The leader of the Russian Orthodox faith said his church and its faithful were holding back the anti-Christ. Patriarch Kirill spoke six weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that he has forced more than four million people to flee their land, left thousands dead and wounded and destroyed towns and cities.
His remarks supported the Kremlin’s line on the war, implying that Russia’s actions in Ukraine constituted a forced response to a foreign aggressor. “Why did external forces rise up against Russian lands? Why do they strive to destroy, divide, pit brother against brother?” Kirill was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency RIA.
The Kremlin maintains that the invasion is a special operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, ideas that Ukraine and Western governments reject.
An ally of President Vladimir Putin, Kirill has defended Russia’s actions and sees the war as a clash with a Western liberal culture he calls decadent, particularly its acceptance of homosexuality.
Referring to a New Testament text in which the intensification of the conflict between good and evil culminates in the second coming of Christ, Kirill said: “The Book of Revelation mentions a certain force that stops the coming into the world of the anti-Christ ». “Some thought that it is the church that is holding this back, and that is correct.”
“The church prevents people from losing their way in life… it is the Orthodox faith, which lives and acts in the Orthodox church: this is the force that holds back (the anti-Christ).”
Kirill said it was no accident that “to this force today all the sharp arrows of all those who seek to compromise the church, divide it and uproot it from the people are pointed,” according to RIA.
