Cyril I: Putin’s Patriarch | tagesschau.de

Russia’s President seeks closeness to the Orthodox Church. Instead of messages of peace, their partiarch, Cyril, preaches loyalty and hatred of the West. He is also criticized for it in his own ranks.

Dietrich Brauer did not have great expectations of the patriarch. But “a wordless rejection of the war on his part would have given hope,” says the archbishop of the small Lutheran church in Russia. Kyrill has disappointed Brauer’s hopes: the 75-year-old patriarch has supported President Putin’s war policy since day one. “What has been said makes you sad and disappointed,” writes Brauer in an email. And he didn’t even know the Moscow Patriarch’s sermon last Sunday. “May the Lord God help us all to unite at this difficult time for our fatherland, also around the state organs,” said Cyril at the inauguration of a church in Moscow.

So again no criticism of the Kremlin. Instead, Cyril legitimized Russia’s attack on Ukraine religiously – as a “metaphysical battle” of good against evil, says Regina Elsner from the Center for Eastern Europe and International Studies in Berlin: “It’s the idea that evil, the evil West attacks this traditional world with its degenerate values, with liberality and secularism.”

Life theme: Denouncing the West

It seems to be the life theme of the Moscow Patriarch. Even as the foreign representative of the Russian Church, he denounced the alleged post-modern arbitrariness of Western societies at every available opportunity, demonized euthanasia, same-sex marriages and abortions. People of faith “could not simultaneously recognize the value of the family and the permissibility of homosexual relationships,” he told a 2007 ecumenical gathering in Sibiu, Romania.

And when the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) elected Margot Käßmann as its council chair in 2009, Cyril, who was elected patriarch in the same year, stopped the dialogue with the German Protestants: the patriarch could not meet with a female bishop, it was said from Moscow at the time . Women in the office of bishop or equal rights for same-sex couples – in Cyril I’s world and church view this is a “violation of the laws of God”.

Conversation with Francis is still possible

In times of war it sounds like this: Russia only wants to protect the people in eastern Ukraine from gay parades, said Kyrill in a sermon a few weeks after the war began.

How much influence Kyrill has on the Russian president cannot be determined exactly. Conversely, Vladimir Putin repeatedly seeks to be close to the Orthodox Church. And while the Russian government is increasingly isolated internationally, the Patriarch continues to maintain ecumenical relations – for example with the Pope in Rome. After a video conference with Francis a few weeks ago, Cyril was pleased “that our interlocutors did not distance themselves from us or become our enemies.”

In terms of content, this conversation is unlikely to have gone in the way the Pope intended. The Patriarch did not unequivocally condemn the war. And yet the Augsburg church historian Jörg Ernesti considers such ecumenical encounters to be important – if only because of the fact “that a channel of communication has remained open to Russian Orthodoxy”.

criticism from within their own ranks

However, there are many in the Catholic Church who are calling for the pope to distance himself more clearly from Putin and the patriarch. The theologian Regina Elsner finds “that the way in which Patriarch Cyril has supported this war over the past six weeks no longer offers a basis for talking to one another about Christian values.”

The pressure on Kyrill is also growing from within his own ranks: Around 260 Russian Orthodox clergymen from Ukraine are demanding a church trial against the Moscow Patriarch.