Fascinating.
Absolutely fascinating.
I'd love to see this happen.
My interest in this was piqued by a small (tiny) footnote to a report which I read - I still remember sitting, stunned, at my desk in my office in the EU HQ, which was next door to Lavrenti Beria's villa, when I read this - which had reported - as a foot-noted aside - that the Patriarchate in Moscow (Moscow!) had turned down a request by the Orthodox churches in South Ossetia and Abkhazia to transfer their theological loyalty to Moscow rather than Tbilisi.
Reading that, I was absolutely fascinated - normally the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian state (ever since the time of the Tsars) have had a disgustingly symbiotic relationship - so why - on this occasion - was the (Moscow Patriarchiate) church taking a different stance to that promoted by the Russian government - and I thought this merited further examination and exploration, and asked to be allowed spend some time thinking about, researching, analysing - and writing about - this.
While my superiors were a bit puzzled - I was supposed to spend my time editing reports on, and analysing current political stuff and current breaches (among other things) of the Sarkozy-Medvedev agreement - they were surprisngly tolerant of my desire to take a flying leap into Orthodox Church history and re-visit the theology of the early middle ages, around a thousand years earlier.
Anyway, I found it an extraordinarily instructive, illuminating - (and, to my surprise, my superiors insisted on sending what I wrote to Brussels - I had merely intended to make them aware of stuff I thought they should know - whereupon Brussels made clear that they "liked" - to use a modern term - my report) exercise, and a very useful one as well.
So, the (deafening) silence of the Moscow Patriarchy on current events (and their past history) is......to put it mildly, rather telling.
www.americamagazine.org
