Patriarch Kirill
Patriarch Kirill differed from his predecessor, Patriarch Alexy II, who kept his distance from politicians. Under Kirill's leadership, the Orthodox Church became an ideological pillar of the Putin regime. He recalled that the rulers of Byzantium and medieval Russia were already promoting the idea that the church and the state should act in a "symphony."
Putin's regime also acquired a partner in the Moscow patriarch who helped define and promote an important ideological component of his regime. It was based on "Russian traditional values," which Kirill often praised over criticized Western liberalism, individualism, or the strengthening of the rights of sexual minorities. The discourse of "cultural wars" over traditional values had also attracted supporters of Putin abroad, including some conservative Protestant preachers from the United States.
In 2020, Russia opened the Cathedral of the Armed Forces near Moscow, a vast edifice mixing Orthodox images with Russian military history, celebrating Soviet victories over the Nazis, the Soviet suppression of protests in Eastern Europe, and Putin’s invasions of Georgia, in 2008, and Ukraine, in 2014, as well as Russia’s involvement in Syria.
“I promise that we will win this holy war,” a Russian officer told recruits in a video 12 October 2022. “Who is fighting against us? People who say that their God is Satan. Satanists are at war with us. People who insist we attend LGBT parades.”
“They’re not fighting Christians in Ukraine,” a scholar of Russian culture and religion at Wesleyan University, Victoria Smolkin, said, explaining how the justification for the invasion has shifted. “They’re fighting Satanists. They’re fighting the West.” At a Kremlin ceremony 30 September 2022 to mark the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian territories, Putin inveighed against nontraditional families, in a seeming attempt to incite homophobia and provide a cultural justification for his war. “The overthrow of faith and traditional values” amounts to “pure Satanism,” the Russian president warned. Increasingly, the Kremlin sees its goal in Ukraine not as “denazification" — the original pretext for the invasion — but as “desatanization,” which had become a popular term in Russian media and politics.
Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, told his followers that "sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins." The patriarch's comments during his Sunday sermon on 25 September 2023 came amid nationwide protests and rising criticism over the Kremlin's recent announcement of a partial mobilization to replenish Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.
Kirill, a prominent supporter of President Vladimir Putin who has "blessed" the war effort and warned by Pope Francis against becoming "Putin's altar boy," has previously claimed that Russians were doing a "heroic deed" by killing Ukrainians, even as he has urged them not to see the Ukrainian people as enemies. "We know that many today are dying in the fields of internecine battle," Kirill said at a church near Moscow on September 25. "The church is praying that this battle will end as soon as possible, that as few brothers as possible will kill each other in this fratricidal war."
However, he added, "The church realizes that if someone, driven by a sense of duty and the need to honor his oath, stays loyal to his vocation and dies while carrying out his military duty, then he is, without any doubt, doing a deed that is equal to sacrifice." After Putin announced the military mobilization on September 21, Kirill was quoted by Russian state media as saying that "danger looms over the Ukrainian people," claiming that unidentified forces were trying to turn them from being "part of the holy united Rus into a state hostile to this Rus, hostile to Russia."
A revival of traditional Christian values in Russia is a “unique phenomenon,” the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, said 11 June 2023, warning that the West has set a course for “expelling God from their lives.” The patriarch was speaking at a newly-built church in Russia’s Siberian city of Tobolsk. The fact that an increasing number of new churches are being built in Russia shows that the nation is going through a “spiritual revival,” he said, calling the new places of worship “an answer to the people’s faith.”
“What’s happening now in Russia is a unique phenomenon,” the patriarch claimed, pointing to the fact that churches in Europe are being “closed” or “turned into restaurants, cafes or dance floors.” Patriarch Kirill then blamed such developments on the policies of Western nations that are “forcefully destroying Christian values.” These God-denying nations are still looking down on Russia and “seek to teach us,” the patriarch said, adding that “they are almost ready to take up arms” to remake Russia in their image. Russia will simply never follow in their footsteps, Kirill said, adding that doing so would mean provoking a spiritual and moral crisis. The Western authorities claim “there is no God but only an individual’s freedom,” the patriarch said, adding that this “denial of God has led to the deepest spiritual and moral crisis.”
Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, whose secular name is Vladimir Gundyayev, was elected as the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia on 27 January 2009 by the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, succeeding Patriarch Alexy II, who died in December 2008 at the age of 79. The Local Council, made up of about 700 priests, monks, and laymen, chose Kirill over his rival, conservative nationalist Metropolitan Kliment, 59. Kirill received 508 votes in a secret ballot, while Kliment received 169 votes. Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk had been seen as the favorite, because of his perceived moderation. Kliment, the church's chief diplomat, believed the church should not be independent of the state and would have continued Aleksy's policies in supporting all factions of the Kremlin coalition.
Kirill, by contrast, was a radical choice. Metropolitan Kirill actually thinks that the patriarch has more authority than a tsar. Kirill believes the state must submit to the church. Of course, he doesn't say it openly. Under Metropolitan Kirill as patriarch, the church would attempt to become an independent institution that would, among other things, want to command the state. So out of self-preservation, the state was pushing for Kliment to become patriarch.
The Russian Orthodox Church enthroned on 01 February 2009 its new leader, Patriarch Kirill, at a ceremony held in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow. During the enthronement ceremony, senior bishops seated Kirill three times in the patriarch's chair at the center of the altar, chanting "Axios" (the Greek word for "Worthy") together with the clergy and the flock. After that, deacons replaced Kirill's archbishop's vestments with the patriarchal sakkos (tunic), the omophorion (a broad scarf) and the patriarchal mitre. The enthronement ceremony was attended by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and other dignitaries.
His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia (secular name Vladimir M. Gundyaev) was born on November 20, 1946, in Leningrad. His father, Rev. Mikhail V. Gundyaev, died in 1974. His mother, Raisa V. Gundyaeva, a teacher of German, died in 1984. His grandfather, Rev. Vasily S. Gundyaev, a Solovki prisoner, was imprisoned and exiled in the 20s, 30s and 40s for his church activity and struggle against Renovationism [the renovationists seized power in the Russian Church in 1922 on a pro-communist platform]. After graduation from school, he entered the Leningrad Seminary and later the Leningrad Theological Academy, from which he graduated cum laude in 1970. On April 3, 1969, Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) of Leningrad and Novgorod tonsured him with the name of Kirill and on April 7 ordained him as hierodeacon and on June 1 as hieromonk. On February 25, 1991, Archbishop Kirill was elevated to the rank of metropolitan.
An articulate public speaker, Kirill was seen as a liberal figure in the largely traditionalist Russian church and led dialogue with the Vatican as head of the Russian Orthodox Church's external relations, the post he had occupied for more than two decades.
Pope Benedict XVI welcomed the election of Kirill as the new Russian Orthodox Church patriarch. "May the Almighty also bless your efforts to seek that fullness of communion which was the goal of Catholic-Orthodox collaboration and dialogue," Pope Benedict said in his message. Relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican, which split almost 1,000 years ago, have been strained since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, mainly over accusations that the Catholic Church stepped up activities to convert believers. The Vatican has denied this. The dispute prevented Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, from visiting Moscow and meeting with Alexy II.
As the church's long-standing external relations director, Kirill was Russian Orthodoxy's public face. Known to millions of people across Russia and beyond as Anchorman of the World of a Pastor TV program on the national First Channel, since 1994. He was seen as a modernizer more likely than his rivals to seek a measure of independence from the state and better relations with the Vatican.
Since Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third presidential term in 2012, the patriarch, who has called the Russian president’s rule a “miracle of God,” has been seen as a close ally of the Russian president, as Putin himself has increasingly used the Orthodox Church to try to legitimize his actions.
In a speech on the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin characterized the peninsula as sacred land to Russians, referring to the baptism of Vladimir the Great in Kherson [part of present-day Ukraine] in 988. "His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy," Putin said of Vladimir, "predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus." Kirill has in turn blessed Putin’s foreign policy, such as in 2015 when a spokesman for the patriarch called Putin’s military campaign in Syria a “holy battle.”
In 2012 Pussy Riot, a feminist punk band that staged an anti-Putin demonstration in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. While many believers urged mercy and forgiveness for the three women on trial, Kirill publicly condemned such sentiments and declared that the women had been doing the work of the devil. For any believer, his remarks were not too far off the mark, as the clear intent of Pussy Riot had been to desecrate the most sacred of Orthodox cathedrals. In June 2013, Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, overwhelmingly passed legislation that criminalized acts committed “with the purpose of offending the feelings of religious believers.” Potential sentences for those convicted include steep fines and a prison sentence of up to two years.
The Russian Orthodox Church supported controversial bills, such as the ban on adoption of Russian children by American citizens and the so-called “gay propaganda law,” which bans the “promotion” of “non-traditional relationships” to minors. The new laws were believed to be an attempt to bolster Putin’s image of Russia as a bastion of “traditional values” and Christianity.
As for critics who express concern for human rights in Russia, Patriarch Kirill has a rebuttal. Speaking after a service in March 2016, the patriarch called belief in human rights that contradict the Bible a “global heresy.” He said “Many Christians have accepted these views and gave more priority to human rights than the word of God ... We must protect Orthodoxy from the heresy of our times."
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