The hostile attacks on the Church are part of a coordinated malicious campaign that implies that national and religious values cannot co-exist with Western, European values. However, the truth is that the two are mutually fulfilling and even reinforcing, notes the statement published on Parliament Chairman Shalva Papuashvili’s Facebook page.

According to Papuashvili, attacks on the Church are not only pointless but also counter-productive and damaging for the country.

“The radical opposition has recently undertaken yet another attack against the incumbent Georgian Dream, through vilifying the Georgian Orthodox Church, accusing us of mythical ‘pro-Russian’ stand. While this futile ‘Russian’ argument is getting so exhausted that even our lackluster opposition is getting tired of it, it is still worth shedding the light on state-church relations in Georgia.

Attacks on the Church are not only pointless but politically counter-productive and damaging for our country. The purpose of this article is to show that these hostile attacks do not come from sincerely deluded personalities but they are part of a coordinated malicious campaign aimed at demeaning the symbols and values around which Georgians have rallied historically. This hostile rhetoric also implies that national and religious values cannot co-exist with Western, European values. However, the truth is that the two are mutually fulfilling and even reinforcing.

The recent attack against the Church by the radical opposition, their privately-managed political media outlets, and satellite ‘civil society organizations’, especially their timing, was particularly nasty and bizarre. On the eve of Christmas, a former high-ranking official of Saakashvili’s government and now self-styled civil-society activist spread footage from inside Georgia’s main Orthodox cathedral. He alleged that he found an ‘icon of Stalin’. As it turned out later, the footage showed not the ‘icon of Stalin’ but a small insert into the icon of St Matrona, depicting the latter’s supposed conversation with Stalin during WWII. The Church decided to change this particular detail on the icon, not because the depiction of a tyrant was uncanonical but because the fact of the above mentioned conversation, was, most likely, untrue. Meanwhile, the footage spread virally and stirred public controversy. In the following days, another political activist splashed paint on the icon, causing a public outcry.

However, depiction of tyrants is not unusual for Christian iconography. For instance, on a fresco in Georgia’s Ubisi church, even Emperor Diocletian, the proverbial persecutor of Christians, is depicted with royal magnificence, conversing with St George. Such depictions are not alien to the Western church either, as exemplified by numerous frescoes in Western Europe. This detail is important because the ensued opposition-linked media frenzy misrepresented the insert, accepted in Orthodox iconography, as ‘icon of Stalin’, and thus, distorted facts for enhancing the effects of disinformation.

A parallel line of attack on the Church aimed at compromising the date of celebrating Christmas on the 7th of January (i.e. 25th of December by the Julian calendar, which the Georgian Orthodox Church follows). The opposition weaponized thispurely canonical issue of the difference of calendars and called the celebrations ‘the Russian Christmas’. However, the reality is that celebrating Christmas by the Julian calendar is an inherently Georgian tradition, having nothing to do with either Russia or Russian Church. This tradition had been in place long before Russia converted to Christianity. Interestingly, the Easter dates also differ between Western and Eastern Christianity but, for some reason, none of the radical opposition and affiliated activists protests this.

The two controversies were taken up by the radicals to also viciously attack Ilia II, the Catholicos-Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, who is the most venerated and authoritative public figure in Georgia by general acclaim and according to any public opinion polls. In their hostile campaign, the opposition and their affiliated talking heads linked the Patriarch, the Church, and the Government with Russia.

Now, for an outsider, this coordinated campaign may have created a perception that Georgian Church and its leader, together with the Government, are indeed conduits of Russian propaganda, venerating Stalin and extending Russia’s cultural influence. Let us see if these superficial and artificially concocted accusations stand up to scrutiny.

First, understanding the place of Georgian Orthodox Church in Georgian society requires historical retrospective. Georgian Church is one of the oldest Christian churches in the world, and Georgia has been an officially Christian nation since the first half of the fourth century. For most of its existence, Georgia was the sole outpost of Christianity in the East, especially after the destruction of the independent Armenian kingdom and, then, the demise of the Byzantine Empire. By the way, when Russia, as an Orthodox Christian nation, appeared on the world stage, Georgia had already been fighting for its Christian faith for centuries.

This existential danger led the Georgian state and Georgian Church to a symbiotic relationship, which is distinct from Western Christendom’s very different, historically divisive interaction between the secular and religious authorities. Both Georgian monarchy and Church understood that the weakening of either of the two would inevitably result in the other’s demise. This did not exclude controversies between them along the way, but the general pattern of interaction was much more amicable than in Western Christendom.

Unsurprisingly, this historic relationship has taken strong root that persists until today. Therefore, the Church’s loyalty to the state should not be confused with its loyalty towards a particular political force, be it Georgian Dream or any other. Moreover, the Georgian Church has traditionally been the bulwark of the culture of tolerance. The Church heroically resisted the overwhelming and violent onslaught by the Bolshevik and then Communist totalitarianism, manifested in inhumane, degrading trampling of human rights for many decades. Even today, the Georgian Orthodox Church remains the only national institution that refuses to get involved in political polarization. The Church always listens to people.

Those politicians and ‘civil society actors’ who attack the Church, if they, as Christians, are genuinely concerned about iconography or celebration dates, can take these issues to the Church for discussion, as parishioners. Moreover, they may happily join any other denomination that celebrates Christmas on any day they like. However, exactly the fact that they mount this hostile rhetoric against the church from the outside indicates that their very aim is to damage the Church, thus blurring the lines between the religious and the secular, while, in Georgia, the state and the church are strictly separated,” Papuashvili stated.