90 people met in Helsinki, Finland, on the 1ster until December 3 to question the ideological foundations of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and try to respond to them from a theological, political and spiritual point of view, at the invitation of the Conference of European Churches (CEC) and the Orthodox and Lutheran Churches of Finland.
A year after the European Consultation on Just Peace held in Poland, in Warsaw, it was in Finland, in Helsinki, that the Conference of European Churches (CEC) continued the process of reflection after the war of invasion led in Ukraine by Russia. 90 participants — academics, church leaders and representatives, national councils of churches or ecumenical institutions — responded to the joint invitation of the CEC and the Orthodox Church of Finland and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland to explore the theme further Resist the Empire — Promote peace — The Churches face the ideology of “ Russian world ”. The theme was broad, “ deeply theological, ethical, spiritual and human, mixing reflections around questions of empire, peace and violence ”, according to Anglican Church Bishop Dagmar Winter, vice-president of the CEC, during his welcoming speech.
Facing the past
Professor Regina Elsner, from the University of Munster in Germany, highlighted the complexity of the theme in her introductory presentation to the three days of discussions: “ the links between empire and Christianity are old and complicated, since Constantine. […] The separation between Church and empire has always been painful in history ; the Russian Orthodox Church certainly represents an exception in this area. ”Consequently, she invited the participants in the conference to an honest approach to the imperialist roots which still plague many Churches: facing the past, choosing the preferential option for the marginalized, living synodality as a practice of a structural equality and dare to approach the question of decolonization theologically.
The holding of such a conference in Helsinki on these dates, also co-organized by the two State Churches of Finland, Lutheran and Orthodox, made the past resonate many times during the three days, echoing the war led by Russia in Ukraine. Finland had in fact experienced, 86 years earlier, the invasion by Russian troops, at the dawn of the Second World War, on November 30, 1939.
Unravel ideological discourses
Much of the second day was devoted to the concept of Russkii mir(the “Russian World”) which covers the uses that the Russian political power and its ecclesial supporters, on the side of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow, make of the political and spiritual history of Russia and the Orthodox Church, justifying the need to “protect” a territory including present-day Russia, but also many of its closest neighbors, including Ukraine. The speakers all underlined the difficulty in unraveling the threads of an ideology which does not present itself as such. Professor Juha Meriläinen, teacher at the University of Helsinki, pointed out that like any propaganda speech, both the political speeches of Vladimir Putin and the theological speeches of the Patriarch of Moscow, Kyrill, play on ambivalence and contradiction,arguments are often turned around depending on the context and based on a romanticized vision of Russian history. Professor Cyril Hovorun, of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute in Los Angeles, looking back on the last ten years of theological dialogue within the Orthodox Churches, recalled that in 2015, during a previous conference in Helsinki on Orthodoxy in a post-communist world, listening to Patriarch Kyrill’s intervention, nobody believed in Russkii mir. Ten years later, no one doubts that this concept is alive and brandished by the Moscow authorities. Daring a parallel between Mussolini’s takeover in Italy in 1922 and its publication only ten years later The doctrine of fascism, Hovorun pointed out that the two did not initially present themselves as ideological systems, but as resistance movements” to the excesses of the world ”.
A call to democracies
The last morning was devoted to discussions on the illiberal danger which threatens more and more Western democracies and to the necessary democratic bursts, to the equally necessary questioning of the leaders of these countries as of the actors of their civil societies, among whom, the churches. “ The adversaries of our liberal democracies argue about the real failures of our democracies in terms of economic and ontological security ”, concluded Bishop Dagmar Winter at the end of the discussions, inviting everyone to take their part in responding to these vital issues for large parts of the populations of European countries.
The conference also concluded with the adoption of a declaration inviting the Churches to live according to the inspiration of the triple ministry of Christ (king, prophet and priest) “ to resist the Empire and promote peace: serve with passion, speak boldly, and pray faithfully. ”