FOR the 25th anniversary of Ramblings (Radio 4, Monday), Clare Balding is fulfilling a longstanding ambition to walk the Camino de Santiago. For the first episode, she accompanied Manni Coe, an author who has walked many of the routes after first undertaking the pilgrimage with his brother, Reuben, who has Down’s syndrome. The programme started as a nicely produced but fairly anodyne travel programme — all wild garlic smells and lichen-covered bridges — but soon segued into something more profound.
Coe was brought up in the Church of England, and was a serious enough young Evangelical to become, in his late teens, a missionary in Bolivia, where he learned Spanish fluently. But then his “faith fell apart”. He had been groomed and abused by the family vicar while at secondary school and finally gathered the strength to tell his parents when he was 21. Charges were pressed, but the case collapsed for want of evidence, although he had once had evidence in his possession. While in Bolivia, he had written to his abuser confronting him with his crimes. He had received a reply in which the cleric acknowledged his guilt, but also asked him to burn the letter, which he had done.
Coe found that peace came only through forgiveness — something that he did for his own benefit, not for that of his abuser. The Camino gave him the perspective that he needed to be able to do so.
In From Our Own Correspondent (Radio 4, Saturday), Nick Sturdee reported from the village of Ostrivets, in western Ukraine, where the parish priest was deposed in 2018 because he refused to abjure the Moscow Patriarchate in favour of the then newly established independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
The required prayers for pro-Putin Patriarch Kirill at every service were understandably controversial in this intensely patriotic region of Ukraine, but this was a case in which ecclesiastical allegiance conflicted with national identity: one of his sons fought the Russians in the Donbas in the low-intensity battles of the late 2010s, coming home severely traumatised.
For some years after his deposition, his parishioners met in his living room. Yet, after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, Kirill became even more vocal in support of Putin. This forced significant changes within the Moscow Patriarchate-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox Church. They no longer pray for Kirill, but, since last August, the Church has been banned, and the priest has stopped holding services entirely. Parishioners now pray only privately in their own homes. The priest remains a Ukrainian patriot, and both his sons are now serving on the front.
While Kirill’s warmongering is indeed an outrage, one can’t help feeling that Ukrainians loyal to both their country and the Moscow Patriarchate have been done a wrong.
