The caput of the Russian Orthodox Church publically ridiculed a clergyman for criticizing the church’s alignment with the Kremlin’s wartime patriotic agenda, according to a leaked video recording.
Patriarch Kirill, a adjacent state of President Vladimir Putin, has been a vocal protagonist of Moscow’s penetration of Ukraine, and the country’s Orthodox Church played a cardinal symbolic relation successful rallying nationalist enactment for the war.
“I don’t hold with specified a patriotic inclination successful religion relations,” a clergyman told Kirill astatine a clergy meeting on Tuesday. “A priest’s work is to pb radical to the Kingdom of Heaven and not to prosecute successful patriotism.”
Kirill changeable backmost by asking the priest: “Are you, father, from Western Ukraine by immoderate chance?”
Following laughter and applause from the gathering hall, the religion person told the clergyman to “go beryllium down and deliberation earnestly astir each that you conscionable blurted retired here.”
Video of the speech was published precocious Tuesday connected a Telegram transmission tally by exiled Russian religion affairs writer Ksenia Luchenko. She identified the clergyman arsenic Alexiy Shlyapin from the Moscow portion municipality of Mozhaysk.
Shlyapin is simply a follower of Father Daniel Sysoev, an influential fundamentalist clergyman who preached that Orthodox Christianity transcends nationalist identity. Sysoev, who received aggregate decease threats, was changeable dormant successful November 2009 successful what was believed to beryllium a religiously motivated attack.
Sysoev’s followers anticipation the Russian Orthodox Church volition canonize successful the future. An anti-war Christian radical said Shlyapin raised the contented with Kirill astatine Tuesday’s clergy meeting.
Russia’s Orthodox Church has framed the warfare successful Ukraine arsenic a “holy war,” urging its followers to combat Russia’s “external and interior enemies.” Dozens of Orthodox priests person been sent to the beforehand lines to enactment Russian troops.
In 2023, Kirill created a elder ecclesiastical presumption to oversee religion activities successful Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories. In his publication “For Holy Rus,” which was published past year, helium promised “eternal life” to Russian soldiers killed successful combat.
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