Christopher Howse for The Telegraph: Vladimir Putin hardly seems a pattern of holiness, but he has aligned himself with the Orthodox Church as an institution. The Orthodox Church in Russia had a bad time of it under Soviet rule: mass executions, imprisonment in the Gulag, destruction of churches – a brutal history. Yet when the state has been friendly to the Church, the dangers have been different. Under the thumb of Caesar, or a tsar, the function of the Church is distorted.
Someone who felt the harm of that Erastianism, the subordination of the Church to the state, was Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900). Realising that the universal Church must be unified, he went as far as saying that, just as the Christianity that came to Kievan Rus in 988 was in full communion with the see of Peter in Rome, so Russians could continue to be Orthodox while restoring their own communion with the Bishop of Rome. He himself was received into such communion in 1896, by Fr Nicholas Tolstoy. Full column is here.
