Russian Orthodox Church Wages a ‘Holy War’ Against Satanism, and the West
A battle has erupted in Moldova over its links to the Russian Orthodox Church, seen by many as a tool of Moscow’s influence abroad.
ACCORDING TO ANOTHER SOURCE:
The village, according to the retired teacher in northern Moldova, was a placid place until the local priest, disoriented by the war in Ukraine, succumbed to Satan, she said. Before that, people got on well and attended Sunday services at the same Russian Orthodox Church.
Now, said Tamara Gheorghies, the teacher, “they don’t even say hello to each other.” The reason, at least in her telling, is simple: a decision by the village priest to sever his allegiance to Patriarch Kirill in Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Moscow Patriarch has for decades commanded the loyalty of Orthodox Christians across the former Soviet Union. But in March, the village priest joined a rival ecclesiastical hierarchy based in neighboring Romania, a member of the European Union.
“He has taken the path of terrible sin,” said Ms. Gheorghies, a member of a group of residents who are fighting to restore the primacy of the Russian church and defeat what they see as a rush to ally with decadent Western forces.
The rift over ecclesiastical allegiance in Rautel, a village of around 4,000 people 50 miles from Moldova’s northeastern border with Ukraine, is just one of many now playing out across the country and in other former Soviet Republics. Patriarch Kirill is a zealous ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. He has been pressing to maintain the loyalty of Orthodox faithful beyond Russia’s borders, and with it, Russian influence.
“This is not about religion or faith. It is about geopolitics,” said Victor Gotisan, a former theology student in Moldova who researches church issues.
The rival hierarchies share the same theology and the only significant difference between them is their choice of calendar. The Russian church uses the old Julian system, while the Romanian one favors a revised calendar that puts Christmas on Dec. 25 instead of Jan. 7, the date traditionally celebrated in Russia and Moldova.
Though identical in many ways, the Russian and Romanian churches have become proxies in an escalating struggle for influence between East and West that has convulsed the former Soviet territories since 1991.
The conflict in Ukraine, which Patriarch Kirill hails as a “holy war” against Satanism, has sharply intensified that struggle. Dozens of Orthodox priests have defected from the church since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Russia is fighting to keep its grip,” Mr. Gotisan said. But to do that, he added, it needs to keep its grip on Moldova’s Orthodox Christian church, and with it, the power to appoint its bishops and other senior clergy.
What priests say in their services will influence the outcome of a critical October presidential election in Moldova as well as a referendum on joining the European Union, he said.
“Priests enjoy authority in places that politicians have difficulty reaching. People listen to what they say,” said Maxim Melinte, a priest in Ghidighici, a village near the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. Mr. Melinte broke with Patriarch Kirill last year. Since then, he has received threats and venomous insults from pro-Moscow zealots. He described them as “Russian Talibans.”
Victor Turcano, the priest in Rautel, defected in March, outraged by the Russian church’s support for the invasion of Ukraine. He immediately faced a barrage of attacks from Bishop Marchel, his superior and a loyalist of Patriarch Kirill in the nearby city of Balti.
The bishop denounced Mr. Turcano as a womanizer and home breaker — “lies and slander,” responded the priest — and ordered him defrocked. In June, the bishop mobilized dozens of like-minded Orthodox clerics from across the region to try to take the Rautel church back by force and install a new priest faithful to the Moscow Patriarch.
The effort failed after Rautel’s mayor, Tudor Istrati, who had applauded Mr. Turcano’s decision, called in extra police officers to prevent a storming of the church.
Not a churchgoer himself, the mayor said he had no interest in ecclesiastical quarrels but supported Mr. Turcano because he was backed by most of his parishioners. The priest’s opponents, he added, “are just trying to get people riled up.” Moscow, he added, “has given nothing to the village” but the European Union has funded road, water and other projects.
In an interview in his office, decorated with photographs of Patriarch Kirill, and other Russian church leaders, Bishop Marchel derided the mayor and defecting priests as victims of “Russophobia well paid by the West.”
A fervent opponent of Moldova joining the European Union, the bishop said he wants his country to be part of Europe, but “not the Europe of Sodom.” In the battle over values, he added, “Russia is on the side of God.”
The Russian church has a long history of serving the Russian state, an alliance that has become ever tighter under President Putin.
Mr. Putin, hailed by Patriarch Kirill as a “miracle from God,” presents Russia as a bastion of traditional Christian values in the hope of expanding its reach and influence through opposition to liberal democracy, feminism and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.
The war in Ukraine, however, has blunted Russia’s once potent religious weapon, sundering Orthodox communities around the world and prompting widespread defections from the Patriarch.
In a letter to Patriarch Kirill last year, Metropolitan Vladimir, the head of the Moldovan Orthodox Church — a largely autonomous institution but ultimately subordinate to Moscow — warned that his church was rapidly losing support because “it is perceived in Moldovan society as an outpost of the Kremlin and a supporter of the Russian intervention in Ukraine.”
This, he said, was pushing more believers to shift their allegiance to the Metropolis of Bessarabia, a rival Orthodox hierarchy subordinate to Romania’s patriarch. “We are in a situation of institutional bankruptcy,” he warned.
Russia’s allies in the Moldovan church dismissed the letter as part of a conspiracy led by pro-Western clerics.
The Russian church’s crisis has been festering since the 1990s but intensified greatly after Mr. Putin’s invasion. Mr. Gotisan, the researcher, estimated that nearly 10 percent of Moldova’s Orthodox parishes have since changed sides. Many more will follow, he predicted, because of anger at Patriarch Kirill’s blessing of Russian soldiers.
It was Kirill’s support for the war, said Mr. Turcano, the priest in Rautel, that pushed him to shift his church’s allegiance.
Soon after the war started, he said, parishioners started complaining that, at the end of each service, he included a brief prayer for Patriarch Kirill. Such prayers are a routine show of respect in Orthodox churches affiliated with Russia, but for parishioners in a village with deep kinship ties to Ukraine across the border, they now seemed deeply offensive.
“Father, how can you pray for Russia when it is killing our family next door?” Mr. Turcano recalled being asked. He held a vote on whether to stick with the Patriarch or jump ship. Those favoring a change won easily, he said. His opponents say the vote was not fair because it was held without advance notice.
Tatiana Palaghiuc, a Rautel resident who wants to stick with Patriarch Kirill, said she has collected more than 600 signatures calling for legal action to stop Mr. Turcano from “leading us all astray.”
On a recent Sunday, the Rautel church was crowded with worshipers, but the dissidents all stayed away. They now go to church in Balti, Bishop Marchel’s pro-Russian bastion.
Silvia Popovic, 60, another Rautel resident, said the war in Ukraine had left her in no doubt about which side to choose. “One patriarch splashes Russian tanks with holy water. The other side calls for the bombing and killing to stop,” she said after a recent Sunday service.
“For me, it is an easy choice,” she said.
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