ROME — The second most powerful leader of the Russian Orthodox Church has blamed Pope Francis for stymying relations with his church through his criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“At this stage I must say that some of the comments we read and hear not only from the pope’s lips, but from most of his assistants, do not contribute in any way to the preparation of a meeting and our further cooperation,” declared Metropolitan Antonij of Volokolamsk, president of the Department of External Affairs of the Patriarchate of Moscow on Russian television Saturday.
Metropolitan Antonij, a representative of Patriarch Kirill and a close ally of Vladimir Putin, had an audience with Pope Francis in August, amid rumors of a possible meeting between Kirill and Francis in September in Kazakhstan, which never happened.
“Currently, relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church are practically frozen,” said the Metropolitan, who has been a staunch supporter of Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
Last spring, Pope Francis had a video conversation with Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, after which he told Italian media that Kirill is harming rather than helping the situation in Ukraine by his support for Putin’s war.
Pope Francis meets with Chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk on the sidelines of the VII Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions at the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Nur-Sultan on September 14, 2022. (FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images)
“I spoke to Kirill for 40 minutes via zoom,” the pope said. “He spent the first twenty reading me all the justifications for the war from a notecard in his hand.”
“I listened and told him: I don’t understand anything about this. Brother, we are not state clerics, we cannot use the language of politics, but that of Jesus,” the pope recounted. “We are shepherds of the same holy people of God. For this we must seek ways of peace, to put an end to the firing of weapons.”
“The Patriarch cannot become Putin’s altar boy,” Francis continued, in a verbal slap to the patriarch’s seeming complicity with the Russian president.
Francis has not been alone in criticizing Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine.
In September, the papal envoy to Ukraine, Vatican Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, came under gunfire as he traveled to the front line of battle bringing foodstuffs and other humanitarian aid.
“We went to the border, to the war zone. We loaded a van and went right there where no one goes except soldiers,” Cardinal Krajewski reported of his trip in Zaporizhia.
“There are always Russians, but also people who have stayed there and who, for various reasons, have not left, some 4 thousand people,” said the Polish-born cardinal, who was accompanied by a Catholic Bishop, a Protestant Bishop, and a Ukrainian soldier.
“It is difficult to enter the war zone because there are no laws, no rules,” he said. “The Russians shoot anything that moves.”
The cardinal said his entourage was warned of the dangers and told to simply leave the food and exit quickly, but they still fell under fire from the Russians.
“It is good that there was a soldier with us, who told us where to run,” Krajewski said, “because for the first time I did not know which way to run.”
More recently, Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin called Putin’s threat that he would consider using nuclear weapons “repugnant.”
Putin’s “repugnant threat of the use of nuclear weapons,” the Vatican Secretary of State said, “illustrates just how close the world has come to the abyss of nuclear war.”
The first and only face-to-face meeting of Patriarch Kirill with Pope Francis took place on February 12, 2016 in the International Airport of Havana.
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