Brussels, June 3, 2022
Photo: vedomosti.ru
The European Union was forced to drop His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia from its latest package of sanctions against Russia thanks to the insistence of Hungary.
While this sixth package includes an embargo on most Russian oil imports by the end of the year, the proposal to sanction the head of the Russian Church failed to find the necessary unanimous approval, as the Hungarian government said sanctioning a hierarch would be a violation of respect for religious freedom, reports the Washington Post.
If sanctioned, the Patriarch would have been subject to travel bans and an asset freeze.
Earlier, Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the EU’s Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, asserted that the Patriarch should be included in the sanctions.
His Eminence Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk, the Chairman of the Russian Church’s Publishing Council, commented that any sanctions against the Patriarch would be completely illegitimate:
Patriarch Kirill is outside of politics and imposing sanctions against him is illegitimate and at the same time incomprehensible. This is a kind of abnormality in understanding human life in general. When the Patriarch expresses his opinion, he expresses his opinion from the position that the Church understands, and he opposes all violence.
The Patriarch has repeatedly called for prayers for peace and for “the parties to the conflict … to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.”
“Our flock is in Russia and Ukraine, and we fervently pray for the restoration of peace, that the Lord might overthrow the designs of the external evil force that feeds hatred,” the Patriarch said in a speech before Russian parliamentarian deputies last month.
At the same time, he has spoken about the conflict as a war of Russian self-defense. “We don't want to fight anyone. Russia has never attacked anyone. It’s amazing that a great and powerful country has never attacked anyone—it has only defended its borders,” he said in his sermon on May 3.
In his sermon on Forgiveness Sunday in March, Pat. Kirill spoke about the fratricidal war as a “struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical meaning.” The people of Donbass have been suffering attacks for eight years, the Russian primate says, because of their “fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim to be world power”—most exemplified by the phenomenon of gay pride parades.
“The requirements for many to hold a gay pride parade are a test of loyalty to the most powerful world; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they don’t enter that world, they become strangers to it,” His Holiness explained.
Therefore, the conflict goes beyond politics, he continued. “We’re talking about human salvation, about where humanity will be, on which side of God the Savior, Who comes into the world as Judge and Creator… And everything connected with the justification of sin condemned by the Bible is today a test of our faithfulness to the Lord, of our ability to profess faith in our Savior.”
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