WelCom August 2022
Cardinal Kurt Koch, a Swiss prelate of the Catholic Church and president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, says Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s defence of the war in Ukraine amounts to ‘heresy’, and has fractured the unity of the Orthodox community. ‘It is heresy that the patriarch dares to legitimise the brutal and absurd war in Ukraine for pseudo-religious reasons,’ the Cardinal said.
He noted that Kirill in the past has implied that Russians and Ukrainians share a national unity given the baptism of Grand Duke Vladimir of Kievan Rus’ in 988, after which he declared Christianity the state religion. In Koch’s view, this vision of unity ‘is cruelly refuted today: if Russians and Ukrainians emerged from the same baptismal bath, but the Russians today attack the Ukrainians and wage war, then the unity is denied.’