The Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill will not meet in mid-September with the Pope Francisco within the framework of the conference of world religions in Kazakhstan, as reported today by Metropolitan Antoni, the head of foreign affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (IOR).
“The holy patriarch will not participate in the work of the congress. And, therefore, a meeting with Pope Francis in Kazakhstan is not planned, ”he told the official agency. RIA Novosti.
Kirill and the pope were expected to meet or at least coincide at the 7th World Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions to be held on September 15 in Nur-Sultan.
Antoni considers that the Kazakh initiative for interreligious dialogue is “important” and “timely”, but added that the IOR will be represented only by an official delegation.
In addition, he recalled that, after unilaterally suspending preparations for a meeting, the Vatican did not present to the IOR “any proposal” about a possible meeting “on another date or place.”
In his opinion, a meeting of this level cannot take place within the framework of an international forum, no matter how significant it may be, as is the case with the Kazakh congress.
“It must be an independent event due to its special importance,” he explained.
Pope Francis recently received Antoni at the Vatican for his first meeting with a Kiril representative since the start of the Russian military campaign in Ukraine last February.
In June, Antoni replaced Hilarion, who had spoken out against a war before it started in Ukraine, as head of the IOR’s foreign relations department.
The pope has condemned the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine, although he also rejected the murder last Saturday of “innocents” such as the daughter of a famous Russian nationalist intellectual, which earned him criticism from kyiv, which also rejected any involvement in the crime.
At the time, Kirill, who maintains a close relationship with the president, Vladimir Putin, called on the Russians in his homilies to close ranks with the Kremlin and the Russian Army in their holy war with the “Antichrist”, that is, the Government Ukrainian and its Western patrons.
Subsequently, many of the Ukrainian dioceses that still depended on the Moscow Patriarchate stopped mentioning the Moscow Patriarch in their sermons in a clear sign of revulsion.
The Russian patriarch was the one who promoted the idea of the “Russian World”, that is to say, that wherever Russian is spoken and the faith is Orthodox, regardless of internationally recognized borders, it is the area of influence of Moscow, whose messianic mission is to defend Russia. Russians and their traditional values.
For this reason, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, until then loyal to Kirill, announced in May its break with the Moscow Patriarchate.
Pope Francis and the Russian patriarch met only once, in 2016 at the Havana airport, the first meeting between a Roman pontiff and an Orthodox chief in nearly a thousand years of schism.
