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“Early in the war, Patriarch Kirill delivered a sermon emphasizing the God-given unity of Ukraine and Russia,” Michels recalled in an interview with UC Riverside News. The capital, precisely, was the current Kyiv. According to that view, the Russian Orthodox Church and state were founded together around the year 988 with the baptism of Vladimir I, the ruler of Kievan Rus’, a territory that included parts of present-day Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Kirill’s vision of Christianity, like Putin’s idea of Russia, is based on a nationalist fantasy of the once-great “Russian World” that used to include Ukraine, CNN’s Delia Gallagher explains in this report. His view of Ukraine Kirill sees Ukraine as an integral and historical part of his Russian church, Georg Michels, a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, told CNN. However, Kirill, with his flock of millions of followers, is in any case the leader of the largest, and in some ways the most challenging, branch of Orthodoxy. “He is detrimental to the prestige of all Orthodoxy because Orthodoxy does not support violence, war, terrorism,” he said in an interview in Istanbul. (Credit: Burak Kara / Getty Images) Bartholomew, in fact, has been critical of Kirill for his position on the war: he recently said that the Russian should not have identified so much with Putin.
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That title, technically, belongs to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (now Istanbul), Bartholomew I. There is indeed a leader of Orthodox Christianity and it is not Kirill. Worldwide, the Orthodox Church is decentralized, with 15 branches, and decisions are made by a council of patriarchs. (In fact, the Great Schism of 1054 in which Catholic and Orthodox Christians split had a theological basis and the primacy of the pope is a key point: the Orthodox do not consider him to be the supreme leader of the Christians). The Orthodox do not have a figure equivalent to that of the pope. (Photo by Mikhail Metzel / SPUTNIK / AFP /Getty Images) Kirill’s place among Orthodox Christians You may have heard references to Kirill as the “Russian Pope”. He received a church that, according to the encyclopedia, “had experienced tremendous revitalization and growth following the end of official state atheism.” Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulates +Atriarch Kirill during a ceremony in Moscow on November 20, 2021. Upon his return in 1974 he was rector of the academy from which he graduated and archbishop of two cities, among other positions he held before being named head of the Russian Orthodox Church. By then his career within the church was decades old: he had graduated from the Leningrad Theological Academy in 1970 and, a year later, he left for Geneva as a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in the World Council of Churches. He has held his position since 2009, when he succeeded Aleksey II.
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Petersburg), was the first patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church elected after the fall of the Soviet Union, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Kirill’s long career in the Russian Orthodox Church Kirill, born in 1946 in what was then Leningrad (now St. Mentions of Kirill, who has openly supported the war, are multiplying: this week it became known that he is one of the 58 people included in the sixth package of European Union sanctions on the bloc, two sources told CNN, and the Pope Francis revealed that he had told him not to become an “altar boy for Putin”. The Russian Orthodox Church supports the invasion of Ukraine 4:20 (CNN Spanish) - In Russia’s war in Ukraine, a powerful name regularly appears next to that of Vladimir Putin: Kirill, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, head of a community of tens of millions of faithful Christians.