The Russian soldier has the pro-war symbol Z on his uniform and a halo around his head. Behind him angels soar in the heavens. Nearby, another soldier placed an automatic weapon in front of an image of Jesus. An inscription reads:
“Christ defeated hell, Russia too”.
Images startling even for wartime are among the propaganda posters displayed in central Moscow to show religious support for the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Another poster reads:
“If God is for us, who is against us?”
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, described the war as a holy battle against the “forces of evil” trying to destroy Russia. He also said that only Moscow could prevent the rise of the “antichrist” and that Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine would have all their sins forgiven.
Last year, state media reported that the Virgin Mary had appeared at a Moscow hospital where Cyril was visiting wounded soldiers.
Kirill, 77, who has called President Putin’s long rule a “miracle of God”, has sought to contain church dissent over the invasion.
Alexei Uminsky, a prominent liberal priest, refused to read a pro-war prayer and was banned from serving in a Moscow church where he had preached for 30 years. An ecclesiastical court also recommended his exclusion from the priesthood.
Uminski did not comment on the decision, but last year he urged the faithful to seek the blessing of priests who “pray more for peace than for victory and understand that every victory is always pyrrhic in these wars.”
The prayer opposed by Uminsky was first read by Cyril in 2022. It contains the lines “Behold, those who want to fight have taken up arms against holy Rus, hoping to divide and destroy her united people. Arise , God, help your people and grant us victory through your power.”
Dozens of other priests who prayed for peace instead of victory were punished. The concept of peace is increasingly foreign to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose court ruled last year that pacifism is heresy.
Critics have accused Cyril, who has been sanctioned by Britain for his support for the war, of forming an unholy alliance with the Kremlin that mocks the separation of church and state in Russia’s constitution.
“I think the time has come to talk about how Christian the organization that calls itself the Russian Orthodox Church is today,” said Sergey Chapnin, a former editor at the church’s publishing house who is a senior fellow at Fordham University’s Center for Orthodox Christian Studies. , New York. “Cyril wants to completely destroy our relatively free and living church and build something of his own instead. Something terrible and dark.”
Chapnin’s anti-war stance means he would almost certainly face arrest if he returned to Moscow, where he lived until two years ago.
Although Putin was a KGB officer in the officially atheist Soviet Union, where millions of Christians were killed or persecuted by the Communists, he now professes a deep religious faith. In 2013, he introduced a law that made it a crime to “offend” the feelings of religious believers.
This law, introduced after a high-profile protest at Moscow’s largest cathedral by the feminist art group Pussy Riot, is used almost exclusively to persecute people who have angered Russian Orthodox Christians.
At a pro-war rally in Moscow last year, Putin said Russia was fighting a battle for its very survival against Western “satanism”. Since the start of the war, he has also escalated what he describes as the Kremlin’s defense of traditional values.
In November, Russia’s Supreme Court banned what it described as an “international LGBT social movement.” It was declared an extremist group. The move means anyone who speaks out in favor of same-sex marriage or other LGBT rights risks being jailed for years. In its ruling, the court said the LGBT movement was fueled in America in the 1960s as part of a White House policy to reduce the country’s birth rate.
Although 60 percent of Russians identify as Orthodox Christians, analysts say the church’s influence is waning. Only 1.4 million people in Russia attended Christmas mass last year, down from 2.4 million in 2012, according to Interior Ministry data.
Ioan Burdin, a Russian priest who was fined for calling for peace in 2022 and banned from holding services, said the church was now failing to provide for people’s spiritual needs. “She stopped bringing Christ to people and stopped preaching love,” he told Sota. In his words, church services have more in common with political meetings than with religious ceremonies.
Another Russian Orthodox priest said he felt “bitterness and shame” at the church’s support for the war.
“It’s hard to believe that this is really happening. This is no longer the same church I came to more than 30 years ago,” he told The Times on condition of anonymity. “But still there is hope. Christ promised that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. History also shows that the church has repeatedly risen like a phoenix from the ashes – after the persecution of Stalin for example.”
However, he also feared that Cyril’s reinvention of the church as an instrument of war could cause more damage than mere “physical destruction”.
Kirill cited gay parades in Ukrainian cities as the reason for the war. Alexander Beglov, the governor of St. Petersburg, said recently that the war was necessary to prevent the spread of unisex toilets, which he falsely claimed were common in Ukrainian schools.
“There is no need to explain what values we defend with our soldiers,” Beglov said after visiting wounded Russian soldiers in hospital.
Putin and Kirill’s enthusiasm for Russia’s brutal war has been cited by critics as evidence that both are lying when they claim to believe in God. Putin said his mother secretly named him because his father was a communist.
“There is no doubt that both Putin and Patriarch Kirill are religious people and have some ideas about God,” said Chapnin, an exiled religious expert. “The problem is that they worship an all-powerful, cruel god who has nothing to do with the God of the New Testament.”
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2024-02-04 19:55:00
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