The coincidence is purely accidental. On April 12th, US President Donald Trump launches a frontal attack on Pope Leo XIV. On the same day — Easter for the Orthodox Churches — Kirill of Moscow interrupts the celebration to honor the President of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Trump’s outbursts and posts on Truth Social are and will be commented upon at length. His clumsy (see here) and grammatically mangled instrumental use of the Christian heritage to accuse the Pope of powerlessness in the face of crime, of political ineptitude, and of prejudicial criticism of the American administration will not be easily filed away.
On the Moscow side, Western media pay no attention, because since the beginning of the aggression against Ukraine, the patriarch has deployed his ecclesiastical authority to justify military action and to display his alignment of vision with the tsar.
The icons and the president
That he should interrupt the Easter celebration to praise Putin for returning to the Church two icons displayed during the rite — the “Mother of God of Vladimir” and the “Mother of God of the Don,” previously held in the Tretyakov Gallery — comes as no particular surprise. It had already happened in 2023 with Andrei Rublev’s Trinity and the reliquary of Alexander Nevsky. As the director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, has acknowledged: “It has become clear that ritual significance now matters more to society than artistic significance.”
In the patriarch’s homilies and addresses, the repeated call to pray for the president is a constant. At the close of the solemn Easter vespers, he gave thanks to God “for our Orthodox president, for our government, in which there are so many Orthodox believers.”
He repeated it the following day: “May the Lord protect Russia, our president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the authorities and all the people.” He had done so on March 15th as well, on the occasion of the third Sunday of Lent: “May the Lord […] protect Russia, our Orthodox president, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the authorities, our armed forces and all of us who are fortunate enough to live in this social era, in which the destruction of the country has been consigned to the past.” The invocation has by now become routine.
The war is there but cannot be seen
The question of the war — which has by now cost two million dead, wounded and missing (of whom 1,200,000 are Russian) — after having been justified, exalted to the level of metaphysics, and described as “holy,” a necessary sacrifice to halt the corrupt West, has almost entirely disappeared from preaching, surfacing only as an unavoidable residue in marginal elements. As in the allusion in the vespers homily to “the armed forces serving at the borders of Russia, which are unfortunately now tinged with the colors of war,” or in similar expressions in other contexts.
At the origin of the military conflict lies “the enemy of the human race” — the devil — who, through his perverse machinations, pursues the destruction of Russia, as demonstrated by the disaster that followed the Bolsheviks’ killing of Nicholas II in 1918. At that moment, in the Church of the Ascension, there appeared the icon of the Mother of God seated on the tsar’s throne, known as “the Reigning One,” to indicate to the Orthodox people that, after the usurpation of power from the legitimate sovereign, Mary had taken it upon herself to safeguard Russia’s future.
Radicalizing the imperial vision of the Russkiy Mir — encompassing Russia, Ukraine and Belarus — Patriarch Kirill champions the cause of a new unification of the peoples who emerged from the baptismal font of Kyiv, “so that the spiritual unity of all our people may be restored and so that brother may never again rise against brother under the mask of political slogans, recognizing that fratricidal enmity is the most terrible sin before God and man. Therefore our prayer, especially today, is for the unity of all Holy Rus’, for the unity of the peoples who make up historical Rus’, for Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians and all the peoples who constitute the one people of historical Rus'” (liturgy of April 13th).
Consequently, the independence of Ukraine and of the other “brotherly” peoples is contrary to historical truth and to the will of God.
Persecution, consensus and power
The dramatic memory of the communist revolution resurfaces as the supreme test of the survival of the Church and of Russian identity, down to the question: why in 1905 and 1917 did “thousands of Orthodox Christians fail to defend the sacred places? They had defended them against Tatar-Mongol raids, against the Livonians (invaders from the Finno-Ugric-speaking Baltic region), against various foreign interventions and attempts to conquer the country! Why did they fail to stop the madmen who threatened the most important and fundamental thing, the spiritual and moral foundation of human existence?” In the event, they did not succeed.
“And so erupted that terrible revolution which overturned the sacred places, destroyed churches, plundered monasteries, and repressed the clergy” (March 15th), with a persecution incomparable to those of the Roman Empire. The extermination of the entire clergy and of churchgoers was contemplated.
Today everything is different. There may be many explanations, “but for a believer, there can be no other answer than: it is a miracle of God […] Looking at our history, we understand that the hand of God is at work” (March 31st). “Today — I repeat it once again — we live in extraordinary times. The terms of the relationship between Church and State are better than those of the tsarist era. Because — as I have already said — in the tsarist era the Church was governed by a state official, the chief procurator of the governing synod. He did not celebrate religious services, obviously, but he elected bishops and made them swear an oath. He was the head of all the bishops. He acted as if acting on behalf of the emperor, but it was he who governed.” And the system survived into the Soviet era with the Council for Religious Affairs, a carbon copy of the chief procurator, but with the intent of destroying the Church.
“Today we live in a completely different era, perhaps the best in all of history […] The Church is completely free. The patriarch answers to no one for episcopal candidacies, nor for appointments to the rank of rector, dean, or other positions. Decisions are taken by the patriarch alone and, in the case of the election of bishops, by the patriarch and the synod.”
According to the patriarch, a remarkable spiritual awakening is underway — “an active development of the Church’s interaction with civil society institutions, political and social organizations. All of this is causing bewilderment in the Western world” (March 31st, on the occasion of the publication of the latest volume, the 75th, of the Orthodox Encyclopaedia). A situation of prestige and recognition that calls for enthusiasm, zeal and courage — even at the price of not hearing the sounds of the war and its tragedies.
(first published in Italian at https://www.settimananews.it/informazione-internazionale/leone-cirillo-dinanzi-al-potere/ )
