RUSSIAN PATRIARCH PRAYS FOR QUICK END TO UKRAINE

Sat 23 April 2022:

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose backing for Moscow’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has dismayed many fellow Christians, said on Saturday he hoped it would end quickly but again did not condemn it.

At an outdoor service at Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral on the eve of Orthodox Easter, Patriarch Kirill splashed holy water onto loaves of colourfully decorated Easter bread known as kulichi and said many of them would be sent to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

“God grant that this Easter gift helps those who are involved in this difficult conflict to calm their hearts, minds, souls, so that internecine strife ends as soon as possible and the long-awaited peace reigns, and with it the piety of people and faith may be strengthened,” he said.

Patriarch Kirill, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has previously made statements backing Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine, a position that has splintered the worldwide Orthodox Church.

Meeting between Patriarch and the Pope is off

Pope Francis’s plan to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has been suspended, the pontifex told an Argentine newspaper.

Reuters reported last week that the pontifex was considering extending a trip to Lebanon in June to meet with Kirill who has been a staunch supporter of Russian’s invasion on Ukraine.

But Vatican’s diplomats have advised that such a meeting “could lend itself to much confusion at this moment,” Francis was cited as saying.

It would have been only their second meeting. Their first, in Cuba in 2016, was the first between a pope and a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church since the Great Schism that split Christianity into Eastern and Western branches in 1054.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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