President Vladimir Putin Photo: Xander Heinl (via Getty Images) The View
They do things differently in Russia. According to newspaper reports (Le Monde, March 4), President Vladimir Putin intends to introduce a reference to God into the Russian Constitution, similar to the preamble to Bunreacht na hÉireann.
It will invoke ‘the memory of our ancestors who have transmitted to us ideals and faith in God’, notwithstanding that Russia is ‘a secular State’. Putin has tried to combine the traditions of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. All reference to the Christian influence on Europe was resisted, mainly at France’s behest, in the draft constitutional treaty rejected in 2005.
Another clause will state that “marriage is a union between a man and a woman”, and affirming that families, fatherhood, motherhood and children should be defended by the State.
Until a few years ago, English registry offices had a notice saying that under the laws of England marriage was between a man and a woman, a definition still adhered to by most churches. Religious and civil liberty means that differences between civil and religious marriage coexist and have to be respected.
Background
The background to Russian constitutional changes is the need to make palatable the most important change, which will allow Putin, due to retire in 2024, to remain President till 2036.
The President of Ireland is limited to two terms or 14 years, while the US President’s maximum two terms amount to eight years. Most elected heads of state or government are not subject to term limits, especially in countries with strong and long-established democratic traditions, where there are regular peaceful changes of government.
Another amendment will forbid the alienation of Russian territory (lest any Western country believes that continued sanctions might secure the return of Crimea to the Ukraine). It is of course one thing to lock the door on giving up ‘national territory’ that has just been taken under firm control, and another to cease using that expression about land remaining outside the jurisdiction, where the language is an obstacle to making progress, which is why the original Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution were re-worded in the Good Friday Agreement.
A further proposed addition to the Russian Constitution, in accordance with “the obligation to protect historical truth”, a problematic concept, will be a prohibition on “denigrating the exploit of the people in defence of the fatherland”, an obvious reference to the patriotic wars that repulsed the invasions of Hitler and Napoleon. This should not stifle criticism of the general failure to stand up to Hitler until too late.
Given persistent controversy over the role of the Papacy relative to the Holocaust, the Church has decided to open up its voluminous archives. Critics espousing a moral absolutism need to take into consideration two things. Pope Pius XII was a virtual prisoner of the Axis powers in the Vatican. If he had become an actual prisoner, as his predecessors Pius VI and Pius VII were during parts of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic era, would that have enhanced the Church’s power to do good at that time?
Secondly, the criticism ignores the elephant in the room. The British and American Governments developed good intelligence systems in World War II, and knew, even if not in detail, about the death camps. Why did they neither highlight what was going on nor bomb the communications systems leading to them?
In independent Ireland the Catholic Church acquired many characteristics of an established Church”
It is too easy to point criticism at the Pope, when those who had the necessary military power to do something about the situation did nothing right up to the end of the war. While post-1939 Hitler was not given a free hand to conduct a war of conquest, he in effect had a free hand throughout to exterminate the Jews.
Putin is without doubt an effective political leader. He provides an alternative to Western democracy, illiberal democracy with only token opposition and separation of powers, and has imitators and admirers in several countries. The serious reservation most people would have is the high human cost of ruthless power play in Syria, Ukraine, Georgia and originally Chechnya, not to mention intelligence wars and the probing of weakly defended air space and territorial waters.
Mind you, we tend to turn a blind eye to ruthless power plays of the West.
Putin has gone some distance towards re-establishing the Russian Orthodox Church. There is a strong tendency in this country, although still a minority, to want, metaphorically speaking, to disestablish the Christian Churches and the important place of religion in Irish society.
Some reflection on this is taking place in the context of the 150th anniversary of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. As far back as 1810, the Catholic bishops turned down a proposal to allow the British government some say in senior appointments as the price of emancipation. Ironically, it was the Church Temporalities Act of 1833 that halved the number of bishoprics in the Irish part of the United Protestant Church, and objection to the principle that parliament could interfere with apostolic succession started John Henry Newman, now a saint, on his path to the Roman Catholic Church.
While sore at the broken promise in the Act of Union that the United Church would be ‘forever’, because no parliament could bind its successors, by the 50th anniversary of disestablishment the Church of Ireland recognised that it never represented a majority of the people.
A strong affinity between Church and state persisted in Northern Ireland, but in independent Ireland the Catholic Church acquired many characteristics of an established Church, with the State more subordinate to it than the other way round. Despite later reaction to that, a balance that respects the continuing value to society of religious practice and belief, not least in the present crisis, is the best way forward.
The Irish Catholic articulates an important strand of mainstream opinion, and with churches closed other ways of accessing it, whether in retail outlets or online, must be found to ensure that its voice continues to be heard.