Needed: An Ecumenical Reset

In the early 1990s, I met Kirill, now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus', when the man christened Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev was chief ecumenical officer of the Russian Orthodox Church. The occasion was a dinner hosted at the Library of Congress by the late, great James H. Billington, whose history of Russian culture, The Icon and the Axe, remains the classic work on the subject. Metropolitan Kirill, as he was then styled, struck me as a sophisticated cosmopolitan, not unused to the finer things of life; there was nothing of the Dostoevskian ascetic or mystic about him. And if he seemed less a churchman than a suave and worldly diplomat in ecclesiastical garb, one had to be impressed by the cool composure with which he played that role. Much of the table talk and subsequent conversation over postprandials revolved around the possibility of Russia's becoming a functioning democracy -- a prospect for which, if memory serves, Kirill showed considerable, if urbane, skepticism.