The Catholic Church and Russia

Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars

Dennis J. Dunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351893350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This unique account of Russia's encounter with Catholicism from the medieval period to the present provides fascinating insights into Catholic-Russian relations. Dennis Dunn analyzes religious politics in the former USSR and in Russia, particularly in areas where relations between the state-backed Orthodox establishment and the Catholic Church have renewed debates about civil rights, religious freedom and Russian national identity under Vladimir Putin's regime. Discussing issues such as the role of Pope John Paul II in helping to bring down the Iron Curtain, Dunn argues provocatively that Catholic-Russian relations are a microcosm of Western-Russian relations and sheds new light on the historical strain between Russia and the West. Showing how Russia's adoption of a secular ideology - a vain attempt to surpass the West - alienated the Russian government not only from the Catholic Church but also from its own Orthodox foundation, this book discusses how Russia sealed its fate while precipitating the Cold War with the West. Students and general readers interested in Russian history, Western-Russian relations, Catholicism, and comparative religion more broadly, will find this an invaluable and accessible account of an important and understudied subject.

CHAPTER 1
Russia’s Problem with Catholicism

[Catholic] rulers do not rule, they follow the directions of their subjects. Russian rulers, by contrast, do not follow the whim of their nobles and aristocrats, they are sovereign.

Ivan the Terrible

In England the constitution took shape long before the sixteenth century, while the country was still in the bosom of the Catholic Church.

Mikhail Lunin

Kievan Rus

The Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians emerged as distinctive and separate nationalities in the course of some two hundred years that stretched from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Before then, they were largely indistinguishable members of the East Slavic peoples, who organized their first state called Kievan Rus in the ninth century with the help of the Varangians and their semi-legendary leader Rurik. Centered on the banks of the Dnieper River with its capital at Kiev, Kievan Rus engaged in trade between the forest and steppe zones of the vast Eurasian plain and between the Baltic Sea and Black Sea and the Byzantine empire with its capital at Constantinople. In 988 the ruling prince Vladimir converted the East Slays to Orthodox Christianity, which was the religion of the Byzantine empire and was one of the two major Christian religions then developing, the other being Catholicism. At the time of the East Slays’ conversion, Orthodoxy and Catholicism were actually still united as one Christian religion, but they had been drifting apart for centuries and finally split in 1054 when the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople mutually excommunicated each other.¹ No one thought the division would last, but it did, and eventually it divided Europe. Most of Western and Central Europe followed Rome, and most of the Christians in the Balkans and far Eastern Europe, including the East Slays, looked to Constantinople. A metropolitanate was set up for the East Slays when they accepted Orthodoxy and its head, who answered to the patriarch of Constantinople, had the title of metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus.

Surprisingly, the two religions were not too different from one another in terms of beliefs. Both religions preached a transcendent, monotheistic order where the Church was the mediator between the viscera of humankind and the will of God. Both faiths also claimed that they had one foot in the spiritual world and another foot in the physical world and were a bridge through their sacramental and hierarchical structure between the two worlds and to God. Both Churches also believed that the soul was immortal, that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, whom the Jews had been expecting and that Christ was both God and an historical personality, who lived among and died for the salvation of human beings.

Both belief systems also held that Christ’s involvement in human affairs was a turning-point around which civilization revolved and history progressed and that God’s Holy Spirit has since guided the Christian Church. They both believed that God’s grace, which was given to individuals by God through their reception of the sacraments and through his love and mercy, changed individuals, affected history and was essential to salvation. Both religions held that human beings were on earth as pilgrims, that they were to try to pursue virtuous lives and develop their God-given talents according to the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Christ and his Church, particularly his exhortation to love God and other human beings, and that in seeking to actualize love, that is, doing good, with the help of the grace of God, they could be optimistic about the future and their salvation, even though life on earth was difficult. Both religions also stressed that morality was objective and that individuals had free will, were responsible for their decisions and would be judged by God in accordance with the lives that they lived, the decisions they made, the lot they had received and the grace they had been given.

Both creeds also maintained a hierarchically structured Church – the Catholics had a pope (the bishop of Rome), a College of Cardinals who elected the pope and then archbishops and bishops who were in charge of worldwide archdioceses and dioceses; the Orthodox had four patriarchs (Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, with the patriarch of Constantinople considered the primus inter pares), who were elected by the bishops in their jurisdiction, and then metropolitans and exarches or bishops who were in charge of metropolitanates and dioceses. Each Church also valued the institution of monasticism, which separated the clergy into secular clergy, who worked among the people, and regular clergy, who lived according to a prescribed rule away from the faithful in a monastery or convent.

Both religions were also missionary faiths, which led to some competition and resentment, but they agreed upon general spheres of missionary activity in the ninth century and were united in their opposition to Islam, the other major missionary faith.² Both Churches, in addition, valued community and individuals. They recognized the interdependency of the individual and the community, with Orthodoxy holding that the community waxed as individualism waned, although maintaining that individuals freely chose the community, and Catholicism claiming that the community burgeoned as individuals within the community grew. For Orthodoxy, the collective was primary. The Orthodox declared, ‘we believe,’ which reflected the importance of the community or, in Russian Orthodoxy, the sobornost’, while Catholics proclaimed, ‘I believe,’ which revealed the value of individualism.³ For Catholicism, there was a danger that the collective might become the state, so the individual and individual conscience were preeminent, although it, too, stressed the importance of community life, and both religions, as mentioned, held up monasticism as an ideal and held firmly to individual responsibility for one’s actions and, thus, to free.⁴

The major distinction between Orthodoxy and Catholicism was papal supremacy with the pope insisting on his right to rule the Church and to judge political leaders. The College of Cardinals elected the pope, but, once elected, he was sovereign and ruled for life. The Orthodox rejected the pope’s right to control their churches, and the Byzantine emperor, as well as other Orthodox political leaders, objected to the pope’s claim to judge them and, thereby, perhaps check their authority.⁵ In Orthodoxy, the political authority did have a role to play in religious affairs, a tradition called caesaropapism, and this variation did create some strain between Orthodoxy and Catholicism.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy also disagreed on the so-called filioque issue that focused on the nature of the Trinity. The Catholic Church, following St. Augustine, taught that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Son as well as the Father, and the Orthodox Church held that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father alone. The Catholic position, in the eyes of Orthodox theologians, seemed to make the Holy Spirit less equal to the Father and Son. The Catholics rejected that nuance and argued that the Spirit was the manifestation of God’s love of humankind and continued in this world as the direct connection between God and his Church and that the Spirit led the Church in evolving toward a deeper understanding of God’s truth and justice.

On the issue of the incarnation, Catholics believed that Christ was born without sin, whereas Orthodox believers argued that he was born with the frailties of human nature, including sin. This disagreement led to a further dispute about Mary, the mother of Christ. Catholics held that Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin — an immaculate conception followed at her death by an immediate assumption into heaven — which helped explain how it was possible for Christ to assume flesh without incurring the stain of original sin. Orthodox scholars did not embrace the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, which the Catholic Church only formalized in modern times

The two religions also held different views on a host of minor issues, including the dates of Christmas and Easter, using two or three fingers in blessing oneself, the type of bread used in communion, fasting on Saturday, the sanctity of beards and long hair and the style of a monk’s tonsure. They also parted over the issue of married secular clergy, which the Orthodox tradition permitted but which the Catholic Church, since the Cluny reform movement, opposed.

At any rate, the conversion to Orthodoxy was a turning-point for the East Slays, because Christianity provided them with the basis for a new order. It was not a finished order, because the religion was new and profound and its subtleties were difficult to absorb without knowledge of Greek or Latin and because the leaders of Kievan Rus proved incapable or unwilling to fashion a workable principle of political succession, which was compounded by the pressure of marauding nomads from the steppe. Virtually every time a ruling prince died, civil war erupted, and by the twelfth century Kievan Rus had divided into three regions: Volynia-Galicia in the southwest with its center at Lvov, Novgorod the Great in the northwest with its capital at Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal in the northeast with the important town of Moscow.⁶

Nonetheless, Orthodoxy did provide the East Slays with a religious faith, the Cyrillic alphabet, Church Slavonic, icons, architecture, a sense of unity and purpose, a hierarchical political and religious model, a value system that included monasticism, a willingness to sacrifice for the community and an unusual understanding and acceptance of human suffering — the virtue called kenoticism. It also provided them with a worldview that Orthodox civilization was chosen by God to bear his truth, that emperor and patriarch were God’s representatives and the model that God preferred for political and religious leadership and that they — the East Slays — were blessed to be part of the Orthodox world.

Undoubtedly, the Greek nexus left a further legacy among the East Slays, a modicum of anti-Catholicism that related to the fact that the two great Christian religions were to some extent rivals and held the different beliefs described above. The Greek objection to Catholicism turned to rage following the famous Fourth Crusade in 1204 (1204–61), which led to the Latin occupation of Constantinople, and certainly this furor filtered down to the East Slays. Perhaps, too, the movement of the trade routes away from the Dnieper River—Black Sea route to the Mediterranean and Europe during the crusades, particularly the Fourth Crusade, irritated the East Slays.

However, there is not much direct evidence that the schism of 1054, the Greek rivalry with Catholicism or the crusades, particularly the Fourth Crusade, seriously turned the East Slays against Catholic Europe. After the schism of 1054, the East Slays welcomed visits to Kievan Rus by Catholic missionaries, including Bruno of Querfurth, Adalbert of Trier, Reinberg von Kolberg and St. Hyacinth of Cracow, the founder of the Dominican order in Poland. St. Hyacinth even set up a small mission in Kiev in the thirteenth century on the eve of the Mongol invasion. Catholics were also resident in Kiev and Catholic priests in Novgorod by the twelfth century.⁷ In addition, the Volynia-Galicia region of Kievan Rus developed relations with Catholic Europe across the Prague—Cracow—Lvov—Kiev trade route. Iaroslav the Wise (1019–54), the son of Vladimir, also arranged dynastic marriages with Catholic ruling families in Europe. Daniel, the ruler of Volynia-Galicia, accepted a king’s crown from Pope Innocent IV in 1253, and his son, Roman, married into the Austrian ruling family, which was staunchly Catholic. The very fact that marriages continued between Western Christian princesses and East Slavic princes indicated that intercommunion between parts of Kievan Rus and Rome persisted. In addition, the hierarchs of Kiev remained in constant contact with Rome in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and did not involve themselves actively in the disputes between the two major centers of the Christian faith, Rome and Constantinople.⁸ The Varangian leaders, too, who helped organize the first East Slavic state of Kievan Rus, came from Scandinavia and, although pagans at the time of their arrival among the East Slays, left a lingering nexus between Kievan Rus and the West, particularly around the Baltic Sea, in Novgorod and up and down the river systems between the Baltic and Black Seas.

As for the trade routes, their westward shift actually worked to the advantage of some East Slavic towns, like Novgorod and Smolensk, which were near the Baltic Sea. Furthermore, the decline of trade between the southern Dnieper towns and the Byzantine empire had more to do with nomadic incursions across the steppe and with internecine warfare among the East Slays than with the crusades, particularly the Fourth Crusade. Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii, for example, transferred the capital from Kiev to the northeastern part of Kievan Rus, the Vladimir-Suzdal region in 1169, long before the Fourth Crusade. The move reflected the declining importance of trade on the Dnieper River and a desire by the East Slays to escape the constant pressure of steppe nomads. In fact, Prince Andrei sacked Kiev in 1169. The city was sacked again in 1203, and the Mongols or Tartars razed it in 1240. Furthermore, Catholic Europe and the Byzantine empire collaborated during the first three crusades, which saw Catholic armies defeat the Turks, allowed the Byzantine empire to recover its key lands in Asia Minor and established a cooperative framework between the Byzantine emperor and Western forces that saw Western Christian states established in the Levant and Jerusalem.⁹

In 1237–40 the Mongols under the leadership of Batu, the grandson of Genghis Khan, poured through the Ural Gap and swept across the Eurasian plain. They conquered all of Kievan Rus and razed its major towns, including Kiev, Lvov and Moscow, sparing only Novgorod in the far northwest because its ruler, Alexander Nevskii, agreed to accept Mongol overlordship and to pay the Mongols the annual levy of taxes and manpower that all other East Slavic princes had been coerced to pay. The metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus started looking for a more secure and less exposed location and eventually settled in 1325 in Moscow. The Mongol cavalry also advanced into Europe as far as the Adriatic Sea. However, internal Mongol politics following the death of Great Khan Ugedey led Batu to pull the Mongols back to the lands of Kievan Rus in 1242 and there establish the satellite called the Golden Horde...