Archbishop says Putin is the ‘Antichrist’, building the ‘Third Rome’
by Archbishop Cranmer:
President Putin is not mad. Unless, that is, all those who believe their political mission to be a divine vocation are mad. He may be grievously misguided and perversely in error, but his invasion of Ukraine is not without reason: there is method in his madness, which is not really madness. We listen to his rambling speeches, and they are dismissed as incoherent rants. They are not. Unless, that is, all those who expound their divinely-inspired strategies are incoherent. We watch his military forces march through the streets of Kyiv, and Russian missiles pounding apartment blocks and kindergartens, and we say he is a delusional sociopath.
This he may be – as many of those who, from time to time throughout apocalyptic history, have invaded their neighbours and turned piles of bodies to ash in the name of God.
Putin is ‘evil’, if his biographer Mark Galeotti has assessed him right.
And if he is evil, he is antichrist.
This is the assessment of Archbishop Yevstraty Zoria of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
The Third Rome is a religio-political belief that Moscow succeeded Rome and Byzantium Rome as the centre of Christianity: there was Rome and the Roman Empire; there was Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire; and now there is Moscow and the Russian Empire. This is Putin’s Christendom; the Christian messianism of the profoundly religious Russian soul, notwithstanding the competing claims of Western Christianity and the echoes (or death throes) of the Holy Roman Empire which still murmur in the European Union.
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