Things are not going well for the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Only one day after the Vatican, after more than half a year of war, called Russia an aggressor for the first time, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also criticized the Moscow church leadership. Steinmeier’s speech at the opening of the 11th General Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) was by no means just a greeting to the delegates from 352 churches gathered in Karlsruhe, but a sharp accusation by the Russian Patriarch and his staff. According to the Federal President, these “justify a war of aggression against the Ukraine” and led their believers and their entire church “on a terrible, downright anti-religious, blasphemous wrong path”. They supported a “nationalism that arbitrarily claims God’s will for the imperial dreams of a dictatorship”. Through a “totalitarian ideology disguised as theology,” the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) “commoned with the crimes of the war against Ukraine.”
Russian Orthodox Church supports Putin’s war – culture
