Réflexion de James Chater

As an English person living in France, I am greatly concerned by two topics that have a lot in common: Brexit, and what is happening in the Orthodox Church, especially the Rue Daru Archdiocese. It is worth reflecting on these parallels. On the one hand, Brexit is part of a wave of retrenchment in the direction of isolationism and nationalism, obtained by the exploitation of grievances, a sort black hole of negativity. The Orthodox Church is also, in the person of the Ecumenical Patriarch (of Constantinople) trying to do away with an archdiocese based in Paris which is unique in straddling several West European countries and bringing together believers from several nations. It is a sort of ecclesiastical equivalent to the EU. While right-wing demagogues and populists from countries such as America, the UK and Poland try to pick away at the EU and seek to undermine it and replace it with something alarmingly archaic and anti-liberal, so also the nationalists and the "strong men" of the Orthodox Church see the existence of the Archdiocese of Russian Churches in Western Europe as an embarrassment, an affront, because the archdiocese is almost unique in allowing laypeople a say in the way it is run, which runs counter to their authoritarian and paternalist ways. For these people, the only true faithful are the docile sheep who do as they are told. 

The unifying force between Brexit and Orthodox retrenchment is, of course Russia: on the one hand the Russian state in the person of Putin who has been trying to engineer Brexit behind the scenes, and its close ally the Moscow Patriarchate which espouses old-fashioned values and has made no secret of its scorn for the liberal West. And many Orthodox, including some I know, have fallen for the Brexit lies, thinking that if we go back to the good old days everything will be all right. But these people will soon find out that if you try to drive a vehicle by looking in the rear mirror the whole time, you will crash.

James Chater