My readers can be forgiven if they hoped that my July 5 “The Patriarchal Saga that Keeps on Giving” would be my final word on Filaret Denysenko. I had certainly hoped that it would be. I’ve grown just as weary of writing about the man and his antics as many of you must feel from reading about them.
What a vain hope that turned out to be.
Not only did Denysenko give interviews on July 1 and 3 to Ukraine’s pro-Russia ZIK TV, as I reported in my last op-ed, but a Russian Orthodox nun with whom I enjoy a cordial friendship has pointed out a particularly disturbing excerpt from Denysenko’s July 1 interview as reported by Rosbalt, a Russian news agency operating out of St. Petersburg. The title of Rosbalt’s précis? “There is no sin in the Church’s cooperation with the KGB.” My friend commented wryly, “Good news for Gundyaev!” (i.e., Kirill, the current Patriarch of Moscow).
This is no hypothetical for Denysenko—or for Gundyaev. Writer and religious rights activist Felix Corley has produced reports on both Denysenko’s and Gundyaev’s careers as KGB agents during their tenure as priests and bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church.
To be clear, the Russian Church was thrust into an unenviably impossible position in 1927 when, in exchange for the right to exist, the Church had not only to recognize the Soviet regime but to declare its loyalty to it. The expectation that the Moscow Patriarchate’s bishops and priests everywhere in the world must declare their loyalty to the Soviet Union resulted—predictably enough—in the schism out of which emerged both the precursor to the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). The OCA reconciled with the Moscow Patriarchate in 1970 in exchange for its autocephaly, and ROCOR in 2007 in exchange for an agreed statement on the events of 1927 and its continuing status as an autonomous church.
No one suggests that we re-litigate the Russian Church’s mandatory collaboration with the Soviet state on multiple levels during that tragic era. In a poignant appeal not to judge those in whose shoes we haven’t walked, Dimitry Pospielovsky makes a persuasive case for compassion toward the hierarchy and clergy of the Moscow Patriarchate in his 1984 The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 1917-1982. When faced with the stark choice of having a church or not having a church, who among us can say that we would have come out with cleaner hands? One of my instructors at St. Vladimir’s Seminary some thirty years ago wondered—in sympathy, not in judgment—how the Russian bishops and priests of that era slept at night.
What rankles about Denysenko is his crass lack of self-awareness and compunction for his misdeeds as a KGB agent against his Church and his nation. His cavalier defense that he had no choice but to obey the secular authorities flies in the face of Orthodox spiritualty. Unlike the legalism that characterizes certain understandings of sin in Western Christianity, our liturgy and our prayers in the Orthodox Church acknowledge—and ask divine forgiveness for—the existential reality of sins committed knowingly and unknowingly, willingly and unwillingly. Denysenko has been a monk for nearly seventy years. He should understand this in the marrow of his bones.
Denysenko is a very old dog, impervious to learning any new tricks. Perhaps a more realistic, indeed worthier hope in all this is that the Ukrainian Church might make a clean start by openly confessing its institutional sins and failures, whether in collusion with the Soviet regime or in betrayals of the Gospel since the fall of communism.
We know too well how hard it is for an ecclesiastical bureaucracy to admit to wrongdoing. Yet we also know how profoundly healing it can be to both church and society when the institutional church makes a sincere confession of its sins.
Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian of Ukrainian and Lemko descent on his mother’s side, a PhD student in Theological Studies at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and the founding editor of Orthodoxy in Dialogue. He holds a BA in Sexuality Studies from York University and an MA 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 MDiv at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary near New York City. See his complete list of articles for the Kyiv Post on his author page. He can be reached at [email protected].
