A parishioner spoke, angrily opposing the priest’s words, uttered on a Sunday in March. Another, he remarked, did not repeat the prayers after him during the service. Then someone reported him to the police. In early April, Fr. Burdin read his last service. The cleric’s stance, which condemns the bloodshed in Ukraine, was in stark contrast to the Russian Orthodox Church, which has thrown its ideological weight behind the Kremlin war. In this way, the Moscow-led church risked not only alienating independent clergy at home, but also many Ukrainians. Mr Bourdain has been accused of “publicly discrediting the armed forces” under a new military censorship law that could carry a prison sentence for repeated offenses. The courts fined him and although he will remain in the priesthood, last week he left the village church for good. He did it on his own, he added. Patriarch Kirill, head of the Moscow-led branch of world orthodoxy, called on Russians this month to rally around their government so that the state could “repel its enemies, both external and internal,” sending a strong message. support for the war. The church, one of the main pillars of Vladimir Putin’s government, gave the war an air of legitimacy among the president’s supporters, reinforcing its portrayal of the Russian invasion as a kind of reunification of ancient Slavic Orthodox territories. Cyril presented the conflict not as an invasion of Ukraine but as a global, historic battle for values, with Russia as the last bastion against an immoral West that allows, for example, “gay parades.” He said that “the truth of God” was on the side of Russia. Since the outbreak of the war, the patriarch has prayed for peace in Ukraine, but has also shared a podium with the head of the Russian National Guard, a domestic military police force that has been fighting in Ukraine, giving him an image to support “small warriors.” . In early April, at a new military cathedral outside Moscow, Cyril recited a special prayer for soldiers fighting for “true Russian independence”, he said. Vladimir Putin presents flowers to Patriarch Kirill at a ceremony. The Russian Orthodox Church is one of the main pillars of Putin’s government © Mikhail Metzel / Reuters It was an “ecstatic agreement” between church and state, Fr. In Ukraine, it has angered many. Before the outbreak of the war, thousands of parishes in Ukraine remained under Moscow control, with Cyril as their spiritual leader, despite the historic split in 2018 that established an independent church led by Kiev for the first time, with its own religious leadership. And yet the church in Moscow has remained silent about the fate of its parishes in Ukraine, even though dozens of church buildings have been set on fire and destroyed, and priests have been forced to live in bomb shelters and provide emergency support to desperate communities. . “For Ukrainian priests and Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill betrayed them,” said Sergei Chapnin, a senior fellow in Orthodox Christian Studies at Fordham University in the United States. “He did not say a word of support or empathy to them. “From their point of view, they simply do not exist for Patriarch Cyril,” Chapnin said. A total of 12,000 parishes in Ukraine remained subordinate to Moscow and Cyril before the war, according to Chapnin. These represent about a third of all Moscow-controlled parishes in both countries, Chapnin said. Fourteen percent of Ukrainians identified with the Moscow-led church, with a population of about 44 million, according to a poll by the Razumkov Center in Ukraine. Now, many are eager to see a break. Just two weeks after the war, a pollster found that more than half of all Ukrainian Orthodox believers attending Moscow-led churches wanted their church to move away from Moscow and Cyril. Many church priests have stopped mentioning Cyril’s name during their prayers, which means that thousands of Ukrainian parishes have now “de facto” left the Moscow orbit, Chapnin said, despite their official belief in the spiritual leader will remain until the top bishop of Kiev does the same. Hundreds of Ukrainian priests, still official members of the Moscow Church, have demanded that their leader, Cyril, be tried in a rare ecclesiastical court for “blessing the war against Ukraine,” signing a petition by Andriy Pinchuk. . a priest from a small town near Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. “For many years, Patriarch Cyril in his public statements. . . “He claimed that he believed that the Orthodox Christians of Ukraine were his flock, for which he was responsible,” Pinchuk wrote. “And yet today he immediately blesses the natural destruction of this community by Russian forces.” “We declare that it is impossible for us to continue to be in any form of normal faith in the Patriarch of Moscow. “This is the command of our Christian conscience,” he said.

In Russia, meanwhile, many priests choose to remain silent, “burying their heads in the sand,” said Father Georgy Sukhoboki, a priest who left Russia in February before the outbreak of war after receiving a call from police. for his critique of the local archbishop’s spending habits. Speaking from Poland, he said he rejected a recent meeting or meeting of bishops in Moscow, where not a word was said about the war, “as if they do not see what is happening.” Father Bourdain said he had been treated fairly by his supervisor, Metropolitan Ferrapont, although the two disagreed over who should serve an Orthodox priest. “The priest can not share and preach his personal views, because the people expect from him the words of the Church,” said the Archbishop. When it came to talking about a war, Father Burdin disagreed. “Besides, I serve God,” he said.