Patriarch Kirill Says He Doesn’t Oppose Restoration of Death Penalty because Apostles Didn’t Object to It when Romans Crucified Jesus

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 7 – In yet another example of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s willingness to engage in mental gymnastics to come out in support of whatever he believes the Kremlin wants, he now says that the apostles didn’t object to the death penalty when the Romans applied it to Jesus so he won’t oppose its restoration in Russia.
    That creative interpretation of the Bible, Aleksandr Soldatov says, is just a small part of the neo-paganism which Kirill has long been associated with, a religion that has little to do with Christianity as it is typically understood but fits perfectly with Putin’s view (t.me/mozhemobyasnit/19287 reposted at poligonmedia.appspot.com/aleksandr-soldatov/ and summarized at charter97.org/ru/news/2024/11/7/617975/).
    According to the specialist on religious life in Russia, Kirill has led his church to completely substitute military patriotic views in place of Christian ones, with the center of his faith “not the Gospels but with an ideology connected with the romanticism of military actions” taken by the Russian state.
    For Kirill and those who follow him, “Jesus no is only one of the gods in the pantheon of the Russian Orthodox Church: on its icons appear the image of Stalin, and the main church of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation features amulets from the computer game Warhammer” rather than the Bible.
    Those who follow the current patriarch including both the priesthood and the laity are told that “in war all means are good” and shown that the church is prepared to support “any mechanism” to promote them “including those which are purely occult” and have nothing to do with Christian traditions, according to the specialist on the Russian Orthodox Church today.
    The teachings of Christ are turned upside down, the researcher says, with Christ’s injunction not to kill being recast as an order to do just that, Soldatov concludes.