Chri$tianity faces one of its biggest splits in centuries this weekend
Ukraine moves to create a new church independent from Russia's influence.
Critics of the plan for an independent Ukrainian church warn it could lead to violence and forced takeovers of churches loyal to the Russian branch.
Roman Lunkin, an expert in theology and director of the Center for Religion and Society Studies at the Institute of Europe in Moscow, said that "fighting around churches, disruption of worship, pickets and seizures of buildings" appeared inevitable.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/christianity-faces-one-of-its-biggest-splits-in-centuries-this-weekend/ar-BBQWHuc?li=BBnbfcL
RELIGION KILLS
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The Moscow Patriarch rules over the Ukrainian orthodox even as he blesses the assault by Russians on Ukraine.
This split started a while back and has only gained steam. So the "new" schismatic Patriarch in Ukraine blessed the defenders. Suddenly *both* churches had armies, and Putin and his angels of darkness really got pissed off. So "takeovers" have been the Russian Orthodox (even if they're rather unorthodox in many ways) backed by the Russian militants in the Donbas and the new government in Crimea, forcibly taking over Ukrainian schismatic churches, beating up parishioners and priests, trashing de-affiliated churches.
The doctrinal differences are trivial. It's the fact that church and state separation is a western thing, and a recent thing, that's at the stumbling block to a lot of western understanding. The Patriarch has almost always been knee-deep in politics, whichever patriarch in whichever church we're talking about. Originally, not so much in Slavic lands. The Horde when it was in charge of Russia did the au courant Muslim thing and identified "minorities" (even if the majority, since Muslims were the privileged everybody else was a "minority"
by their confession, and placed the religious leaders as de facto authorities over those groups. The Ottomans did that until their last gasp. When Ivan Groznyi took over from the Horde, things changed but didn't change--the Horde always had power, so Ivan had power; but the Horde gave the Patriarch a lot of umph, so Ivan kept that up when it suited him. So the Patriarch over Russia had a huge say in politics as a result, and that's carried on except when there was one all-powerful deity over Russia that allowed no other worship, the Communist Party. Even then, when Hitler came to shove, Stalin turned to the Patriarch for his blessing and alliance, securing for Orthodoxy a special place under Communism (and constituting the final betrayal of the sectarians that so helped the Bolsheviks).
Note that even then there was the same sort of secular/religious split, at least on paper (the Stalin tarakanshchik sort of blotted out most distinctions). There was officially a government that was elected and not the Party, but everybody knew that what the Party did was God's voice, or had better damned well be taken as God's voice if you didn't want to wind up in hell or the GULag purgatory.
