The theologian Jean-François Colosimo analyzes the consequences of the ambiguous relationship between Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin. For him, the two men are doomed to fall together.

Aleteia: You point out that Putin and Kirill are of the same generation. Apart from their age, what do these two men have in common?

Jean-François Colosimo: In Russia, after 1989, only two institutions emerged from the rubble of communism: the KGB and the Church, which have old ties. Kirill immediately entered the race to become patriarch, a goal he achieved in 2009. While he had an initial reputation as a progressive and ecumenist, he took on the anti-Western bias typical of the new authoritarian regime and endorsed Putin's foreign policy. He becomes in a way his minister of religious affairs. In the same way that Putin leads a multi-ethnic, multi-faith and multilingual federation, Kirill, in the name of Orthodoxy, presides over the Religious Council of Russia, which brings together the Chief Rabbi for Judaism, the Grand Mufti for Islam and the Grand Lama for Buddhism. On the outside, the pontiff and the despot profess the same ideology of the unity of the "Russian world," in other words, of a Russia that includes all Russian-speaking populations. This pan-Russian imperialism was made possible by the fact that there was no Nuremberg of communism. Putin and Kirill are two survivors of homo sovietus. They agree on the oblivion of the Gulag, the refusal of the international order and the denial of human rights.

The patriarch seeks to affirm the greatness of the Russian Church, just as the president intends to reaffirm the greatness of the Russian state.

What do they bring to each other?

Kirill and Putin are driven by the same restoration project. The patriarch seeks to affirm the greatness of the Russian Church, just as the president intends to reaffirm the greatness of the Russian state. Internally, the Church is taking over the role once played by the Communist Party. It is now in charge of patriotism, morality, social norms and the recruitment of elites. In this context, Kirill intends to imitate the interpretation he has of a 19th-century Catholicism that never existed, a fortress Church which governed society. He wants to make this Church play, against the clock, the great battles against Modernity with an inquisitorial dimension that is not traditionally Orthodox. Outside, Kirill brings his diplomatic support to Putin. The Moscow Patriarchate is the only Russian institution that still covers the whole of the former USSR. It supports the geopolitical maneuvers of the current regime. The representations of the Moscow Patriarchate in Belarus, in Ukraine, but also in the Baltic States, in Kazakhstan and in the Central Asian Republics are in fact second embassies. With its extensions in the former satellite countries and the former sister republics, but also in Europe and in the Americas, the Moscow patriarchate makes up about 50% of the Orthodox world and benefits from the important diplomatic and financial resources reserved for it by the Russian state. The two men walk hand in hand in domestic and foreign policy. The aspergillum blesses the saber and, from now on, the incense burner legitimizes the missile.

Jean-Francois Colosimo

Jean-Francois Colosimo

Kirill will follow Putin in his fall