On Sunday, at his weekly Angelus appointment, Pope Francis decried a new Ukrainian law concerning the Russian Orthodox Church and its presence in Ukraine.
Popes don’t usually criticize national laws so specifically.
Moreover, the most senior Catholic in Ukraine, Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), has strongly endorsed the law.
Thus the Holy Father and Major Archbishop Shevchuk, the “Father and Head” of the largest Eastern Rite Church in communion with Rome, have taken starkly opposing positions.
Restricting the Russians
The Ukrainian Parliament, Verkhovna Rada, passed a law severely restricting the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.
The vote, by a supermajority of 256-29, took place on Aug. 20. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the law on Aug. 24, and Pope Francis spoke vehemently against it on Aug. 25.
Law No. 8371, as it is known, prohibits the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine and the activities of religious structures affiliated with Moscow.
The premise of the law is that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has unambiguously allied the Russian Orthodox Church with Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Russia.
The Russian Orthodox Church has thus become complicit in the invasion and should be treated as an accomplice rather than a proper religious body.
The law requires that Orthodox Christians in Ukraine distance themselves from the Moscow Patriarchate or risk having their activities prohibited.
The same logic has been behind official sanctions against Kirill implemented by, for example, the United Kingdom and Canada. They have treated Kirill not as a religious leader but as an agent of state power.
There are some historical analogies.
In 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, was occupied by a precursor of al-Qaida. The occupiers were not considered pilgrims, despite being in a holy site, but political radicals.
In 1984, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a military raid on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion.
While viewed by Sikhs as an intolerable desecration of a sacred site and a violation of religious freedom, Gandhi argued that the shrine had forfeited its religious immunities when it became an armory for separatist forces. Gandhi was assassinated a few months later by her own Sikh bodyguards.
Divisions in Orthodoxy
The Moscow Patriarchate claims that Orthodox Christians in Ukraine are under its jurisdiction — that Ukraine is part of Moscow’s historic canonical territory. Thus the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) has been subordinate to the Moscow patriarchate.
After the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 — supported by Kirill of Moscow — Ukrainians rejected Moscow’s religious claims in increasing numbers.
How could Patriarch Kirill claim the adherence of Ukrainians when he supported their violent subjugation by the Kremlin?
An independent “autocephalous” Orthodox Church in Ukraine (OCU) was thus formed in 2018. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the head of global Orthodoxy, granted official recognition to the independent OCU in 2019.
That infuriated Moscow, and the Russian Orthodox effectively excommunicated Bartholomew.
As a consequence, while Orthodoxy is the majority religion in Ukraine, the Orthodox community is divided.
The majority of Orthodox belong to the independent OCU, while a minority remain the Moscow-controlled UOC. Law 8371 is aimed at severing the UOC from Muscovite control or suppressing it altogether.
Restricting or Protecting Religious Freedom?
State regulation of religious affiliation and activities is prima facie a clear violation of religious freedom.
American sympathizers of Vladimir Putin — Tucker Carlson most prominent among them — have made the argument that Zelenskyy’s government is persecuting Russian-affiliated Christians. Sen. JD Vance has also accused Ukraine of violating religious liberties, part of his campaign to cut off U.S. assistance to Ukraine.
The consensus view within Ukraine is that religious freedom is not being restricted in general, but that extraordinary measures have been taken against a specific religious body that has been instrumentalized by Russian aggression.
An analogy would be to European governments monitoring the preaching in mosques to counter homegrown Islamist radicalization.
Ukraine’s Law 8371 had first been proposed in January 2023. In November 2023, a wide array of Ukrainian religious leaders visited Washington to argue that religious freedom was not under restriction in Ukraine.
Law 8371 has been endorsed by the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations.
Thus what is understandably considered a restriction of religious freedom from outside is considered, by a majority in Ukraine, to be a protection of religion from state subjugation — the state in question being Putin’s Russia.
Law 8371 is thus promoted in Ukraine as a defense of religious freedom.
In Moscow, Patriarch Kirill fiercely denounced the law and, on Saturday, appealed worldwide to religious leaders to protest this attack on religious freedom.
Pope Francis on Religious Freedom
On Sunday, Pope Francis heeded Kirill’s plea and emphatically denounced the new law as a violation of religious freedom:
“Thinking about the laws recently adopted in Ukraine, I fear for the freedom of those who pray, because those who truly pray always pray for all. A person does not commit evil because of praying. If someone commits evil against his people, he will be guilty for it, but he cannot have committed evil because he prayed. So let those who want to pray be allowed to pray in what they consider their church. Please, let no Christian church be abolished directly or indirectly. Churches are not to be touched!”
Rarely does a pope speak so directly about a political matter in a specific country.
Pope Francis himself rarely speaks so bluntly about religious freedom. For example, papal comments about the wholesale attacks on the Catholic Church in Nicaragua — throwing out Mother Teresa’s sisters, the expulsion of the papal nuncio, imprisonment of clergy, seizure of Catholic institutions and assets, including that of its Jesuit university — have been largely muted, calling for dialogue and withholding direct criticism.
The Holy Father’s secret diplomatic pact with China meant that he resisted for years even mentioning that more than a million Uyghur Muslims were in communist internment camps. Even then, his comments were only in passing.
Pope Francis has never defended religious liberty for Catholics in Nicaragua or Venezuela, or for Muslims in China, as he spoke in defense of the Russian Orthodox in Ukraine.
The only comparable interventions of the Holy Father into practical politics have been related to the environment and migration. He has spoken often in generic terms about economics, abortion and gender ideology, but without reference to specific domestic laws.
Orthodoxy Reacts — Russia and Constantinople
Despite being warned against being “Putin’s altar boy” in the biting formulation of Pope Francis, Patriarch Kirill appealed to the Holy Father and other Christian leaders to join his protest.
In a message released on Saturday, the same day Zelenskyy signed the new law, Kirill wrote:
“On 20th August 2024, the Parliament of Ukraine adopted the law On the Protection of the Constitutional Order in the Sphere of Activities of Religious Organizations, the actual purpose of which is the legislative ban of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
The blatant contradictions between the provisions of this law and the norms of the Constitution of Ukraine, its international agreements, human rights and fundamental principles of law have been repeatedly noted in documents of major international human rights organizations."
The following day, Pope Francis issued his condemnation.
In contrast, Bartholomew, the ecumenical patriarch, took the side of the Ukraine’s non-Moscow-aligned Orthodox and the local Catholics.
Just three days after the vote in the Verkhovna Rada, an official delegation representing Bartholomew made an official and fraternal visit to Archbishop Shevchuk and the UGCC.
No protest against the law was registered; to the contrary, Bartholomew indicated his solidarity with the local Catholic view.
Moreover, the day after the vote, Bartholomew had a telephone call with Zelenskyy, during which the Ukrainian president defended Law 8371 and mentioned its wide support among Ukrainian religious leaders.
A truly extraordinary situation has come to pass. The leader of the “Third Rome,” Kirill of Moscow, appealed for support against the consensus of Ukrainian Christian leaders.
The “Second Rome,” Bartholomew of Constantinople, did not give that support and sent strong signals that he sided with the opposition to Kirill.
Meanwhile, Francis of Rome took Kirill’s side against Bartholomew and the local Catholics of Ukraine.
Ukrainian Catholics: Rome Against Kyiv
Patriarch Shevchuk of Kyiv argued strongly for Law 8371, charging the Russian Orthodox Church and the UOC as being agents of Putin’s war, in effect enemies of the Ukrainian state.
He rejects their claim to religious freedom as being insincere.
Thus another extraordinary situation has come to pass.
The Holy Father, head of the Latin Church, and Patriarch Shevchuk, head of the UGCC, are in open and complete conflict on a matter of great importance.
Pope Francis has taken a position against the majority Christian and Catholic consensus in Ukraine.
It is likely that Ukrainian Catholics are no longer capable of surprise at their lack of support from Rome.
The tipping point came last March, when Pope Francis advised Ukrainians to have the “courage of the white flag” and seek to negotiate with Putin to end the war by ceding their territory.
Since the 2016 meeting of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill in Cuba, Archbishop Shevchuk has acknowledged that many Ukrainian Catholics feel that the Holy Father has betrayed them in his desire to placate Kirill — and by necessary extension, Putin.
The dispute over Law 8371 will damage Rome-Kyiv relations, but they are already in a poor state.
The Holy Father’s intervention has created a new and surprising dynamic: Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill on one side, taking the position of pundits and politicians (Carlson and Vance), while Bartholomew of Constantinople takes the side of the embattled Catholics of Ukraine.
The consequences will be enduring.