PATRIARCH KIRILL of Moscow has accused European politicians of “leading their people to the abyss of moral and spiritual devastation” and has insisted that Russia has a duty to “resist the Antichrist”.
“Western elites are deconstructing their Christian heritage and abandoning their spiritual roots — everything that shaped Western civilisation and made possible its successes and achievements,” the Patriarch said on Tuesday.
“The European house increasingly resembles, in the Gospel expression, a painted tomb, seemingly beautiful on the outside, but full of dead bones and uncleanness — striking in splendour and luxury, but with a foundation hopelessly sagging and walls about to collapse.”
Addressing the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Federal Assembly, in a three-hour speech, Patriarch Kirill said that the European Union, largely created by Christian statesmen, had since adopted “values hostile to Christianity”, as Western elites waged “war against the traditional family” by promoting gender reassignment, “same-sex cohabitation”, and other “moral perversions”.
He warned, however, that Russians should avoid “pharisaic pride” by merely looking down on the West, and should, instead, be active in resisting its “culture of the golden calf, putting economic values and earthly well-being at the forefront.
“When the Soviet Union collapsed, much of our society felt optimistic about relations with the Western world; there was practically no assessment of the cultural and spiritual state of Western society,” he said.
“We can mourn and complain that Western political elites, like blind leaders, are leading their people to the abyss, to moral and spiritual devastation. But Russia must learn from this, and understand how important it is to remain faithful to its spiritual traditions and values.”
The Patriarch spoke in the wake of fresh Russian missile strikes against Kyiv and Kharkiv, in which 20 civilians were killed and 130 people were injured, after Ukraine’s annual Unity and Freedom Day on Saturday. And another prominent Orthodox priest and theologian, Archimandrite Cyril (Hovorun), has been unfrocked by the Moscow Patriarchate for criticising the February 2022 invasion.
Patriarch Kirill said that Europe’s migration crisis had been exacerbated by the continent’s anti-Christian direction. Crosses and the name of Christ were now barred from public spaces, and biblical texts had been rewritten to “justify gender ideology”.
He said that Poland and Hungary had tried to “maintain their commitment to Christian values”, but also feared conflict if they asserted their “freedom in the spiritual sphere”.
“We are offering a different civilisational path of development, and this path is becoming very attractive — Russia has enormous potential to unite a large number of nations around itself, not militarily, but ideologically, as countries and peoples grow tired of intrusive Western liberal propaganda,” he said.
“We are talking about the victory of evil, about a confusion of values, when people no longer have the ability to distinguish good from evil and believe in the coming Antichrist. The struggle for morality, to maintain our traditional values, thus becomes a struggle for our present and future.”
Amid signs of growing opposition to Moscow Patriarchate influences, Estonia’s Russian Orthodox Metropolitan, Evgeny (Reshetnikov), was denied a visa extension last week for “endangering national security”. A prominent Orthodox priest, Fr Arseniy Revtov, urged the Orthodox Church in Poland, in a media interview, to distance itself from Russian actions.
On Saturday, the US State Department handed religious-freedom awards to a group of Orthodox priests from Lithuania and Belarus who were expelled from their Moscow-aligned Churches for speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine in their blog, en.ortodoksas.lt.
In a meeting on Tuesday with Manfred Weber MEP, president of the European People’s Party, the Primate of the Ukrainian independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), said that Russia had constantly used Moscow-aligned “church structures” to “achieve its criminal goals”, and defended a planned law to curb religious links with “the aggressor state”.
In a speech on Unity Day, on Monday, however, the leader of Ukraine’s Moscow-linked Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky), insisted that his followers had consistently defended “Ukrainian statehood”. He said that current moves against his Church endangered “national unity and consolidation”.
Patriarch Kirill told the Federation Council that “cynical political strategists” would be “condemned in the court of world history and God’s court” for driving a wedge between Russia and Ukraine, which he described as “little Russia”.
Russian soldiers were “fighting and dying”, he said, so that their country could remain “sovereign and independent” by preserving its “traditional values”, while also saving Ukraine from alignment with the West.
“It is no coincidence that Orthodoxy was chosen as a target by the godless Western political elites, who do not hide their true intentions to destroy our country, encourage Russophobia, and sow enmity, hatred and divisions between fraternal peoples.
“The requirements for joining the European Union are predictable: legislative recognition of immoral phenomena such as destructive gender ideology, same-sex unions, feminism, and euthanasia. Having recognised and assimilated all of this, there will no longer be a people of Ukraine, but a population with inverted ideas of good and evil, deprived of its own spiritual and cultural identity.”
The Patriarch welcomed Russian laws, adopted in 2023, to “consolidate traditional values in the education system”, ban gender reassignment, and encourage a “negative attitude to abortion”. It urged “full implementation” of a Supreme Court decree, last November, that banned the “extremist LGBT movement”.
He called for steps to ensure that the “value of chastity” was promoted by Russian media and schools, and to curb the “massive influx of migrants”, which was “changing the appearance of Russian cities” and “deforming the country’s unified civilisational space”.