Holding the balance

By B.C.

VLADIMIR PUTIN and Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko don't agree on much, but both had kind things to say about the newly departed leader of Ukraine's largest religious structure as he was buried in a grand ceremony in Kiev today. Metropolitan Volodymyr or Vladimir (respectively the Ukrainian and Russian versions of his name) died on Saturday at the age of 78 after a long walk on a political tightrope. He headed what is sometimes called the "Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate"—in other words, a church which aspires to be the main Christian organisation in Ukraine (and certainly is, in terms of parishes) and does enjoy some independence, but is ultimately under the aegis of Moscow.

For most of the time since assuming that office a couple of decades ago, he was keeping a careful balance. For his ecclesiastical masters in Moscow, his very existence was a public reminder of the fact that millions of Russians and Ukrainians still belonged to a single spiritual community, whose leader was the Patriarch of Moscow. But in his home city of Kiev, the Ukrainian prelate insisted that he was loyal to his newly independent homeland and backed its right to determine its own future. Among the thousands of Ukrainian parishes under his authority, some were very Ukrainian-minded and some staunchly pro-Russian.

In February, the prelate's severe health problems made it necessary for another bishop, Onufry, to take over his tasks on a provisional basis. The tightrope walk continued. As conflict with Russia escalated, Metropolitan Onufry carefully supported Ukraine's territorial integrity but stopped short of advocating the Ukrainian national cause against Russia. That caution was criticised as faint-hearted or even treacherous by leaders of Ukraine's other eastern Christian churches, such as the Kiev Patriarchate, which proclaimed ecclesiastical independence soon after the Soviet break-up.

With every passing day of warfare between Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces, the position of a large church organisation that is based in one of the holiest sites in Kiev but ultimately answers to Moscow comes under greater strain. That doesn't mean, though, that the position will become untenable. Both the late Metropolitan Volodymyr and his likely successors came from a cohort of Soviet-born churchmen for whom compromise and caution were second nature: loyalty to the Soviet state was seen as a price that had to be paid for keeping at least a vestigial Christian structure intact under an atheist regime. Clerics and other believers who rejected those compromises paid a heavy price.

In any case, the tributes paid to Metropolitan Volodymyr were a measure of his diplomatic skills. Mr Putin sent a message of praise for the dead man's "devoted pastoral care, great personal contribution to Russian-Ukrainian friendship and his talent as a preacher" while President Poroshenko, after praying at his coffin, spoke of "an outstanding spiritual leader who led the church at the time of its revival after decades of brutal persecution..."

Nor do all Ukrainian prelates enjoy such a broad posthumous consensus. In 1995, during the funeral of a leader of the Kiev Patriarchate, Volodymyr Romaniuk, a riot broke out after the deceased prelate's followers were denied permission to inter him in Saint Sophia's, one of the Ukrainian capital's oldest places of worship. At least two people were killed and dozens injured as priests and Ukrainian nationalists battled with riot police; the cleric, who had spent 20 years in the gulag, was hastily interred under some cobblestones.