The reason was that many of the participants of the celebrations were parishioners of the Ukrainian branch of the Moscow Orthodox Church. Once Ukraine’s most popular church, it has been losing parishioners and reputation in the past two years following Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
In the weeks before the celebration in Kyiv, hundreds of its members were engaged in a pilgrimage to Kyiv that was widely and negatively covered by some media because some of the pilgrims appeared to be Kremlin supporters. It was feared that the pilgrimage could end up in provocations, orchestrated by Kremlin through the church.
There were grounds for believing so: In the past, the Kremlin has used the church in its attack on Ukraine: Kirill, the head of the church, condemned the Ukrainian government’s fight against Russian-separatist forces in the Donbas, calling it a fratricidal war – a statement aimed at the citizens of the Donbas, most of whom are the parishioners of Kirill’s church.
Unfortunately, using religion for political purposes is an old trick – and it all too often done in Ukraine, too.
Despite a law saying that the state and the church can’t interfere with each other, there is a history of Ukrainian politicians making deals with bishops for campaign endorsements. Officials of the highest rank have even invited priests to bless their offices when taking up their posts.
But mixing religion and politics is a road to nowhere, and we hope that Ukrainian authorities will eventually have the decency to call a halt to it. The abuse of churchgoers’ sincere beliefs for political purposes really is a sin.
