War of Ukraine EU adds patriarch to Kirill’s sanctions list – This is the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has called Putin a “miracle of God” and is said to have been a KGB agent.

Of the European Union in the latest sanctions list imposing personal sanctions on high-ranking officers of the Russian army, the perpetrators of the war crimes in Bushan – and the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch of Moscow For Cyrillic.

Around the same time the press reported that Kirill ended up on the sanctions list, the pope also made headlines. Franciscus to the Italian To the Corriere della Sera an interview given on Tuesday.

In an interview, Franciscus says he talked to Kirill for 40 minutes at the video service Zoom. The pope says he was very disappointed with the outcome of the talks and therefore canceled the face-to-face meeting scheduled for June.

“For the first 20 minutes, he read from the paper in his hand the reasons that justify the Russian invasion. I listened to him and replied, ‘I don’t understand any of your messages… We should not speak the language of politics but the language of Jesus,’ Franciscus said.

“The patriarch cannot humble himself Putin as an altar boy. ”

“Putin’s Altar Son” is a rather rough but appropriate expression to describe Patriarch Kirill.

The son of the altar is a young boy assisting the priest in ecclesiastical ceremonies. Kirill, born since 2009, has been the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, in turn, has long been a faithful servant of President Putin. Now 75 years old, Kirill has further strengthened the church-state bond in Russia.

In early March, Kirill made clear his church’s view of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In a historical sermon Kirill roared against homosexuality and Pride parades and accused “Western values” of the war in Ukraine. Kirill has not condemned Russia’s military actions in any way.

Director of the Finnish Orthodox Church, Archbishop Leo was one of many religious leaders, who condemned Kirill’s speeches immediately.

“It was a completely unbelievable and inappropriate speech – a sad bottom line, a deliberate misrepresentation of believers,” Archbishop Leo said.

Kirill was convicted of heresy in an exceptional declaration by the International Theological Group published in mid-March.

In St. Petersburg, born in what was then Leningrad, Kirill comes from a religious family. Both his father and grandfather were pastors. According to Putin, Kirill’s father Mikhail Gundyaev baptized him as a member of the Orthodox Church.

The fate of Kirill’s grandfather, in turn, is a reminder that in Russian history, the distance between church and state has not always been the same as in the country now ruled by Putin. Vasily Gundyaev was deported Vladimir Lenin in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the Solovetsky prison camp.

During Lenin, the Communist Party practically drove down the Orthodox Church. Joseph Stalin however, during World War II, it suddenly began to revive the Church in order to gain support from it in raising the military morale of its citizens against Nazi Germany.

After World War II, during the Soviet rule, the church and the state converged — even to the extent that the Soviet secret service, the KGB, effectively infiltrated the church.

One one of the KGB agents operating within the church was allegedly Kirill herself. The financial magazine Forbes wrote in 2009, archives reveal that Kirill was an active agent of the KGB.

At the same time, Kirill has had an extensive career in the Orthodox Church throughout her adult life. He graduated from the Leningrad Spiritual Academy in 1970, after which he has worked as bishop of Vyborg and as bishop of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, among others.

Even before he became the leader of the Orthodox Church, he became more widely known in Russia, among other things because he had his own religious television program on Russia’s number one state channel, the Pervyi Canal.

Moscow since his appointment as patriarch, Kirill has focused on strengthening the position of the Orthodox Church in Russia. During the Cyrillic period, Russian government policy has further emphasized the same conservative values ​​that he himself pursues.

Kirill is known, among other things, as an absolute opponent of same-sex marriage. He considers homosexuality a sin. Kirill has also strongly condemned feminism as a dangerous idea that “can destroy Russia”. During the Cyrillic period, Russia has also weakened the position of religious minorities. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses are banned from the country as extremists.

In 2020, a reference to the Russian faith in God and marriage as an institution between a man and a woman was added to the Russian constitution. The same constitutional amendment allowed Putin to continue as president until 2036.

No it is no wonder, therefore, that even before the start of the war in Ukraine, Kirill has combined religious views in his public statements with praise for his close partner, Putin.

In 2012, Kirill described Putin’s reign as a “miracle of God,” ending the economic turmoil that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union.

In addition to religious miracles, Kirill himself has been proven to have amassed worldly possessions.

In 2012 there was a stir From a photo published by the Russian Orthodox Church of a $ 30,000 wristwatch removed from the wrist of Kirill. However, the reflection of the clock had remained on the surface of the desktop in the picture.