“Kirill is okay with not mentioning him in prayer”

“The termination of the commemoration of the name and title of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia during divine services is not something unusual; Patriarch Kirill himself permitted this to not cause wrong feelings”, the first deputy chairman of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, Metropolitan Mark of Berlin and Germany, said so in an interview with RIA Novosti.

As Metropolitan Mark explained, under certain circumstances, priests can stop commemorating the primate of the Church. According to him, this is not a violation of church rules. “It simply means that for certain pastoral reasons, the priests temporarily do not mention the Patriarch to not provoke anger on the part of those who do not understand his position on the current situation in Ukraine.”

Contradictory

The statement of the Metropolitan seems contradictory to earlier reports. As CNE.news reported earlier, the Ukrainian Orthodox diocese in the Sumy region no longer wants to commemorate the patriarch because the support of Kirill for the “criminal and brutal war waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine and the Ukrainian people”.

A few weeks later, the Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam in the Netherlands stopped commemorating Patriarch Kirill. They did so after the patriarch spoke out of his support for Putin’s policies in a speech. But the church was officially rebuked by the bishop, who suggested that he spoke in name of the Russian state as well. The parish of Amsterdam decided to withdraw from the Moscow Patriarchate after that.