THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IS NOT AN AUTHORITY FOR GLOBAL ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY AND ACTS ONLY AS A ‘PROPAGANDIST OF WAR.’ IT HAS CALLED FOR THE GENOCIDE OF UKRAINIANS, ENCOURAGED MASS MURDERS, AND INSISTS ON EVEN GREATER MILITARIZATION OF RUSSIA
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Kremlin based pseudo-Patriarchate of Moscow perhaps the ultimate KGB operative regiment has loitered behind the scenes for decades. The Russian Patriarchate shrouded itself in the bosom of the safe, respected, and legitimate apostolic Orthodox Church. The supposed autocephaly granted to Moscow by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1589 ended in 1721 and has never been “re-granted.” The current Patriarchate has no ecclesiastic lineage to the autocephaly it perceives to have received from Constantinople.
Make no mistake, Putin is wielding the Russian Orthodox Church. Reminiscent of Stalin, who incidentally founded the current Moscow Patriarchate to “revive the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify patriotic support for the war effort and presented Russia as a defender of Christian civilization, because he saw the church had an ability to arouse the people in a way that the [communist] party could not.”
Which is exactly what Putin and the militarist patriarch Cyril (Gundyaev) are doing today. In 1943 it was to bolster morale against Nazi Germany, today its Nazi Ukraine. Deficiencies in Stalin’s Church’s camouflaged veneer began to manifest a few decades ago. The Soviet Orthodox sphere of influence lingers in Antioch, Bulgaria, Georgia and other previous Iron Curtain states. The fissures are profound and what is on clear display for the entire world to see is the exorcism of the last vestiges of that Soviet system, from Orthodoxy.
Former ill-equipped KGB agents with visions of grandeur run the current political and religious branches of the former Soviet Union. These men are seriously motivated by a warped Russian World ideology. Cyril’s escalation continues, yet the silence from Jerusalem to Belgrade is deafening. “When you get money from Moscow it is not easy to be critical.”
Perpetually entrenched in their distinguishable tribulations the ancient and apostolic patriarchates are complicit to some degree for enabling the Kremlin based “Patriarchate” to find legitimacy based in falsehoods. Most obvious historic pentarchy collusion would be accepting the unilateral establishment and granting themselves autocephaly, the regranting themselves the title Patriarch and consequently being allowed to concelebrate as such; in ancient diptych order. However the Slavic Orthodox status quo is coming home to roost.
“Until 2014, a plurality of Orthodox Ukrainians maintained allegiance to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), established in the last days of the Soviet Union as a self-governing branch of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). However, soon after independence, clerics aligned with president Kravchuk set up a rival Orthodox Church headed by its own patriarch in Kyiv” -CSIS
Putin and Cyril don’t want an isolated cold war Russia but a high culture Russia of influence. Don’t think Brezhnev, Gorky, or Gerasimov rather envision Catherine the Great, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and Rublev. Putin’s not interested in emulating the communist regime which lasted half a century. These despotic autocrat collaborators, Putin and Cyril, envision themselves like those leaders of the Czarist era, an empire which lasted half a millennium.
Half a millennium, the last time the Ukrainian language was heard liturgically in the Kyiv Caves, Lavra Monastery. That is until yesterday, Orthodox Christmas 2023.
Metropolitan Epiphanios festooned strikingly in Traditional Ukrainian vestments with beautiful Vyshyvanka which was banned under Russian occupation. These Vyshyvanka patterns are found in Ukrainian national costumes. This historic liturgical event in the Slavic world, would be as if Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is celebrating a Liturgy again. Can you imagine the passions and vehemence on both sides of these events. Like other oppressed peoples, Ukrainians were unable to eat at the “Whites Only” counter in their own monastery. According to one of the Thousands of faithful who attended Liturgy on Christmas day:
… we are returning Our Heritage to ourselves. Not a modern heritage but one which was taken from us a long time ago and was manipulated by another state, the Russian, through the Moscow clergy
The Russian Orthodox Church’s „Firehose of Falsehoods“ of ecclesial propaganda is so audacious most Orthodox Christians can’t fathom the extensiveness of lies and historic revisionism. Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun explains: “Putin’s regime supplies guns, Cyril’s church, supplies propaganda” and they both sacrifice boys to the slaughter.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine was greatly enabled by the Russian Orthodox Church, and its hierarchs are currently cheering on Putin’s invasion. Moreover, the need to ‘protect’ the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine was one of the several false pretexts for the devastating attack on Ukraine.
An IM research study showed that the Russian Orthodox Church’s preaching from the pulpit (including Patriarch Cyril) were most often endorsing the following four narratives about Ukraine:
- the UOC and Orthodox people in Ukraine are being persecuted
- Ukrainians are prone to terrorism, aggression, paganism
- Russians and Ukrainians are one indivisible nation
- non-recognition of Ukraine as a separate independent country
“The key point is the use of pseudo-theological arguments to justify Russian aggression and the genocide of the Ukrainians.” Chapnin “We saw that the Moscow Patriarchate was not engaged in theology, it was simply interested in supporting the ideology of the state,” said Archpriest Volodymyr Melnichuk “In essence the patriarch betrayed his Ukrainian flock.”
Lest we forget even Orthodox ethnic Ukrainians under the omophorion (Spiritual authority) of Patriarch Cyril are brutally persecuted by the Russian Orthodox Church. Ukrainian members of Cyril’s own flock who fight against Russian soldiers are not granted a funeral. This ugly demonic adherence continues to this day. The impudence of a “God consecrated Russkiy mir” as a concept comprises the core phronema of Russian Orthodoxy as manifested by Cyril. In October 2022 Patriarch Cyril said in a sermon that “Russian soldiers who die fighting in Ukraine will have all their sins forgiven.” Essentially, Cyril proclaimed death, in a war of aggression, as a source for martyrs’ status in Russian church.
For centuries, Russian was the only language allowed to be spoken in the Russian churches throughout Ukraine and especially in this monastery. After independence in 1991 of the Ukrainian State, the Moscow Patriarchate continued to anathematize any hierarchs who utilized the Ukrainian language or continue to preach autocephaly. Westerners have a hard time comprehending the magnitude of these implications… it is, a complex history.
Make no mistake in Ukraine, Russian is the voice of the oppressor. No matter how much you hear “the Orthodox wingman of Putin’s regime,” the warmonger patriarch, Cyril declares “we are one people, one language, one faith…” What is actually on display is a high degree of de-Russification in Ukraine.
French President Macron called on the ROC to resist the Russian government’s „manipulations“. Macron said that „today, the people in power in Russia are manipulating the Orthodox religion to justify their actions, and these actions must be resisted.
The appeal from Human Rights Without Frontiers calls for actions
“to hold personally accountable and prosecute Vladimir Mikailovitch Gundyaev, known as Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, for inspiring, inciting, justifying, aiding and abetting war crimes…
Cyril Gundyaev literally has his own special military operation proceeding, corresponding to Putin’s Russian world. Any hierarch opposed to the bishop of Moscow Cyril’s defense of the vulgarly called “special military operation” or ecclesiastically acknowledges the Ukrainian Orthodox Church consequentially becomes a pagan enemy. Yes, a pagan enemy, a heretic, an opponent of Orthodoxy, which subsequently bequeaths Cyril Gundyaev his definitive wet dream: controlling the entirety of world Orthodoxy. If not by canonical order, Cyril will bulldoze any opposition in his way. Hence, he has set up uncanonical churches and even exarchates in Africa, Cyprus, Turkey, Southeast Asia, North and South America, even Antarctica isn’t immune to Cyril’s pathology.
A self-proclaimed, Stalin installed, KGB patriarchate’s bishop of Moscow unilaterally declares entire populations of Orthodox peoples, jurisdictions, even ancient apostolically founded Patriarchates “schismatic, heretical, and nonexistent.” Thus, according to Cyril, rendering him the authority to ecclesiastically annex or to simply bribe poor priests. Characteristically like Putin annexed five Ukrainian oblasts – Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – Cyril annexes lands clearly not in his geographic authority like Africa.
In an age of technology most people have no concept of Orthodox theology let alone the intricacies of Orthodox history: Rome, Czars, Ottomans, communism etc. For most readers Orthodoxy is like some old Orientalist novel of the 19th century. Sadly, they have no clue. which is about the same comprehension of most Orthodox Christians. For example, most don’t recognize the Ukrainian way of thinking i.e., the current war began with the invasion and subsequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. The modern Ukrainian mindset includes the Holodomor, and other justifications for an all-inclusive Ukrainian independence which goes beyond a Russian land grab…
“It is time for Truth, not partisanship.
It is time for Tradition, not domination.
It is time for Unity, not coercion.”
-Archon Elias Damianakis
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Doxologia Infonews.