ISW<\/a>.<\/p>\nA Russian Telegram channel with insider sources within the ROC MP amplified on March 31 a document dated March 29, in which Head of the ROC MP Affairs, Metropolitan Gregoriy of Voskresensk, instructed clergy to read a prayer \u2014 the \u201cPrayer for Holy Rus\u201d \u2014 on a daily basis during Lent.<\/p>\n
Metropolitan Gregoriy of Voskresensk also called on the clergy to read the \u201cPrayer for Holy Rus\u201d at home and to offer to read this prayer to parishioners. The \u201cPrayer for Holy Rus\u201d is a new prayer that the ROC MP officially introduced in September 2022.<\/p>\n
This prayer is a highly politicized and pro-war and pro-Kremlin prayer filled with Kremlin talking points and other false Russian narratives. The prayer asks God to \u201cto help [Russian] people and grant [Russia] victory\u201d against \u201cthose who want to fight [and] have taken up arms against Holy Rus, eager to divide and destroy her one people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mention of \u201cHoly Rus\u201d and \u201cone people\u201d echoes Putin\u2019s long-term false narrative that Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians comprise one Russian nation, and is a misappropriation of the history of Kyivan Rus.<\/p>\n
ROC MP Head Patriarch Kirill \u2014 reportedly himself a former Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) officer and a known staunch supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin \u2014 first read the \u201cPrayer for Holy Rus\u201d (which he supposedly authored) on September 25, 2022, following Putin\u2019s unpopular call for partial mobilization. The ROC MP had previously instituted politicized prayers in June 2014 and March 2022 supporting Russia\u2019s aggression against Ukraine, and ISW has long assessed that the ROC MP is a Kremlin-controlled organization and a known tool within the Russian hybrid warfare toolkit that promotes the Kremlin\u2019s interests and nationalist ideology domestically and abroad.<\/p>\n
The ROC MP leadership has also intensified internal scrutiny against ROC MP clergy and has reportedly defrocked several clergy members that refused to promote Kremlin-introduced prayers supporting Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A guest researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ksenia Luchenko, noted that the ROC MP regards individual ROC MP clergy members\u2019 refusal to use assigned prayers in liturgy as perjury and a sin punishable by defrocking under the 25th Apostolic Canon.<\/p>\n
The Christians Against War Project, a Russian organization that tracks persecutions of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian priests, reported that ROC MP or Russian state authorities have already disciplined no fewer than 28 ROC MP clergy members from Russia, five from Belarus, one from Kazakhstan, and six from Lithuania for anti-war rhetoric or refusing to read the assigned pro-war prayers during liturgy.[6] The ROC MP has reportedly administered various punishments, including defrocking, demotions, and excommunication.<\/p>\n
Local Russian state officials opened administrative cases and issued fines for \u201cdiscrediting the Russian Armed Forces\u201d against several such anti-war ROC MP clergy members.<\/p>\n
Patriarch Kirill, for example, approved a decision in February 2024 to defrock one of the most famous and respected ROC MP priests, Archpriest Alexey Uminsky, for refusing to read the \u201cPrayer for Holy Rus.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Court of the Moscow Diocese also defrocked a priest in May 2023 for substituting the word \u201cvictory\u201d with \u201cpeace\u201d when reading the \u201dPrayer for Holy Rus.\u201d Luchenko also reported that clergy members are increasingly self-censoring themselves out of fear that their own parishioners will report them for sharing anti-war sentiments. Parishioners, for example, reportedly called the police on a ROC MP priest in March 2022 after he prayed for peace in Ukraine. The ROC MP recently intensified Kremlin rhetoric about Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine and cast it as an existential and civilizational \u201choly war,\u201d and the Kremlin will likely continue to use the ROC MP to promote its imperialist and aggressive goals in Ukraine and elsewhere to secure long-term domestic support for Putin\u2019s war efforts.<\/p>\n
The ROC MP also recently approved an ideological and policy document tying several Kremlin ideological narratives together in an apparent effort to form a wider nationalist ideology around the war in Ukraine and Russia\u2019s expansionist future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (ROC MP) reportedly directed all its clergy to change their liturgy to include pro-war prayers in support of Russia\u2019s war of conquest against Ukraine and is likely threatening to defrock ROC MP clergy who do not support the war. That\u2019s according to ISW. A Russian Telegram channel with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":88897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"telegram_tosend":false,"telegram_tosend_message":"","telegram_tosend_target":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5142,5153,5144],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-191634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"category-top-en","9":"category-war-en"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/df.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/image-1-3.jpg?fit=1024%2C632&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191636,"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191634\/revisions\/191636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/df.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}