“Patriarch Kirill? Just think about money and power. He stole his hidden money from the church.”

Scholar Serge Chapinin is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University. But above all, Patriarch Kirill has known since the early 1990s, although he was expelled from the head of the newspaper of the Moscow Patriarchate. “I knew ‘Metropolitan Kirill’, and he’s a friendly person,” he says today in an interview with Republic and signed by Rosalba Castelletti. “Kirill the Patriarch is someone else. Just think about money and power. Sanctions will help to discover your hidden money. It is money stolen from the church ». The European Union announced yesterday Penalties Towards Kirill, take responsibility with put it in to invade Ukraine. Pope Francesco she has Tell That the Patriarch, during conversations with him, read to him a document stating the reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Orthodox Church replied Accusing the Supreme Pontiff of distorting the thought of the Patriarch.

The Orthodox Church and Putin

According to Chapinin, currently Russia, Belarus and Ukraine form a kind of spiritual trinity in the religious vision of Moscow. Kyiv’s application to join NATO led to the perception of religious betrayal: “In Putin’s ideology there are three Russian empires: the Romanovs, Stalin’s and Putin’s. And in between there were traitors: Lenin, Gorbachev and Yeltsin. When the Russian Orthodox Church beatified the last Tsar, Nicholas I, twenty years ago, they personified the entire Romanov Empire with him. Putin then reconsidered Stalin as the one who defeated Nazism. And now it is up to the Church to build the imperial personality of Putin as a defender of the Christian faith in the world. ” And in this partnership between Kirill and Putin, he is above all the first to win: “For Putin, Kirill is the leader of the religious “enterprise” of the Federation. Like the leaders of other companies: Atomic energy, oil, etc. It is Kirill who needs Putin the most: all his money, power and influence are based on this partnership with the state ».

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