Needed – an Ecumenical Reset
By George Weigel, First Things:
In the early 1990s, I met Kirill, now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, when the man christened Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev was chief ecumenical officer of the Russian Orthodox Church. The occasion was a dinner hosted at the Library of Congress by the late, great James H. Billington, whose history of Russian culture, The Icon and the Axe, remains the classic work on the subject. Metropolitan Kirill, as he was then styled, struck me as a sophisticated cosmopolitan, not unused to the finer things of life; there was nothing of the Dostoevskian ascetic or mystic about him. And if he seemed less a churchman than a suave and worldly diplomat in ecclesiastical garb, one had to be impressed by the cool composure with which he played that role. Much of the table talk and subsequent conversation over postprandials revolved around the possibility of Russia’s becoming a functioning democracy–a prospect for which, if memory serves, Kirill showed considerable, if urbane, skepticism.
Investigating his biography later, certain things about Kirill came into sharper focus.
In 1971, at the tender age of twenty-five, then-Archimandrite Kirill was sent by the patriarchate of Moscow as a Russian Orthodox representative to the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Ten years earlier, the Soviet regime, then conducting a draconian persecution that shut down half the country’s Orthodox churches, had “allowed” the Russian Orthodox Church to join the World Council. The regime’s motives were hardly ecumenical, however. Russian Orthodox representatives at the World Council were carefully selected by the KGB, the Soviet secret intelligence service; their task was to block any challenge to the Soviet Union’s violations of religious freedom, while turning the World Council into a constant critic of the West. All this is detailed in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. And from that invaluable resource, it is impossible not to conclude that Kirill was, at the very least, a KGB asset; he may well have been a KGB agent like another Vladimir, Putin.
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