A Russian Orthodox priest dismissed from the clergy for his opposition to the invasion of Ukraine was recognised as a priest of the Lithuanian Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Andrei Kurayev was confirmed as a protodeacon of the Lithuanian Exarchate on 23 July, after becoming the first priest in the history of the Moscow Patriarchate to seek recognition from its rival.
In 2023 he was dismissed and fined as a “foreign agent” for criticising the war, but after he appealed to the Patriarchate of Constantinople it ruled in April that he had been sanctioned for political reasons and restored his clerical status.
Kurayev told The Tablet that few priests shared his attitude toward Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, whom he said had allowed “the Church to become a ministry of police”.
“Against the background of 30,000 priests … you can find another 30 priests with the same public position, but against the background of 30,000, this is a negligible value,” he said, speaking after his first public liturgy in Lithuania on 26 July.
He warned that this was also a common attitude among ordinary Russians, so that “even if at the beginning they were perplexed at what has happened, they soon adjusted themselves and decided not to go against the mainstream”.
Supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church, he said, “are even more militaristically minded” and he saw “no hope that the Church and its preaching will somehow awaken the nation’s conscience”.
Despite a distinguished career as a theologian, Kurayev said that he had broken with Kirill as early as 2011 over the patriarch’s support for blasphemy laws, “because I was against what essentially was the idea of religious police”.
“The dismissal [last year] came as a rather rejuvenating boost,” he continued. “I saw that my life still holds adventures and sudden turns, which means that God might still need me for some serious things.”
The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church said that the visit to Ukraine last week of the Vatican’s secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin sent “a message to the international community” to stop it from forgetting the war.
“The statements made by the cardinal are important both for Ukraine and for the world,” said Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk after Parolin’s visit, during which he met President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to affirm “the Pope's solidarity and the commitment to finding a just and lasting peace for war-torn Ukraine”.