Window on Eurasia

Has the Moscow Patriarchate’s Chaplin Finally Gone Too Far?

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 28, 2006 – Over the last several months, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the deputy chief of the Moscow Patriarchate’s External Relations Department, has departed from his normal diplomatic style and lashed out at Muslims, journalists writing about religious issues, and others he considers to be “enemies of the Church.”

His remarks have infuriated many. Muslims, for example, were infuriated
by Chaplin’s suggestion that if they did not want to study “The
Bases of Orthodoxy,” they should find themselves another country in
which to live. But until yesterday, no one was prepared to take on the
powerful Churchman in court.

Now, Sergei Bychkov, a “Moskovskiy komsomolets” journalist whom
Chaplin has accused among other things of being “a liar” for his
often extremely critical coverage of the Russian Orthodox Church and
its leaders, is suing Chaplin for slander in a Moscow court, Interfax
reported yesterday.

In an interview given to Portal-Credo.ru and published today, Chaplin
said he welcomed the suit because it would give him the chance to
defend himself and attract broader attention to “the dozens of false
assertions” Bychkov has made and to highlight the fact that the
journalist has not denied that he is “a liar.”

The archpriest told the religious news service that he has still not
been served with court papers because he has been on vacation, but he
noted that he “will soon return to Moscow and is ready to go into
battle” for his own good name and that of the Orthodox Church –
even though he insisted that the suit was a personal one.

Just what is going on? Why has the normally careful Chaplin, the
powerful deputy of Metropolitan Kirill and one of the most influential
thinkers of the Church become so outspoken? And why is a Moscow
journalist now prepared to challenge him when the country’s Muslim
leaders were not?

The answers to these questions remain far from clear, as Credo.ru’s
Valeriy Yemel’yanov pointed out in a commentary yesterday, but the
history of Chaplin’s new approach to what he views as the
“enemies” of the Russian Orthodox Church does provide some clues
[http://portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=comment&id=1030].

Earlier this year, Chaplin took the unusual step of posting on the
“Religion and Media” website of what he described as
“scraps”from his notebooks and diaries. So far, eight of these
excerpts have appeared, almost every one of which containing attacks on
one or another enemy. All eight are available at
[http://www.religare.ru/subject200.htm].

But Chaplin did not leave things there. In public speeches, he
reiterated many of the things contained in his “jottings,”
including most infamously, his suggestion earlier this summer that the Church had already prepared “an enemies list” to be posted on the Internet so
that Russians could know who their friends and opponents really are.

Initially, as Yemel’yanov notes, no one was quite sure what to make
of these jottings or Chaplin’s broader use of them. Were they the
private musings of one priest about things of concern to him alone? Or were
they part of the Patriarchate’s latest effort to settle scores with those
it feels are its opponents?

No one who has dealt with Chaplin in the past could quite believe that
they were the former, but few could bring themselves to conclude
definitively that what he was saying in these comments actually
reflected the considered opinion of Metropolitan Kirill, let alone
Patriarch Aleksii II and other leaders of the Church.

As a result, some suggested that Chaplin had taken this step because he
felt he was losing out to others in having influence over the direction
the Church is taking. But others argued that he was reflecting the
emergence of a new consensus within the Patriarchate and the Russian
government over how religious affairs should be handled.

The latter view is almost certainly and disturbingly the case,
Portal-credo.ru’s Yemel’yanov suggests. And he argues that the
views that Chaplin is now putting out should carry the following
notification: “’The Ministry of Health Warns that Clericalism is Dangerous for
Your Health!’ Above all, for your spiritual well-being.”

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