Orthodox Christmas – and another ceasefire
On the initiative of the Pope of Orthodox Christianity, Metropolitan Kirill of Moscow, President Putin has ordered a ceasefire for all Russian units along the entire front on the occasion of Orthodox Christmas – from 12.00 noon Moscow time on 6 January until 24.00 on 7 January.
A noble intention, a peace-loving gesture! It is just that I myself doubted its feasibility and practicality. Especially under the present circumstances.
As was to be expected, Ukraine has not kept this truce. Especially because it hates the Russian Orthodox Church to death – it sees it as an instrument of Russian influence (so much so that Ukraine, together with the Western churches, will now celebrate Christmas on December 25.)
The West has been waging a war against the Russian Orthodox Church for years as part of its struggle against Russian national identity.
Let us remember the old ones!
In July 2016, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church called for a nationwide procession „for peace, for goodness, for the salvation of Ukraine”.
The faithful responded to the call of the Church, starting from the two holiest monasteries in the Eastern (Svyatogorsk) and Western (Pochayev) parts of the country. Along the way, thousands, tens of thousands of people joined the crowd, which swelled to hundreds of thousands by the end. For weeks the two processions marched along the country’s roads – until they met in Kiev.
Together they marched first to the statue of Grand Prince Vladimir (on the „hill” with the same name – the statue reminds us of our statue of St. Gellért), and from there to the holiest shrine of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Pecherskaya Lavra Monastery. (It is symbolic that the procession went through the area, where the insanity called „Maidan” took place as for three months, a little over two years, two and a half years earlier.)
This was a huge slap in the face to the lawless Nazi junta – which we can safely call Satan, the Antichrist. Yet the pious faithful said nothing: they simply prayed piously, chanted and sang hymns. But that was enough for the Satan. Before the procession from the East (Ukrainian-occupied territory), then only 300 as planned, left, the junta threatened to crucify them all. Women, old people, children too. Apparently also because instead of the 1500 who left instead of the 300, they stopped. But they tried, wherever they could, to thwart the march. Militant mobs gathered, ready for a mass brawl, trying to block their way; loudspeakers blared ‘patriotic’ songs while churchmen addressed the faithful. There were times (to their shame) when the right sector (!) had to ensure the march continued unhindered. And the authorities of the town of Borispol near Kiev (where Kiev International Airport is located) forbade the procession to pass through the town. And on the main street of Kiev itself, Kreshchatik, metal detector gates were set up and believers (who happened to be from the East) were searched. Yet the event was not thwarted.
Already, Satan’s headwinds were rising. The Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) has banned all road transport to Kiev for the day in question – July 27. Private operators have also refused to operate to Kiev on that day: they have already been warned ‘from above’ that they risk losing their business licenses. Extremists threatened the carriers that if they dared to take anyone to Kiev that day, they would set their cars on fire. This method worked: for example, the believers from Odessa did not get to Kiev.
The breakaway (junta-served) so-called Kiev Patriarchate – which, not having learned from a previous failure, tried to counter-attack, just to be sure – organized a counter-attack for the next day, July 28. It turned out to be a dismal failure: barely a few thousand people took part – and they were mainly priests of the breakaway church.
So, in 2016, this is what hundreds of thousands of devout believers prayed for: for peace, for love, for the salvation of Ukraine. A truly God-pleasing prayer, we would think. And you’d think: in the spirit of Christian love for our neighbours, the Church in the West would also say at least a few words of greeting to our Christian brothers and sisters in the East.
We thought wrong. The kindly (I would call his kindness „stupidity”) Holy Father, while receiving in the Vatican a group of mass-murdering, bloody, war-criminal special forces, notorious for their atrocities in Eastern Ukraine, to „pray together for peace”, did not even think of praying, at least mentally, for a message of peace (and goodness, and for the salvation of Ukraine) with those 100,000! And he had almost a month to do it. But it did not occur to him, nor to any other leader of Western Christianity – our own Cardinal Péter Erdős
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