Defying The Russian Orthodox Church Is Risky. These Priests Did It Anyway.
“It was like a necessary surgery … if you don’t do it, you just die. I had the choice between dying as a personality and losing my position amongst the people who were my family, my parishioners, who used to love me, whom I loved …”
Those were the words of Father Vladimiras Seliavko. He risked everything when he decided to publicly condemn Patriarch Kirill I of Moscow, the highest-ranking official in the Russian orthodox church, for Kirill's support of the Russian war against Ukraine.
“I thought I would lose my office as a priest forever,” Seliavko added.
His parishioners turned into his enemies, his relatives abandoned him and he was branded a traitor.
“On the other hand, it was impossible to remain with a patriarch who blesses war criminals,” Seliavko told Religion Unplugged.
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Across the table, Father Gintaras Sungaila, who endured the same fate, nods.
“What changed my mind was a talk with a parishioner of mine who told me: ‘You know, you are against what the Patriarch teaches, but I have kids,” he said. “And what if my kid says: but the patriarch says this? And I realized, I also have a kid.”
In May 2022, Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Innocent of Vilnius of Lithuania suspended five priests and two deacons for opposing the commemoration of Patriarch Kirill in their services and publicly condemning his support of the Russian state.
Their suspension sparked a public outcry in Lithuania and eventually drew the attention of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople.
In 2023, he restored the priests and established a new church district, giving them a canonical home after nearly a year of uncertainty. Gintaras and Vladimiras, both among those five priests, have invited me into the provisional home of their newly established church, a wooden chapel on the outskirts of Vilnius that still bears the marks of recent renovation.
After offering me coffee, the two priests recount the events that reshaped their lives.
For both men, Patriarch Kirill’s support of the attack on Ukraine came as a shock.
“2022 was a red line I could not cross,” Vladimiras said, “not because of ethnic conflicts, but because of the gospel. If the patriarch blesses war criminals, this can’t be accepted.”
Gintaras, himself of Ukrainian descent, describes a similar experience: “My friends, my relatives were under attack, and Patriarch Kirill started justifying this war.”
He was amongst the first Lithuanian priests to voice his opposition, urging the clergy to stop commemorating Patriarch Kirill and publicly oppose him. When expressing his proposal at a clergy meeting, he was told, “This is the Russian church, go to the Roman Catholics if you don’t like it.”
A few weeks later, he was suspended as a priest, expecting to leave his ministry for the rest of his life. Four other priests and two deacons, amongst them Vladimiras, followed him in a spontaneous act of solidarity.
For him, this conflict turned out to reveal a deeper conflict: “The question was whether we are first of all Christians or just an ecclesial institution that lives with the one purpose of saving itself, whether we are Christ-centric or ecclesio-centric.”
What was at stake for him, in other words, was not a political orientation, but the purpose of the church as such.
The moral conflict of 2022 unfolded against older tensions over identity, language and belonging within Lithuanian Orthodoxy. Already long before, cultural identity had become an issue in Lithuanian Orthodoxy. Since the Russian Orthodox church was the only Eastern Orthodox church holding jurisdiction in Lithuania, ethnic minorities had to “blend in” with Russian culture and church Slavonic.
The attempts of various minorities to hold services in their own languages or to establish independent jurisdiction found no support. Both priests frequently encountered ideas associated with the “Russian world (russki mir)” ideology, attempting to sacralize Russian geopolitical ambitions.
Often, Vladimiras argued, these statements were motivated by “regret of what was lost” – what he describes as the failure of large parts of the Russian population to integrate into Lithuanian society after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this sense, he said, “2022 was the end, not the beginning”, revealing a deeper tension in a church that had become “an instrument of Empire.”
Over the months after their suspension, the five dissident priests met constantly, supporting each other and attempting to figure out what to do next. The support of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople came “like a miracle” — giving the priests the opportunity to slowly build a community of multi-ethnic believers that followed them from the Russian Orthodox church.
“We gave freedom of expression to those communities who were silenced before,” Gintaras said.
While Lithuanian functions as a common language for the church district, various communities are able to hold their services in their own languages. Currently, the four small communities in Vilnius and more in other cities meet at improvised worship places, like museums, Catholic and Lutheran churches and even a former jail, until they are able to build their own cathedral.
What emerged was a deep sense of belonging that both priests had not experienced in their previous ministries. The act of collective resistance united small communities around a common struggle that allowed them to rebuild their lost spiritual homes.
“We live, and we try to build a family of many, multicultural communities,” Vladimiras said. “It is not so easy to feel this animosity from people who used to be yours and do not even want to shake your hands now. But we created quite a strong brotherhood.”
Three years after the rupture, both priests now feel an optimism they could not have imagined just four years ago. Pointing to similar developments in other Baltic countries, Vladimiras expresses his hope: “Each idea grows from a very small seed and then it has the possibility to become a great tree.”
Jonathan Bühne is currently studying religious studies in Leipzig. He was born in Menden in 2005, grew up in Tenerife and Germany and spent a year in Kyrgyzstan after graduating from high school. In addition to his studies, he works as a journalist, editor and author.