by Ieromonaco Ioann

Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, whom the pope will meet in Cuba on 12 February, is transforming his communities by offering them younger bishops and a functioning curia with the Catholic Church as his model and Nikodim’s legacy as a precedent. The bureaucratisation and self-centredness are real risks.

Moscow (AsiaNews) – Who is Patriarch Kirill, with whom Pope Francis will meet on 12 February in Cuba? Elected to the patriarchal throne seven years ago at the age of 63, Patriarch Kirill was one of the youngest bishops in the history of the Russian Church, since he received the episcopal ordination eight months before the age of thirty, despite the fact that ecclesiastical canons prescribe the age of 30 as the minimum age for the episcopate.

Kirill has always promoted young people. As bishop, he has personally supervised the training of seminarians from his diocese. As chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Patriarchate, he has encouraged young theologians and clerics to study abroad, at Catholic and Protestant institutions. The average age of the bishops of the Russian Church fell substantially under him.

Kirill is a strong and decisive man, no doubt a prime character, a natural leader, a strategist. One might call him a good chess player who can anticipate his opponent's moves, and when he does make a move, he has already thought out two or three steps ahead of time.

He is pragmatic, someone who rules through checks and balances. Backed by the progressive wing of the Church and appreciated by the secular intelligentsia before ascending to the patriarchal throne, as Primate of the Church he has held an equal distance between conservatives and progressives. It is said that his closest entourage includes people who are often at serious loggerheads with each other.

Despite such seemingly Machiavellian pragmatism, Patriarch Kirill is an intuitive man, able to uncover the talents of others and bring them forth. He has personal charisma, great interpersonal skills and talents as a diplomat. He is a good preacher with innate rhetorical skills, a great orator, able to impress the audience even just with the tone of his voice.

The Russian Church has a very young episcopate and the number of bishops has increased substantially in recent years. Patriarch Kirill has led a major institutional reform. He has divided most dioceses and set up metropolitan constituencies that place a number of neighbouring dioceses, each of which has its ordinary bishop, under the supervision of a metropolitan. He has also ordained a considerable number of vicar bishops.

His Holiness holds the Church under tight control. Many believe that he rules as no other head of the Russian Church ever has. And this not because of the fact that today the state does not limit the work of the Church, but rather because of the total absence of any internal opposition. Of the eight regular members of the Holy Synod, the permanent ruling body of the Russian Church, only two were members before Kirill became patriarch. Of the approximately 380 bishops currently in office in the Russian Church, almost half were appointed under Kirill.

The patriarch has created new Church governing bodies. In addition to the Holy Synod (the main administrative body), the Council of Bishops (which by statute meets every four years) and the local council (which includes representatives of the clergy, monks and lay people, and meets only for the election the patriarch), two other governing bodies have been established on the initiative of His Holiness: the Supreme Church Council (sort of Council of Ministers, which includes all the heads of the central institutions of the Church) and the Inter-council Commission (a consultative body of experts from various sectors of the Church).

No outsider can attend the meetings of the Supreme Church Council and what is discussed is kept secret. The Inter-council Commission submits the projects laid out in its documents to the public for discussion, even via the Internet.

All ruling institutions are by right led by the patriarch. In recent years, he has repeatedly changed and reformed what can be considered the dicasteries of the Russian Church (departments, commissions, committees, directorates), restructuring them, abolishing some and creating new ones, as well as reshuffling their tasks. His Holiness is in charge of the staff of Church’s central institutions and he personally hires and fires everyone. Patriarch Kirill has thus created his own Curia, much stronger and more centralised than it was before.

The Primate of the Russian Church is the bishop of the city of Moscow and its surrounding region. The urban diocese is divided into ten vicariates, each of which includes several deaneries. For the city alone, the patriarch has 23 vicar bishops (actual and patriarchal vicars), and six more for the suffragan dioceses. The patriarchal administration alone includes about forty nuns, plus some bishops, dozens of monks, priests and laity in the service of His Holiness. Another secretariat is in charge of the Moscow diocese.

Patriarch Kirill is the spiritual son, i.e. disciple of Metropolitan Nikodim, who was known for his ecumenical openness, especially for his proximity to the Catholic Church. Nikodim died from a heart attack at the Vatican in September 1978 in the arms of Pope John Paul I when he was on a visit to congratulate the pope for his enthronement two days earlier. The journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, the official newspaper of the Russian Church, wrote at the time that "the pope recited the prayers in articulo mortis and the formula for the remission of sins. When the Secretary of State, Cardinal Jean Villot, came to the scene, he too prayed over the metropolitan’s mortal remains."

Metropolitan Nikodim nurtured a generation of clerics, generally open to dialogue with Catholics, many of whom became bishops, and constituted a group of great importance and quite united inside the Russian episcopate in the 1980s and 1990s. Kirill was one of the youngest representatives of this group.

Archbishop Kirill joined the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches in 1975, and was appointed head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Patriarchate in 1989. Many thought at the time that a bright chapter would open in the relations between the Russian and Catholic Churches. Things went rather differently.

In Ukraine, the conflicts between Orthodox and Greek Catholics got worse. In Russia, the Catholic Church of Latin rite set up structures beyond the actual number of Russian Catholics. In 1991, Metropolitan Kirill made a working visit to the Vatican where he held talks with the leaders of the Catholic Church. Only when he came back to Moscow did he learn from the newspapers that the Catholic Church has just established two apostolic administrations in Russia.

Many believe that the Catholic Church has served as the inspiration for Patriarch Kirill’s model of institutional and administrative reforms of the Church: curia, centralisation, pyramidal ecclesiology, authoritarian management of the Church. At least, this is how many Russian clerics see the Catholic Church: an absolute monarchy that relies heavily on strict obedience of its subjects.

Such a model does not correspond to the reality of the Catholic Church after Vatican II. It clashes even more with the reforms Pope Francis is implementing, whose highlights are decentralisation, greater participation of the periphery in the management of the Church, collegiality, and transparency - as well as wide-ranging dialogue, the Church going out towards the existential peripheries, overcoming a certain self-centredness, admitting errors committed by clergymen and the request for forgiveness on their behalf, mercy for those who come last, sinners, the marginalised . . .

Recently, the impression is that the two churches are going through contrary but specular experiences. The Catholic Church, which is structured like a monarchy, has increasingly sought collegiality. The Orthodox Church, for whom sobornost is a key ecclesiological concept, and has always considered the reception of the decisions taken by the hierarchy by the fullness of God's people a discriminating criterion, seems to moving towards a rigid management of authority. It appears that the two traditions are making the de jure state of the other its own de facto state. On the positive side, this seems to indicate that they really need each other.

Inside the Russian Church, voices of dissatisfaction have been growing recently among the clergy and the laity, over the despotism of some bishops, especially younger ones. Many deplore a tendency towards the bureaucratisation of the Church. What is more, some unpleasant episodes have become clear signs of a moral decay by representatives of the clergy: corruption, careerism, favouritism, nepotism. The Church has become very inward looking, uninterested and unable to engage the wider society in dialogue, increasingly in conflict with the secular intelligentsia, the world of culture, business, science.

Let us hope that the meeting between Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis can have a positive impact, not only on relations between the two Churches, but also on the internal life of the Russian Orthodox Church.

• russian orthodox church
• vatican
• catholic church
• patriarch kirill
• pope francis