Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in the Pskov oblast of Russia, Sept. 11, 2021.
Photo:
Alexander Demianchuk/Zuma Press
Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France
Cyril Hovorun,
a 48-year-old Ukrainian, has worked in the innermost sanctum of the Russian establishment. An Orthodox monk, he was for 10 years the private secretary and closest theological counselor to
Patriarch Kirill
of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now living in elective exile in the West, Mr. Hovorun is a professor of religion and international relations in Sweden. He knows better than most how those two subjects collide in his former home.
invasion of Ukraine, he says, isn’t simply a project of subjugation. It is also “a sacred war.”
At a conference in France last month organized by the Faith Angle Forum, an American program that studies the interface of religion and politics, Mr. Hovorun declared that Russia’s brutality in Ukraine is inextricable from the Kremlin’s idea of “Russian messianism.” In subsequent conversations, he explains to me that Mr. Putin and his associates “have the mentality of Crusaders, for whom Ukraine is their Jerusalem.” Just as the Crusaders sought to “purge the holy land of infidels,” the Russians are in Ukraine because they believe it’s in the hands of unbelievers “in thrall to the West”—namely, “gay people, secularists and Catholics.”
Mr. Hovorun dismisses the Russian president as a shallow man, incapable of deep thought. He believes Mr. Putin’s messianic inspiration comes not from his own reading of Russian history and Scripture, but from Patriarch Kirill, who has thrown the weight of the Russian Orthodox Church behind the war. “My hypothesis is that the war would have been impossible without input from the church,” Mr. Hovorun says. Others evidently share this view, including
Pope Francis,
who in May exhorted Patriarch Kirill…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at RSSOpinion…