The Church of England’s Synod is debating the war in Ukraine today. There will be a vote on a motion that sounds uncontentious: Synod affirms the peace-making efforts of various churches, calls for the highest possible protection of religious freedom, and calls for UK political parties to work for a peaceful international order.
But sometimes blandness is offensive. It is a failure of Christian responsibility to debate the war in Ukraine with an air of neutrality. Synod should be sending a clear message that Russian Orthodoxy is a pariah church, a cheerleader of fascism. But, as I recently said in relation to Justin Welby, ecumenical diplomacy seems the only consideration.
The briefing paper attached to this motion is a swamp of obfuscation. It puts huge emphasis on the need to respect religious freedom in Ukraine. That sounds unobjectionable, unless you know that it’s a quiet encouragement of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, still loyal to Moscow (unlike the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine). Let’s be blunt: a nation has the right to curtail, even suppress, a religion that supports its enemy, an enemy not just at the gates but within them.
The briefing paper claims that the charge of disloyalty is a slur, for the UOC has begun to distance itself from the Moscow church. In reality it has prevaricated, procrastinated, hedged. It could just cut ties with the Moscow Patriarchate and declare itself autocephalous. To retain those ties is to endorse the invasion.
There is also a paragraph that seeks to be even-handed about the war’s cause. It suggests that ‘the West’s reneging on promises to Russia at the end of the Cold War was a contributing though not determining variable in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’. It also warns the West against a future peace-settlement that humiliates Russia.
The text seems to have been influenced by certain Russian Orthodox clergy operating in Britain. These priests are careful to shroud their views about Moscow under vagueness and generalised hand-wringing. They have persuaded well-meaning Anglicans that they are caught in a tragic dilemma, rather than cowardly colluders in fascism.
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