There are candidates

So, according to the results of the Council of Bishops held yesterday, the candidates for the patriarchal throne were Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, who received 97 votes, Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk - he had 32 votes, and Exarch of Belarus, Metropolitan Philaret of Minsk and Slutsk - he was supported by 16 bishops. Just a little behind him was Metropolitan Juvenaly of Krutitsky and Kolomna, who gathered 13 supporters. 198 of 202 bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church participated in the Council; four reported the impossibility of arriving at the forum. However, this did not affect the quorum, which, according to the adopted regulations, amounted to 2/3 of the cathedral participants.

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, where the Council took place, was placed under heavy security. To ensure security, 12 thousand police officers and internal troops were brought to the center. Accreditation for the Media Council was seriously limited: however, they warned about this in advance, citing a lack of space and staff for “escort.” The day before the start of the forum, the information and analytical religious portal “Kredo.ru”, known for its ability to obtain insider information, was shut down. Jammers were installed in the temple. “This measure is necessary in order to exclude any external influence on the participants of the Local Council, psychological pressure on them, because there are forces that will certainly want to use mobile communications to find out what is happening at the Council and manipulate this information in the public sphere,” — the forum organizing committee explained to Interfax.

However, even its participants were not fully granted the right to “find out what is happening at the Council”: the counting of votes, for example, was carried out behind closed doors, unlike the 1990 elections, when this operation took place right in the hall.

The voting procedure proposed by the Synod - one vote for each of the 145 candidates who have the right to claim the patriarchal throne (that is, bishops over 40 with experience in diocese management and theological education), apparently, did not cause objections from the Council of Bishops, which at the very beginning The meeting had to approve the regulations developed by the Synod. Meanwhile, during the preparation of the forum, other proposals were discussed: for example, at the first stage to vote for 145 candidates, and then take, say, the first ten and re-vote with the whole council again, only now highlighting the top three - so that the choice would be more targeted, and not as spread out as when voting for 145 candidates at once. This is precisely the procedure that was established at the Local Council in 1990, when Patriarch Alexy II was elected. After all, what happened now: if we add Bishop Juvenaly to the first three, who, according to experts, also had serious chances to be among the contenders for the patriarchal throne, then it turns out that 40 bishops out of 197 (one ballot was declared invalid), that is, almost a quarter voted not for obvious leaders, but for people “close” to them for some reason. And although these considerations may have been the most lofty, in fact the votes of 40 people can be considered lost.

The local council, which will begin on January 27, has the right to nominate additional candidates for the primate throne, but everything will depend on the procedure. In 1990, formally, such a right also existed, but in order to get on the list, the candidate had to gain more than 50% of the votes of the participants in the Local Council. And this is complete absurdity: if a candidate is able to get more than half the votes, then this is already a clear patriarch. Therefore, in 1990, no one made it onto the list, although there were proposals.

The current procedure for nominating additional candidates is not yet known to the general public; in any case, for it to become legitimate, it must first be approved by the Local Council, and it is unlikely to be liberal.

The advantage of Metropolitan Kirill over other candidates is obvious, and it is significant. Who could presumably vote for him? Firstly, most likely all the bishops from foreign dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church (about 15 participants in the Council): all of them are part of the department of Metropolitan Kirill, the Department for External Church Relations, and are vitally interested in maintaining the status quo, which is much easier to achieve if the Bishop of Smolensk agrees promotion, rather than having a new boss over him. Surely many bishops of the ROCOR (11 delegates): Metropolitan Kirill, who played the first fiddle in the negotiation process before the reunification, is one of the few hierarchs of the ROC whom they at least somehow know; most are complete strangers to them. There is information that the head of the UOC-MP, Metropolitan Vladimir, who actually withdrew his candidacy, cast his vote in favor of Metropolitan Kirill. This means that minus a little more than 20 people (ten participants of the Council still voted for the Primate of the UOC and Metropolitan of Chernivtsi and Bukovina Onufriy, plus 3 people for Metropolitan of Odessa and Izmail Agathangel), the remaining 35 members of the Ukrainian delegation could well have given their votes to Bishop Kirill. Total: if you count to the maximum - 61 votes. 97 minus 61, leaving 36 “undecided” votes, still more than the second chosen candidate.

This, it seems to me, suggests that the power of the isolationist movement in the church is greatly exaggerated. Apparently, fundamentalist and anti-ecumenical sentiments are not so strong in it, if Metropolitan Kirill, traditionally associated with the “sin” of ecumenism, won such a convincing victory. The Bishop, through the mouths of his supporters, tried in every possible way to prove during the election campaign that he did not want any church reforms. The word “reforms” indeed evokes idiosyncrasy among many Orthodox Christians, but perhaps some of the “frostbite” of the church in recent years - the other side of stability - is in fact quite a burden for the people of the church; perhaps the will for change in it is much stronger than it seems to analysts and experts.

Bishop Kirill, of course, did everything possible for his victory - the pressure of the election campaign of his lobby surpassed other secular campaigns: all the media under his control, day after day, did nothing but extol his virtues. The other applicants did not have even a small share of the resources that the locum had concentrated in his hands. Moreover, before the official nomination of candidates, that is, until yesterday, they had very shaky grounds for presenting their candidacies. But in a sense, the members of the Holy Synod (the most likely candidates for the patriarchal throne) themselves deprived themselves of room for maneuver: weren’t they the ones who made the decision to hold the Local Council back-to-back with the Bishops’ Council, and all the others?

Much has been said about preserving the unity of the church, the continuity of the course, that is, in other words, the positions of the current clerical bureaucracy - is this not what forced the majority of the applicants to dampen their personal ambitions? Secret cross agreements with bishops from different camps, who can be promised certain benefits, promotions and movements, should reduce mutual grievances to nothing.

Or maybe it’s just a matter of age - if we take the main contenders, then Metropolitans Vladimir, Filaret and Juvenaly were born in 1935, Kirill and Clement are more than 10 years younger, and they clearly had more passion. And God (if we look at the problem from this perspective), as we know, gives to those who really ask.