Pope Francis warns pro-war Russian patriarch not to be ‘Putin altar boy’

65

Pope Francis warned the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, 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, Francis also lashed out at Kirill for supporting Russia’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine.

“I spoke with him for 40 minutes via Zoom,” the Pope told 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 clerics, we cannot use the language of politics but the language of Jesus.”

“The patriarch cannot turn himself into an altar boy of Putin,” the Pope said.

..........

Francis said the conference call with Kirill took place on March 16, and that he and the Patriarch had agreed to postpone the planned meeting for June 14 in Jerusalem.

“This will be our second face-to-face meeting, nothing to do with war,” the Pope said. “But now, he also agrees: let’s stop, that can be an ambiguous signal.”

In March Kirill Patriarch Kirill said the conflict was an extension of the fundamental cultural clash between the wider Russian world and Western liberal values, exemplified by expressions of gay pride.

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.

But the hard-line stance of the Russian patriarch is to the detriment of his followers.

In March, the Russian Orthodox church in Amsterdam announced that it was severing ties with the leader, joining a growing number of priests and churches fleeing Moscow because of the war in Ukraine.