MOSCOW — As the Russian Orthodox Church continues its ascent as a political force, Archimandrite Tikhon Shevkunov stands at the center of a swirling argument about the church’s power and its possible influence on President Vladimir V. Putin.

Father Tikhon, a former film student, presides over the 14th century Sretensky Monastery here, near the headquarters of the former KGB, for which Mr. Putin worked in Soviet times. A media-savvy figure, Father Tikhon has written a surprise best seller about monastic life and has been described as “Putin’s spiritual father” — a label he coyly neither embraces nor denies.

“It would be cruel of me to answer this question, to say yes or no and take away the bread of journalists,” he said recently in an interview in his receiving room, adorned with portraits of a saint and a czar. “Although, of course, one doesn’t answer such a question about anyone,” he added.

This week, Father Tikhon was in the news again after reports, swiftly denied, that the police had shut down a brothel on the grounds of his monastery. He branded the story “unconscionable slander” and “a vivid example of the information war against the church.” The truth, he told the news agency RIA Novosti, was that a brothel had been operating in a building next to cloister grounds, and that his monastery had demanded it be shut.