Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill Cancels Planned Kazakhstan Meeting With Pope Francis

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has canceled his planned attendance at an interfaith meeting in Kazakhstan next month, where he was expected to meet Pope Francis, a top Orthodox official said. The official’s announcement pointed to further strain in relations over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk, head of foreign relations for the Moscow Patriarchate, was quoted by the Ria Novosti news agency as saying that Patriarch Kirill would not attend the Sept. 13-15 meeting and that any meeting with Francis was therefore off.

Kirill has justified the invasion of Ukraine on spiritual and ideological grounds, describing it as a “metaphysical” battle with the West. He has blessed Russian soldiers going into battle and has invoked the idea that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Associated Press reporting describes him as a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, and says he has lent spiritual justification to the war.

Francis had confirmed as recently as the previous month that he would meet Kirill at the Kazakhstan conference. That encounter would have been the second-ever meeting between a Roman Catholic pope and a Russian patriarch. The first took place in 2016, and a second meeting planned for June had been postponed because of the diplomatic fallout from the war.

Francis has denounced the war in Ukraine while trying to keep a door open to dialogue with Moscow. He has not condemned Russia, Putin or Kirill by name. That approach has angered Kyiv, which this week criticized his remarks lamenting that innocents on both sides were paying the price of war. He made those comments on Wednesday, as he marked six months of conflict. They included an allusion to the weekend car-bomb slaying in Moscow of Darya Dugina, a nationalist Russian television commentator and daughter of the political theorist Alexander Dugin, who strongly supports the war. Francis listed the “poor girl” killed in Moscow among the “innocents” victimized by the “insanity of war,” along with orphans in Ukraine and Russia. Protecting the vulnerable, including orphans, is the kind of care Psalm 82:3 calls for.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See, Andrii Yurash, said Francis’s words were “disappointing” because they seemed to equate “aggressor & victim, rapist and raped.” In a tweet on Wednesday, he asked how Francis could cite an “ideologist of imperialism as innocent victim.”

Source: Read the original report