The solemn funeral of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI took place on the eve of Epiphany and two days before Orthodox Christmas, for which even Kirill, the patriarch of the radical Church of Moscow, The call for a truce so that everyone can celebrate the holy mysteries of the festival is backed by President Putin, echoing Pope Francis’ call for peace. The news of Joseph Ratzinger’s death has drawn a lot of attention and has drawn attention to the situation everywhere during the Christmas season.
Benedict met Kirill in 2006, a decade before Kirill’s historic meeting with Francis in Havana, when Kirill was Metropolitan for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Church and was already preaching a reconquest world to realize true faith.
On that occasion, Kirill came to Rome to consecrate the Russian Church, whose patron saint is St. Catherine of Alexandria, which towers above the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. On the outskirts of Abamelek on the Yanikulum hill, it is the official residence of the ambassador of the Russian Federation.
After all, the future patriarch has often been in Rome for many years, he has already exercised de facto “ideological” leadership of the patriarchate since his youth, and he has met Cardinal Ratzinger several times.
Relations with Catholics are his main reference, as the general aspiration of the Moscow Church, which since the Middle Ages has claimed to rise to the status of a “Third Rome”, and the church above the Vatican is only its signature self-awareness.
Kirill’s “universal” debut after living in the Soviet era as a young man (the Brezhnev era and becoming a bishop before he was 30) was at the Millennium Celebration of Rus’s baptism in 1988, where he is compared to the present Patriarch Pimen (Pimen), old and sickly. The apostolic bishop died of illness the following year.
In the fear of Gorbačev and all the elites whose reforms are still uncertain, Kirill asked the 10 cardinals of the Vatican delegation, From Casaroli to Martini and Lustiger, arriving in Moscow, at St. Sergei’s Monastery.
In 1990, Kirill supported the patriarchal appointment of Metropolitan Alexei (Ridiger), against the most popular Filaret. Metropolitan Filaret of Kyiv, 95, inspired the Ukrainian church to revolt against Moscow.
Ratzinger was already Minister of the Doctrine of the Holy See at that time, and he had a similar function to Kirill in Russia. The true reference of the Orthodox and Catholic Union.
The 76-year-old Patriarch of Moscow was undoubtedly a well-educated and brilliant man, but despite his academic and theoretical achievements, he could not be compared with Benedict, who was probably the greatest Christian theologian of the second half of the 20th century.
While Ratzinger’s doctrinal teachings aimed at preparing the Church for a humble and cryptic future came to be known as the “Benedictine Choice,” Kirill had in mind a comprehensive, not an alternative.
The Bavarian theologian and future pope has seen profound changes in the relationship between the Church and the world in the years following the Second Vatican Council. He participated as a young advisor at Vatican II.
Preparations must be made to abandon the dominance and sociopolitical influence of official Christianity and return to the prophetic and decisive influence of the Gospel, which can change the world without the support of power and worldly glory. Much of the recent commentary has returned to emphasizing Benedict’s prescience, which has signaled what his successors have called an “extroverted” and “marginal” Church.
Kirill paid close attention to Ratzinger’s words, and during the years he was trying to deal with the delicate transition from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church had faithfully served the party’s directives since Stalin’s time, taking a humiliating, Very compromised position.
The religious revival of the 1990s challenged the Moscow Patriarchate, which, while restoring the faithful, was in danger of losing power. The Metropolitan then proposed to serve not only Orthodox Christians, but also Catholics: in 1990, he advised the Holy See not to send bishops or nuncios to Moscow, but to send missionaries to him, “Catholics” distributed in the Patriarchate. Diocese”, as a member of the vast Russian-Eurasian territory (where the USSR still existed).
Pope John Paul II did not like this idea at all, and whenever he could, he re-established the Catholic structure in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union, first of all Ukraine, where Kirill was particularly concerned, and it is easy to understand why today.
The metropolitan took this as a personal insult, a circumstance that prompted him to change the tone of the official statement. Leaving aside the subtleties of ecumenism and foreign relations, he began preaching another religious revival, one of the end-of-the-world churches fending off the attacks of the Antichrist.
Kirill, using a Razin-style argument, wants to show that Christianity is indeed in danger of being eliminated by a secularized society; for that matter, who, after 70 years of militant atheism, understands this better than the Russians? The Church had to be reborn in a new form, and this task fell precisely to the ‘Third Rome of Moscow’.
These and other considerations made Kirill a genuine inspiration for the policies of newly elected President Vladimir Putin, as he brazenly threw himself into the contradictory adventures of Russia under Yeltsin, who at the time He was known as the “ecclesiastical oligarch”. Putin was elected in the third millennium of Christianity.
If today’s Orthodox Church is somehow compelled to support Putinist militant excesses, accompanied by harsh repression, in the first decade of the new tsar’s reign it was the Patriarchate who guided the selection, It promotes “defense of tradition” in various ways as a solution to all problems.
When Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, Kirill thus took over Russia and its revival, no longer just religious in general, but Orthodox and “sovereignist”. He then tried to revive a failed coalition in 1990, placing himself alongside the new pope in a worldwide defense of true Christianity.
He effectively gained control over the Russian Catholics, which he had previously demanded and which Pope Ratzinger granted him, despite the persuasive zeal of the Poles. After all, this is no longer his primary need, as the new rules of the Putin regime have prevented him from engaging in any kind of competition in Russia’s sacred territory.
Kirill’s wish is to push Catholics around the world to increasingly defend the “inalienable values” of the social sphere, the traditional family and natural gender roles, and the defense of the unborn, despite the argument It’s hard to stand up in Russia, a country with a higher abortion rate in the world, where church law even allows divorce.
Ethical and anthropological arguments are often glossed over in Russia (and elsewhere) and expressed with hypocrisy, when in reality they express a deep need for the Church’s action at the social level. From the Russian Orthodox point of view, what really counts is the “defensive” attitude, the declaration of the impassable space that constitutes the original meaning of the word “Orthodox”, and the defense of the true faith.
In 2000, the year of Putin and Kirill’s glory in Russia, Ratzinger’s Dominus Iesus, written by Ratzinger, seemed to fulfill these requirements, reaffirming salvation through Christ and not through other religions or ideologies uniqueness.
This grand plan seemed achievable during Ratzinger’s pontificate, a kind of “Benedictine-Kirillian choice”, a union of Eastern and Western Christians not to bring about structural mergers but To witness the advent of a new era of true Christianity.
However, history shows how unfounded these dreams are. When Kirill became patriarch in 2009, a very serious economic crisis had erupted in the globalized West, causing great discontent in all countries and among the most unprotected segments of the population.
In addition to moral crusades, social anxieties of rebellion, so-called “populism” and all sorts of sovereignisms starting to spread, Russia has also lost its last remaining prerogative of being the only country in the world challenging global power.
On the contrary, the second decade of the 2000s, the beginning of the Patriarchate of Kirill, the end of the Benedictine term, who resigned for reasons known only to God, but still showed his presence in the face of the disintegration of the world and of the Church Obvious weakness.
Instead of the syncretism of globalization and the optimism of ultraliberalism, the age of susceptibility and culpability-finding has begun in the public institutions of the state and church. The Orthodox-Catholic union dreamed by Kirill, to which Benedict was at least partially addicted, but which Pope Francis and Kirill announced in Havana, unfortunately failed to translate into a real rebirth of the universal Church.
We know today how it turned out, Kirill blessed Putin’s army to “defend the world” from the Antichrist, who is increasingly difficult to pin down, or increasingly equated with, every despotism in either side of the war tendency.
Pope Francis, who has long believed in the alliance with Kirill, supported it on all fronts, even tried to support it during the months of the invasion of Ukraine, does not believe that this is really the final choice of the Russian Orthodox Church: historical enlightenment.
Benedict retired to pray, entrusting to God the future of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the world as a whole. He rested at Christmas, after a year of war, and all, believers and unbelievers, militants and activists of all stripes, took this respite of reflection and contemplation, like the Magi of the East in this infinite worship before the baby of the helper.
The gentle and profound Pope has long since prepared us for real revelation, and his prophecy is more effective today than it was yesterday. The choice of Benedict is the rebirth of the world in Christ, at the end of the war of peoples and hearts.
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