Pope Francis has finally opened up about Russia's military invasion of Ukraine. Pope Francis asked the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill not to support Vladimir Putin's move to invade Ukraine.
Pope Francis warned Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill not to be "Putin's altar boy", he said in an interview this week. In his harshest words to date against the pro-war Patriarch, the 266th Pope lashed out at Kirill for supporting Russia's stated reasons for invading Ukraine.
"I spoke to him for 40 minutes via Zoom," the Pope told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview published Tuesday.
"The first 20 minutes he read to me, card in hand, all the justifications for war."
"I listened and told him, 'I don't understand anything about this'," the Pope said.
"Brothers, we are not state priests, we cannot use the language of politics, but the language of Jesus."
"The patriarch cannot turn himself into an altar boy (special servant) of Putin," said the Argentine pope.
The Roman Catholic Church leader said the conference call with Kirill took place on March 16. He and the Patriarch have agreed to postpone the meeting planned for June 14 in Jerusalem. "This will be our second face-to-face meeting, nothing to do with war," Pope Francis said.
"But now, he also agrees: Let's stop (the meeting), it can be an ambiguous signal."
Responding to Pope Francis in a statement on Wednesday (4/5/2022), the Russian Orthodox Church said it "regrets" the comments. "It is regrettable that a month and a half after the conversation with Patriarch Kirill, Pope Francis chose the wrong tone to convey the content of the conversation," the Russian Patriarchate Department of Foreign Relations said in a statement.
"Such a declaration does not contribute to building the constructive dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church that is so necessary at this time," the statement read.
Also on Wednesday (4/5/2022), it was revealed that the Patriarch was among the individuals to be included in the sixth round of proposed European Union (EU) sanctions against Russia, according to two sources who have seen the full document.
The proposed draft has been sent to the relevant ambassadors for review. At this stage, names can be removed or added at the discretion of the member state, an EU Commission source said.
Russian Orthodox Church spokesman Vladimir Legoida said the sanctions did not make "common sense", Russia's state news agency TASS reported.
"The more reckless (these) sanctions are, the more they lose touch with common sense and the more difficult it is to achieve peace, for which the Russian Orthodox Church prays at every service with the blessing of His Holiness the Patriarch, and assistance to all those affected by the Ukrainian conflict, only serves to confirmed his words," said Legoida in a Telegram post on Wednesday (4/5/2022).
"Only those who really don't know the history of our Church can try to intimidate pastors and their believers by compiling some (sanctioned) lists," said Legoida.
In March the Patriarch said the conflict was an extension of the fundamental cultural clash between the wider Russian world and Western liberal values. He gave an example of the expression of the gay parade.
Experts say Kirill's comments offer important insight into Putin's larger spiritual vision of a return to the Russian Empire, where Orthodoxy plays an important role. However, the hard-line attitude of the Russian patriarch divided his followers.
In March, the Russian Orthodox church in Amsterdam announced that it was severing ties with the leader. They join a growing number of priests and churches fleeing Russia because of the war in Ukraine.
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