A new Orthodox church next to the Eiffel Tower boosts Russian soft power

By ERASMUS

THE skyline of Paris has just acquired yet another arresting feature. Only a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, a spanking new Russian Orthodox cathedral, complete with five onion domes and a cultural centre, was inaugurated on December 4th by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, amid sonorous rhetoric about the long and chequered history of the Russian diaspora in France.

To secular observers, this was the latest success for Russian soft power, showing that even in times when intergovernmental relations are frosty, ecclesiastical relations can still forge ahead. In October, Patriarch Kirill reconsecrated the Russian cathedral in London and had a brief meeting with the supreme governor of the Church of England, Queen Elizabeth; this was a more cordial chat than any conversation the political leaders of Britain and Russia have had recently.

The new temple in Paris was, in a sense, both a product and a hostage of secular politics. Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s then-president, agreed to its construction, with Russian funds, back in 2007 as a good-will gesture to Russia. Plans to turn the cathedral’s opening into a moment of diplomatic togetherness, attended by the French and Russian presidents, foundered after the countries’ row over Syria sharpened. But nothing prevented Patriarch Kirill from inaugurating the new house of prayer, with French cultural figures like the singer Mireille Matthieu in attendance.

To church-history buffs, meanwhile, the grand new edifice marks the latest twist in a tale which was already contorted enough. From the 1920s onwards, Paris was the main destination for Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks, many of whom were learned but destitute. One effect was to turn the French capital into a centre of brilliant, disputatious Russian theologians who influenced their Catholic and Protestant counterparts. Among the things the scattered Russians quarrelled over was what relations, if any, they should have with the church back in the Soviet Union, which was persecuted but kept a vestigial existence under government tutelage.

Some exiles joined a conservative White Russian church which eschewed everything on Soviet soil. Others maintained relations with the Soviet church at least until 1930, when a Paris-based bishop irked his superiors in Moscow by attending prayers in London for persecuted Soviet Christians. (Church leaders in Moscow had to pretend that they were not persecuted.) As a result the largest group of Russians in France realigned with the Istanbul-based Patriarch of Constantinople, by tradition the “first among equals” among the prelates of eastern Christianity.

But a handful (initially just six people, albeit rather distinguished ones) chose to remain under their Muscovite masters; they apparently understood that bishops in Russia had to lie in order to survive. The base of this tiny but loyal group was the ground floor of a dull building in a Parisian side street where it could worship on condition that nothing on the street gave away the presence of a church. Meanwhile, the grandest Russian church in Paris, near the Arc de Triomphe, operated and still remains under the authority of Constantinople as the hub of a thriving and relatively liberal-minded Russo-French community.

In recent years, the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow have had some hard legal arguments over the Russian spiritual patrimony in France. The Russian government managed to wrest from Constantinople control over a magnificent cathedral in Nice, which was built for the tsars.

In Paris, meanwhile, the profile of the “Muscovites” has dramatically risen, with the recent construction of a new Russian seminary (competing with an older Parisian establishment, under Constantinople) and now a cathedral near the banks of the Seine. But the “Constantinopolitans”, led by some distinguished French families whose forebears came from Russia three or four generations back, still hold their own.

Much else has changed. Back in 1930, when France’s intra-Orthodox split opened up, the Soviet Union was an atheist state; being a culturally Russian Christian of any kind, regardless of where you were or which bishop you obeyed, felt like going against the grain. These days Russia presents itself as a bastion of traditional values trying valiantly to arrest the de-Christianisation of Europe.

But one thing has probably not altered much. Life for ordinary Orthodox clerics serving scattered communities across France has always been tricky, whichever bishop they obey. Most have day jobs and receive little if any material reward for their pastoral work. The funds deployed on spectacular buildings on the banks of the Seine do not seem to have filtered down to them. For all the magnificent pomp and ceremony of last weekend, secular France is still a stony field for a Christian cleric of any kind to hoe.