I spent almost two weeks in Rome and Berlin this July, at a conference and in conversations with Orthodox people from half a dozen jurisdictions — and one line kept coming back again and again, always with the same theatrical sigh: how could all this have happened to Metropolitan Hilarion, such a gifted theologian, the obvious — main — heir to the patriarchal throne of Moscow?
What struck me wasn't the sympathy and compassion itself — I'd heard all of this before. It was who was saying it. Not naive laypeople who'd read too many church websites and social media, but bishops, priests, theologians — people whose job is presumably to understand how real power actually works in the Russian Orthodox Church in recent years. And still, all of them had spent years living inside a very well-made myth.
I'm tired of explaining this same point privately, over and over, in conversation after conversation. So here's the short version of it, in writing.
https://sobornost.substack.com/p/hilarion-who-never-was