization: “We often criticize or contest this word, but it represents a great opportunity. It is in contexts like these that faith matures as free adherence, not as social conditioning or formalism.” All of this takes place in the new headquarters of the Russian Orthodox University (across from the Lubyanka), an educative enterprise strongly desired by the Patriarch, who entrusted it to a young rector.

Without filter. Facts like these document a journey that is unthinkable if viewed through the filter of prejudices about proselytism or with the arched eyebrows of doubts regarding the possible instrumentality of relationships. And they throw a new, Eastern light on the charism of Father Luigi Giussani, capable of changing men even here, in Russia–and so catholic as to reach the Orthodox faith without nullifying it. At the meeting of the Communion and Liberation responsibles from the former Soviet republics, there were also some Orthodox young people present.  Alexei, who is Belarussian, explains why there is no contradiction between belonging to his tradition and his presence at the Russia Cristiana “East–West” public conference in November: “I am interested in what I hear here; I feel that it is useful for my life. I even understand my faith better; I rediscover it as more alive.”
At the end of the 1800s, almost by chance, a priest in a Russian Orthodox church cleaned one of the countless icons. He discovered that the layer of black smoke hid vibrant colors, luminous backgrounds, an unexpected vivacity that contradicted the aura of gloom that was wrongly associated with faith and the places relating to it. The heads of the Church thus ordered that all the icons in sacred buildings in Russia be cleaned, multiplying that explosion of beauty that revived the faith of the whole populace. It is an operation that is always necessary.