Patriarch Kirill, head of Russian Orthodox Christians since 2009, put his church at the service of President Vladimir Putin, with whom he shares his ambition for a conservative and strong Russia, and supported Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine.
(Read: Russian priests are exposed to fines if they condemn the operation in Ukraine)
Since many years, the 75-year-old religious leader does not hesitate to show himself blessing weapons and missilesnor in justifying the repression of the opposition and the independent media.
(You are interested in: The religious rebellion behind the war between Russia and Ukraine)
The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (IOR), is a key pillar and staunch defender of the system created by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and now a candidate for sanctions by the European Union (EU) for his support of the Russian invasion to Ukraine.
“We don’t want to fight anyone, Russia has never attacked anyone. It is a wonder that a powerful and great country has not attacked anyone, it has only defended its borders“, Said the Orthodox hierarch in full swing of the military campaign in the Ukrainian territory.
Kirill, whose father supposedly baptized Putin’s, has all the ballots to become the first head of a Church with tens of millions of parishioners subjected to international sanctions.
He, like Putin, also sees Ukraine and Belarus as “brother” countries that should have remained under the rule of Moscow, and not as different nations.
You have to totally ignore the history of the Orthodox Church to try to intimidate its clergy and its believers with inclusion in certain lists.
“The Patriarch personally made the decision to be one of the ideologues of the political system created by Putin“, theologian Sergei Chapnin, who worked for fifteen years for the Moscow Patriarchate, told Efe.
In his opinion, Kirill has become one of his main allies of the head of the Kremlin “to the point of justifying the war in Ukraine.”
“I would like to remind the authors of the sanctions initiatives that the Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Kirill comes from a family that for decades was persecuted for its faith during the belligerent communist heresy,” Vladimir Legoida, one of the spokesmen for the IORon his Telegram channel.
The patriarch has multiplied declarations of support for the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
On February 27, three days after the start of hostilities, Kirill had described as “forces of evil” those detractors of Russian ambitions in the neighboring country.
In April, he called on Russians to “stand together” to fight “enemies outside and inside.”
The Catholic Pope Francis, who met with Kirill in March, had urged the patriarch “not to use the language of politics and use the language of Jesus.” Kirill’s support for Vladimir Putin is not at all a surprise.
Kirill, who in 2009 succeeded the late Patriarch Alexis – who had rebuilt the Church after the fall of the USSR and its atheist system – has turned Russian Orthodoxy into a true political-religious machine at the service of the Kremlin.
What is Kirill’s trajectory?
Born on December 26, 1946 under the secular name of Vladimir Gundyayev, Kirill was enthroned in 2009.
In 1965, at the age of 19, he entered the seminary in his hometown of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and became a monk four years later. He accesses his first diplomatic post since 1971 and in 1989 heads the department for foreign affairs, the equivalent of a ministry of foreign affairs.
This career has fueled suspicions of close links with the KGB, the secret services, which relied on the ecclesial institution to spy on the faithful.
His career has not been without its scandals: in 1997, when he was then Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomoletsk published an article about the license granted to the IOR to import tobacco and alcohol duty-free, calling on Kirill the “metropolitan of tobacco”.
The future patriarch did not file a lawsuit against the newspaper or against the journalist to avoid, according to the Metropolitan Iliarion, then bishop of Vienna and Austria, a scandal that would further damage the Church.
The duty-free importation of tobacco and alcohol was a privilege granted to the IOR by the government of the first president of post-Vietnam Russia, Boris Yeltsin, to compensate it for the losses it suffered during the communist period, from which numerous intermediaries ultimately benefited.
A gift, a wristwatch that he had received a few years ago, put Kirill back in the spotlight of the press in 2009 for reasons other than religious. During a pastoral visit to the Ukraine, the local press revealed that it was a Breguet costing $30,000.
Patriarch Kirill.
“We don’t want to fight anyone, Russia has never attacked anyone. It’s amazing when a big and powerful country didn’t attack anyone, just defended its borders.”
Often 🤡 Putin’s rubles to blatantly lie this character. pic.twitter.com/9G3iR4L5S2
– Jorge (@_Jorge_BCN) May 3, 2022
Kirill, who took vows of poverty when he took the monk’s robes, insisted that the photo published by the Ukrainian press was staged and that with his clothes he cannot wear a wristwatch during religious services.
But the same image, with the clock in question, was published on an official website of the Moscow Patriarchate. As soon as the photograph was spread, it was withdrawn by the administrators of the page.
The controversy might not have gone further if it had not been for the fact that they published the image again, this time retouched: without the clock, but its reflection was clearly observed in the varnish of the table where the patriarch rested his arm.
We are aware that we live in a happy country (…). Today Russia advances along its historical path with a great reserve of solidity.
Last year, Putin, a self-confessed Orthodox believer, gave Kirill the Order of Saint Andrew, the country’s highest distinction.
Kirill has never skimped on praise for Putin: in 2012, he described Putin’s election as a “miracle from God” and the president himself as “the only defender of Christianity in the world.”
In 2012, he proclaims that Putin’s reign is “a miracle of God” after the post-Soviet crisis of the 1990s. The same year, an event symbolizes all the conservative severity of this religious man with a gray beard.
Four hooded young women, who form the punk group Pussy Riot, enter the Christ the Redeemer Cathedral, Moscow’s main cathedral, to sing an anti-Putin song.
Three of them were arrested and sentenced to prison terms.
It is very important in the current conditions to avoid further escalation
For him, the large demonstrations after the arrest in January 2021 of the opponent Alexei Navalni revealed a “crisis within the young generation” Kirill is also a critic of homosexuality and praises the law desired by Vladimir Putin that prohibits “propaganda of homosexuality to minors”, text considered by the NGOs as a homophobic instrument.
The IOR chief also recalled that Russia had received promises decades ago from NATO that it would not expand to the east, something that was not fulfilled. Kirill also assured that the current situation in Ukraine causes “great pain” because the Russian Church has faithful on both sides of the border.
For this reason, he asked the pope how both Churches can “influence the state of things,” according to the IOR statement.
“How can we contribute to the pacification of belligerents with the sole objective of achieving the strengthening of peace and justice?” the Russian patriarch told Francis, according to the note.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from EFE and AFP
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