Ninth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The proposed paper will center an ongoing conflict around a small Ukrainian Orthodox parish in the village of Ptyche as the starting point for an analysis of the movement for Ukrainian autocephaly – i.e., the cessation of the Ukrainian Church’s subordination to Moscow. Ptyche’s Ukrainian Orthodox parish, which seeks to join the Kyiv Patriarchate – the largest “schismatic” denomination in the country – while facing the often violent opposition of Moscow loyalists is representative of many similar conflicts over contested parishes around the country. While many scholars and journalists describe the battle for and against autocephaly as a simple “proxy war,” the proposed paper will argue that this conflict is in fact inextricably tied to questions of canonical jurisdiction that have become crucial in the post-Soviet Slavic Orthodox space. This analysis, informed by cultural geography and spatial analysis, proposes a link between: Moscow’s current project of the creation of an optics of a pious Russia through widescale church construction, restoration, and the seizure of formerly secularized property; the battle against Ukrainian autocephaly, which represents the loss of sites holiest to Russian Orthodox spirituality and an end Moscow’s status as the world’s largest Orthodox denomination; the joint Church-State project of protecting Middle East Christians and helping to maintain historically Christian spaces in the region via access to a military apparatus that the Ecumenical Patriarchate lacks; and Moscow’s campaign to achieve primacy in the Orthodox world in place of Constantinople.