The warlike stance of the Russian Orthodox Church has caused some Ukrainian priests and parishioners to sever their ties.

The Russian Orthodox Church reiterated the Kremlin’s rhetoric to justify the war in Ukraine.

This stance seems to lead many Ukrainian priests and members of the Orthodox Church to turn their backs on Moscow.

“I will never forget the moment when I got up early for Mass and suddenly heard the shocking sounds of bombings,” says Father Nikolai Pluzhnik.

“The wonderful woman who cooks at our church and her son in a wheelchair were killed when a cannonball hit their house. And now I know other parishioners who have been killed,” he added.

Like most clergy in the northeastern region of Ukraine, Father Pluzhnik belonged to the local branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which followed the line set by the Moscow headquarters.

But now he has said he wants to join the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which gained independence from Russia in 2019, in a move never recognized by the country under Putin’s rule.

Pluzhnik said that many of his fellow priests who followed the Moscow Patriarch Cyril did the same because of the church leader’s stance on the war.

Father Pluzhnik and his family fled when their area was attacked and they now have a new temporary home in the town of Chernivtsi in western Ukraine.

“When the war started, I was waiting for news from the ‘father’ of our church, Patriarch of Moscow, Cyril. But first there was no reaction, then the situation got worse,” he said.

“Patriarch Kiril blessed the Russian army, blessed the war. Not only him, but most of the priests of the Moscow Patriarchate (Russian Orthodox Church), including those of Ukrainian descent. I was in shock,” he says.

While the patriarch did not openly condemn the massacres of innocent people in Ukraine or call for a ceasefire, he held large television services in Moscow to bless the soldiers. He also suggested in his sermons that the Kremlin war was only for the future of Christianity.

“What happens today is much more important than politics,” he said last month. “We are talking about the salvation of man, where will humanity end, which side according to God the savior?”

Christian nationalism

Many of the Kremlin’s narratives have a religious tone that justified their invasion of Ukraine. It is a struggle for the conservative ideals of the Russian Orthodox Church against a supposedly immoral outside world.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Ukraine is not only an “inalienable part” of Russia’s history and culture, but also its “spiritual domain”.

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who until 2012 was the spiritual leader of the Church of England, said he had offended Patriarch Cyril’s feelings.

“There are elements in the Russian Christian tradition that can be really toxic when you put a certain kind of Christian nationalism, a kind of messianic approach to the destiny of the nation, into their heads,” Williams said on a visit to western Ukraine this week. Said.

Williams was part of a high-profile multi-faith delegation of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist leaders who met with refugees fleeing the horrors in the east of the country.

The former archbishop has long written about the positive contribution of the Russian Orthodox Church and seems deeply upset by the role played by the Moscow Patriarchate in the war.

“I think the growing influence of ultra-nationalist ideals, often with a tone of anti-Semitism, has been circulating in the Moscow Patriarchate for some time,” he said.

“It is now manifested in this very uncritical support for Russian national aspirations, in a very aggressive attitude towards many other Orthodox churches,” he said.

‘They are either blind or serving the devil’

Patriarch Cyril reiterated Putin’s assertion that Russian speakers and followers of the Moscow Russian Orthodox Church living in eastern Ukraine should be released after years of repression.

“Our brothers were really suffering, they are suffering for their devotion to the Church,” the Patriarch said a week after the war began.

However, Father Pluzhnik, who spoke Russian and was a supporter of the Moscow Patriarchate throughout his adult life, was enraged by these allegations.

“When I hear them say they are protecting us and waging a ‘holy war,’ I think they are either blind or serving the devil, not God,” he said.

“We lived in peace until they came. But instead of protecting us, they bombed, tortured, and killed us. Before the war, parishioners were completely free to choose which church they would serve, and they only went to the church closest to their homes. “It didn’t make a big difference for them, they just wanted to pray to God. Now that has changed.”

Sergi Bortnik, professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy and adviser to the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, acknowledges that there is a large movement of people and communities across the country who have given up their allegiance to Moscow.

“I think half of the 12,000 parishes (the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine) now say they want to leave,” Bortnik said. Said.

“Patriarch Cyril has said nothing about all the Christians killed in Ukraine, so I think our church members are free to terminate any ties to him as patriarch,” he added.

“The connection of our entire church in Ukraine with Moscow is now doubtful,” he said.

The Kremlin’s aim, supported by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, was to unite Russia and Ukraine in a single “spiritual space”.

But the way they tried to do this seems to have had the opposite effect.