Father Ioan Burdin, a priest from a small village in central Russia, began his first sermon after the outbreak of the war with the promise of praying for the people of Ukraine and ending their suffering.
One parishioner spoke out, angrily objecting to the priest’s remarks on Sunday in March. Another, he noticed, did not repeat prayers after him during the liturgy. Then someone brought him to the police. In early April, Father Burdin read his last liturgy.
The clergyman’s position condemning the bloodshed in Ukraine was at odds with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has thrown its ideological weight behind the Kremlin’s war. In doing so, the Moscow-led church risks not only repelling independent-minded clergy at home, but also many Ukrainians.
Father Burdin has been accused of “publicly discrediting the armed forces” under a new military censorship law that could result in a prison sentence for repeat offenses. The court fined him, and although he will remain in the priesthood, he left the village church forever last week. He did so of his own free will, he added.
Patriarch Kirill, head of the Moscow-led branch of global Orthodoxy, this month called on Russians to unite around their government so the state can “repel its enemies, foreign and domestic,” a resounding message in support of the war.
The church, one of the key pillars of Vladimir Putin’s rule, gave the war a legitimacy among the president’s supporters, reinforcing his portrayal of Russia’s invasion as a kind of unification of the ancient Slavic-Orthodox lands.
Cyril presented the conflict not as an invasion of Ukraine, but as a global, historic battle for values, with Russia being the last bastion against the immoral West, allowing, for example, “gay parades.” He said “God’s truth” was on Russia’s side.
Since the outbreak of the war, the patriarch has been praying for peace in Ukraine, but also shares a pulpit with the head of the Russian National Guard, an internal military police force that has divisions fighting in Ukraine, by giving him an icon in support of “young warriors.” In early April, in a new military cathedral near Moscow, Kirill read a special prayer for soldiers fighting for “Russia’s true independence,” he said.
Vladimir Putin presents flowers to Patriarch Kirill at a ceremony. The Russian Orthodox Church is one of the key pillars of Putin’s rule © Mikhail Metzel / Reuters
It was an “ecstatic symphony” of church and state, Father Burdin said, speaking on the phone from his small parish in Karabanovo, shortly after his last sermon at the Golden Dome Church.
In Ukraine, this has caused outrage among many. Before the war broke out, thousands of parishes in Ukraine remained under Moscow’s control, with Kirill as their spiritual leader, despite the historic division in 2018 that created an independent, Kyiv-led church for the first time with its own religious leadership.
Nevertheless, the Moscow Church is silent about the fate of its parishioners in Ukraine, even as dozens of church buildings have been shelled and destroyed, and priests have been forced to live in bomb shelters and organize emergency support for desperate communities.
“For Ukrainian priests and Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill betrayed them,” said Sergei Chapnin, a senior fellow at Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University in the United States.
“He did not say a word of support or sympathy for them. From their point of view, they simply do not exist for Patriarch Kirill, “Chapnin said.
According to Chapnin, as many as 12,000 parishes in Ukraine remained under Moscow and Cyril before the war. They represent about a third of all Moscow-controlled parishes in both countries, Chapnin said.
Fourteen percent of Ukrainians identify with the Moscow-led church of about 44 million people, according to a study by the Ukrainian Razumkov Center.
Now many want to see a holiday. Just two weeks after the war, a sociologist found that more than half of Ukrainian Orthodox believers who attend Moscow-led churches want their church separated from Moscow and Kirill.
Many priests in the church have stopped mentioning Cyril’s name during prayers, meaning thousands of Ukrainian parishes have already “de facto” left Moscow’s orbit, Chapnin said, although their formal allegiance to the spiritual leader will remain as long as the supreme bishop of Kyiv did not do the same.
Hundreds of Ukrainian priests, still formally members of the Moscow Church, have called for their leader Kirill to be tried in a rare church tribunal for “blessing the war against Ukraine”, signing their names in a petition by Andriy Pinchuk, a small-town priest near Dnieper in Eastern Ukraine.
“For many years, Patriarch Kiril in his public statements. . . He claims that he believes that the Orthodox Christians of Ukraine are his flock, for which he is responsible, “Pinchuk wrote. “Yet today he directly blesses the physical destruction of this community by Russian forces.”
“We declare that it is impossible to continue to be in any form of canonical fidelity to the Moscow Patriarch. That is the command of our Christian conscience, “he said.
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In Russia, meanwhile, many priests choose to remain silent, burying their heads in the sand, said Father Georgi Sukhoboki, a priest who fled Russia in February before the war broke out after receiving a police summons for criticizing local spending habits. archbishop.
Speaking from Poland, he said he refrained from a recent synod or meeting of Moscow bishops, where not a word was said about the war, “as if they don’t see what’s going on.”
Father Burdin said he had been treated fairly by his superior, Metropolitan Ferapont, although the two disagreed on whom an Orthodox priest should serve.
“A priest cannot share and preach his personal views because people expect the words of the Church from him,” the archbishop said.
When it came to speaking out against the war, Father Burdin disagreed. “After all, I serve God,” he said.
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