SPIEGELONLINE INTERNATIONAL: Metropolitan Kyrill, foreign minister of the Russian Orthodox Church, discusses Christian values in the post-communist era, his relationship with the pope in Rome, Vladimir Putin the churchgoer -- and wrangles with SPIEGEL about homosexuality.
SPIEGEL: Your Eminence, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church seemed to have prevailed over the godless communists. But has it been able to fill the spiritual vacuum that followed?
Kyrill: I wouldn't call it a vacuum. In communism, the church had no direct way of influencing society, but it did influence Russian culture and people's awareness. I remember a tour guide in a monastery in Vologda in the early 1970s. She talked about architecture and painting as if she were giving a sermon. There was no talk of Christianity, but her speech depended on a Christian system of values. This woman was not alone. Writers and artists spoke the same way. Or, someone would see a destroyed church and discover another world beyond the gloomy prefabricated high-rises where people lived. Christian values were always kept alive among the people. They ultimately brought about the fall of communism.
SPIEGEL: Crime and corruption were rampant after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Murder, robbery and fraud became mass phenomena. Wasn't this a defeat for the church?
Kyrill: Reviving morality is a long process. We also see high crime rates in other countries. Besides, Russia faced massive social changes. Our economy was in ruins, foreign influence was growing and so was the consumption mentality, the focus on performance, all of these postmodern ideas which treat everything as relative and no longer require us to distinguish between truth and lies.
SPIEGEL: It sounds as if the present is no better than the past, in your opinion.
Kyrill: The church should have taken time to regenerate. We were weakened by atheism, and then we were faced with a double burden. We were like a boxer who walks around for months with his arm in a cast and is then abruptly shoved into the ring, accompanied by shouts of encouragement. But there we encountered a well-trained opponent, in the form of a wide variety of missionaries from America and South Korea who tried to convert the Russian people to other faiths. Religion was also marginalized by a secular way of thinking.
SPIEGEL: Is capitalism ultimately worse than communism?
Kyrill: The free market economy has certainly proved to be more effective than the planned economy. Unlike corporate executives, however, the church also believes in justice. As far as that's concerned, we have no fewer problems today, perhaps even more, than in the Soviet era. The gap between rich and poor in Russia is scandalous. That's an issue we are addressing.
SPIEGEL: You must find it obscene, the way the Russian oligarchs, with their palaces and yachts, show off their wealth.
Kyrill: It isn't the church's place to point to someone and say: He owns yachts and airplanes, so let's take away his riches and redistribute them. That happened in the 1917 revolution. At the time, they were saying that paradise was the next step after expropriation. But what we got instead was hell. May God protect Russia from repeating the same mistake. However, the government must ensure that the gap doesn't become too wide. Russia's future depends on it. ’The Bible Calls it a Sin’ >>>
Part 2:
’Men Can Control Their Drives’
This superb interview will be cross-posted at The Shrewd Economist because of several references to economic affairs in post-communist Russia.
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)
