My readers here at the Kyiv Post and at Orthodoxy in Dialogue know of my unflinching support for Ukraine’s political and ecclesiastical liberation from centuries of oppression at the hands of Tsarist-Soviet-Putinist Russia.
I have been especially supportive of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kyiv. By every metric, the grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was the right thing to do ecclesiologically, pastorally, and politically, despite some of the Phanar’s worrisome neo-papist claims that underlay it.
Yet my support has not been blindly uncritical. I have lamented the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s incomprehensible mishandling of its Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Western Europe and the OCU’s misguided and predictably disastrous actions with respect to the “honorary patriarchate” of Filaret Denysenko. (More on the latter in my next op-ed.)
This spirit of transparency compels me to call attention to the Bellingcat website’s somewhat lengthy and sobering exposé of June 21, “Calls to ‘Fight’ LGBT People by Ukrainian Cleric Emblematic of Church’s Proximity to Far Right.” Everyone who cares for the well-being of Ukraine and for the Ukrainian Church should give it an attentive reading.
Ukraine-haters will see this report as “proof” that Ukrainians and their Church are all right-wing nationalist extremists. Yet this hackneyed trope hardly squares with the fact that a predominantly Orthodox country handed 75% of its vote to a Jewish president over against the Orthodox incumbent, and just now finished hosting the largest and most peaceful LGBTQ festival in the history of Kyiv Pride. The ongoing project of Ukrainian democracy continues in its birth pangs, but shows promise of a bright future. Bellingcat makes clear that the right-wing extremism exposed in its report does not enjoy widespread support in Ukraine.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the Orthodox Church everywhere attracts right-wing, nationalist, extremist elements who treat Orthodoxy as a geopolitical project rather than a practice of inner transformation through lifelong repentance and ascesis, and whose violent ideologies bear no resemblance to the Gospel or to Orthodox spirituality.
We see this even in the US, where the Orthodox Church’s numerical insignificance presents no obstacle to being discovered by various nationalist and even neo-Nazi individuals or groups and conscripted as an unwitting cover for their nefarious aims. Repeated appeals to the largely ineffectual Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America to address this issue (archived under White Supremacy and Racism at Orthodoxy in Dialogue) have been met with deafening silence since January 2018.
In Ukraine, Tradition and Order (Традиція і Порядок)—reportedly one of the nation’s most violent far-right groups—has created a meme which can be seen in the Bellingcat article: it consists of a photo of Metropolitan Epiphanius standing before the iconostas of a church and blessing the congregation, with a caption superimposed: “Epiphanius on LGBT: We Cannot Call Sin Good.” Tradition and Order’s logo figures prominently at the bottom of the photo.
While Epiphanius’ statement is hardly surprising and seems innocuous enough, its use in this context, by this particular group, serves to justify the anti-LGBTQ violence for which Tradition and Order has become known in Ukraine. This lends a note of urgency to my appeal to Epiphanius, published on these pages on May 17, to distance himself and his Church as publicly and visibly as possible from these extremist movements, and to work energetically to promote a just society where all citizens enjoy their rightful and safe place.
In Russia the Kremlin and Patriarchate are so completely in bed with each other that it seems humanly impossible to pry them from their adulterous embrace. In Ukraine this is not the case. Metropolitan Epiphanius, the hierarchy, and the clergy of the OCU simply must preach—in season and out of season—that there is no place in the Orthodox Church for unrepented nationalist extremism.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian of Ukrainian and Lemko descent on his mother’s side, a Ph.D. student in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and the founding editor of Orthodoxy in Dialogue. He holds a B.A. in Sexuality Studies from York University and an M.A. in Theology from Regis College, both in Toronto, and is an alumnus of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Earlier in life, he completed the course work for the M.Div. at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary near New York City.
