The so-called “ROC exarch in Africa,” Metropolitan Leonid, claims, or perhaps already performs the role alike to that of an odious lawmaker, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, known for his outrageous propaganda stunts.
That’s according to a Ukraine-based religious expert Oleksandr Yefremenko, who addressed the cleric’s latest interview on Facebook on January 27.
“Listening to the comments of the main Russian ‘educator’ of Africa, one gets the impression that Metropolitan Leonid himself is claiming, or perhaps already performing, the role of a ‘Church Zhirinovsky,’ or at least claiming the position of the main church propagandist. According to him, everything and everyone outside of Russia is doomed to moral and spiritual destruction. And that only Russia is a place of salvation for all mankind,” Yefremenko said.
Yefremenko says as he listened to the interview with ROC Metropolitan Leonid, he had the impression that the whole thing was a continuous Russian propaganda, in which two main leitmotifs are clearly traced: the ROC is the only defender of canons among all Churches and that Russia is the only defender of traditional family values in the world.
“It is the ROC, according to him, that can protect the canons at the ecumenical level, and therefore ‘we should not be ashamed of this ecumenicity.’ In fact, yet another heresy has been voiced, in a cheap Russian wrapper, which, in fact, conceals the banal craving for power and primacy in the Orthodox world,” said Oleksandr Yefremenko.
“In an interview the Moscow-African hierarch denied such aspirations by the ROC, noting that the Moscow Patriarchate doesn’t seek to be on top, only willing to be a servant to all. However, at the end of this very interview, he agreed with a happy smile to the thesis, introduced by the interviewer, about Moscow being the third Rome,” concluded the religious expert.
