The Moscow-based church's leadership has framed Russia's invasion of Ukraine in holy terms - as a defense of conservative values against a morally-corrupt West. Now, the war has prompted dissent within the Orthodox Christian faith.
Last weekend, at a special midnight service in a packed church in Udine, in northeast Italy, a priest led his flock of Ukrainian, Russian and Eastern European immigrants through their usual Orthodox Easter traditions. But recently, he's also accompanying them on a much less familiar path, sparked by the war in Ukraine.
An Easter service at the Orthodox Church in Udine, Italy. The parish has split from the Russian Orthodox Church, based in Moscow, over the church leadership's support for the war in Ukraine. There are roughly 100 million Russian Orthodox – the largest church within Orthodox Christianity. Their leader is Patriarch Kirill, who has framed Russia's invasion of Ukraine in holy terms.
Father Cyrill Hovorun was ordained by Kirill, and was his theological advisor until 2012. He said,"I believe that the church is the main supplier of the ideology, Putin's ideology. This war has a simple formula: War equals guns plus ideas, and the guns are, of course, supplied by the Kremlin and the ideas come from the church."
Those resources are vast, said another former insider, Sergei Chapnin, who also worked for Kirill:"There are rough estimations that he's definitely a billionaire and, in fact, he's one of Putin's oligarchs – sorry to say that.""Yeah," Chapnin replied."He has financial interest in his cooperation with the state, just like other oligarchs."
Before the war, Ukraine had many Orthodox Churches loyal to Moscow. Now, hundreds of Ukrainian parishes have broken away in protest … something that's not so easy to do in Russia.