Government: Hungary against sanctioning religious leaders
Hungary rejects sanctions against religious leaders, the state secretary for aiding persecuted Christians told public television on Sunday, commenting on the European Union’s plan to sanction Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Tristan Azbej, who also heads the Hungary Helps aid programme, said that whereas Hungary condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine and supported various sanctions, Hungary supported brokering peace and “sees counterproductive, nonsensical sanctions as harmful”. The Russian Orthodox Church has some 160 million members and 40,000 priests worldwide, Azbej noted, adding that the EU’s “crazy” proposal would ban the patriarch from entering the bloc, isolating religious people from their spiritual leader.
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The Syrian orthodox patriarch, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Hungarian eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, among others, have turned to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, “the last voice of Christianity and common sense in the EU”, regarding the European Commission’s proposal, which he said would create a dangerous precedent of “keeping other churches in check, and subjecting them to politically motivated sanctions”.
Hungary sees religious freedom as “sacred and inviolable”, and will not support sanctioning religious leaders, he said. Meanwhile, Hungary has provided aid worth 2 billion forints (EUR 5.2m) to Ukraine, he said.
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Source: MTI
Kirill said at a ceremony the other week, while praising members of a battalion that had just returned from an areas where it is alleged that they participated in war crimes, “We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” That was on the 6th of March and he was clearly endorsing the invasion of Ukraine.
The Pope has responded on the 16th March, “)Pope Francis warned the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, not to become “Putin’s altar boy,” he said in an interview this week.
In his strongest words to date against the pro-war Patriarch, Francis also slammed Kirill for endorsing Russia’s stated reasons for invading Ukraine.
“I spoke to him for 40 minutes via Zoom,” the Pope told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview published Tuesday. “The first 20 minutes he read to me, with a card in hand, all the justifications for war.”
“I listened and told him: I don’t understand anything about this,” said the Pope. “Brother, we are not clerics of state, we cannot use the language of politics but that of Jesus.”
“The Patriarch cannot transform himself into Putin’s altar boy,” the Pope said.”
By aligning religion with politics (and offering religious support for the invasion) Kirill is not fit to be a religious leader and it is quite right that he should be sanctioned for his blatant support and encouragement of the Russian invasion and war against Ukraine.