• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
  • HOME
  • ABOUT CHINA
    • NEWS
    • TESTIMONIES
    • OP-EDS
    • FEATURED
    • GLOSSARY
    • CHINA PERSECUTION MAP
  • FROM THE WORLD
    • NEWS
    • OP-EDS
    • FEATURED
    • TESTIMONIES
  • INTERVIEWS
  • DOCUMENTS AND TRANSLATIONS
    • DOCUMENTS
    • THE TAI JI MEN CASE
    • TRANSLATIONS
  • EVENTS
  • ABOUT
  • EDITORIAL BOARD
  • TOPICS

Bitter Winter

A magazine on religious liberty and human rights

three friends of winter
Home / International / News Global

Russian Orthodox Leader: Ukraine is a Catholic Conspiracy, the Pope is a Monster and a Thief

01/11/2023Massimo Introvigne |

Protodeacon Vladimir Vasilik defies ridicule by connecting the war to a plot by Pope Francis to incorporate Ukrainian Orthodox into the Catholic Church.

by Massimo Introvigne

Protodeacon Vladimir Vasilik. Credits.
Protodeacon Vladimir Vasilik. Credits.

Protodeacon Vladimir Vasilik is not, as you may believe by reading its prose, a lonely madman. Not only is he a scholar who has published about Church history in respected Western journals, but he is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church’s powerful Synodal Liturgical Commission and a frequent contributor to church journals and magazines.

Vasilik took exception to Pope Francis’s Christmas message, where he invited those gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome to look at the “faces of our Ukrainian brothers and sisters who are living this Christmas in the dark, in the cold or away from their homes because of the devastation caused by ten months of war.”

While Pope Francis is usually more than moderate in his comments about the Ukrainian war, Vasilik expressed his anger that the Pope did not mention “the Russian brothers and sisters” who also die in the war. Thus, he took the opportunity to “unmask” the Pope and claim that the events in Ukraine ultimately are the results of a sinister plot by the Vatican.

Not only is the Catholic Church conspiring against Russia and Orthodoxy since the 16th century, Vasilik said, it has now become clear that the Vatican organized “the Maidan of 2014. For even the blind can see that the most ardent activists on the Maidan were Uniate Catholic priests [i.e., priests of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church].” Some of Vasilik’s colleagues—the Protodeacon is also an anti-cult activist—believe the 2014 Maidan had really been organized by Scientology, but it is true that they did write that Catholics also cooperated.

Pope Francis is singled out as the mastermind of particularly sinister plots. He became Pope in 2013, and in 2014 the Maidan Revolution happened, an event that in Russian propaganda made the invasions of 2014 and 2022 unavoidable.

Francis, according to Vasilik, is “the main beneficiary” of what is happening in Ukraine. Why? Because the war situation is giving the Ukrainian government the pretext to suppress the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and merge it with the branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that is in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Vasilik at a conference in 2019. From Telegram.
Vasilik at a conference in 2019. From Telegram.

However, Vasilik says, “there are long-term plans for the unification of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Roman Catholic Church. The year is already known—2025—the year of the anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council, which Catholic heretics and Greek traitors to Orthodoxy are going to celebrate in such a perverted way. And they decided to choose Ukraine as a testing ground for such an alliance. The idea is simple—the creation of a single national church of Ukraine. First, schismatic groups are driven into the so-called OCU [the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in communion with Constantinople], and then the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is attached to it, not willingly, but by hook or by crook. And then all this is connected with the Uniates. Thus, a single Ukrainian church of the Eastern rite is being created.”

Pope Francis, Vasilik says, is a monster, “a crocodile who, when he eats his prey, sheds tears incessantly, but eats, nonetheless. In the same way, the Pope of Rome can weep, lament, mourn. However, this will not stop him from eating the Orthodox—his work is such, more precisely, his nature is such. He is not the Pope, not a father, but he is a thief, a real thief. And ‘the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy’ (John 10:10).”

Protodeacon Vasilik has some hope for the new year, tough. He hopes 2023 will bring peace. But peace, he explains, is “something we can acquire only through war.” Not the “commercial war” some Russian commanders fought in Ukraine—which explains, or so Vasilik believes, why they preferred to abandon Ukrainian cities rather than destroying their valuable infrastructures—but a full-fledged holy war. Either we win, Vasilik proclaims, or “we will disappear, as a country and a people. Or even disappear physically. In this case, we have only one choice: win or die. You cannot fight and trade at the same time. However, for some reason, these elementary truth did not sound convincing to some of our commanders. I wish then to sound the alarm for them, and tell them that in 2023 Russia will be renewed, cleansed of its sins—abortion, corruption, embezzlement, and the presence of atheists and cultists—, and finally of obscenity. Then, finally, Russia will become Holy Russia.”

Tagged With: Orthodox Churches, Russia, Ukraine

Massimo Introvigne
Massimo Introvigne

Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio.  From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

www.cesnur.org/

Related articles

  • Novopashin Confirms: “Russian Anti-Cultists Are Still Part of FECRIS”

    Novopashin Confirms: “Russian Anti-Cultists Are Still Part of FECRIS”

  • Russian Anti-Cult Leader: “The US and Ukraine Use Satanists to Destroy the Whole Orthodox World”

    Russian Anti-Cult Leader: “The US and Ukraine Use Satanists to Destroy the Whole Orthodox World”

  • Novopashin confirme : « Les anti-sectes russes font toujours partie de la FECRIS »

    Novopashin confirme : « Les anti-sectes russes font toujours partie de la FECRIS »

  • 82 universitaires ukrainiens demandent à la France de cesser de soutenir la fédération anti-sectes FECRIS

    82 universitaires ukrainiens demandent à la France de cesser de soutenir la fédération anti-sectes FECRIS

Keep Reading

  • U.S. Department of State Accused of Infiltrating LaVey’s Church of Satan into Russia
    U.S. Department of State Accused of Infiltrating LaVey’s Church of Satan into Russia

    A member of the Duma has asked the Prosecutor General to ban Satanism as “extremist.”

  • Russian Anti-Cult Leader: “International Religious Liberty Is a Nazi Idea”
    Russian Anti-Cult Leader: “International Religious Liberty Is a Nazi Idea”

    Archpriest Alexander Novopashin explains that international freedom of religion “as it is understood in America” is a theory created by Adolf Hitler to destroy Russia.

  • 82 Ukrainian Academics Ask France to Stop Supporting the Anti-Cult Federation FECRIS
    82 Ukrainian Academics Ask France to Stop Supporting the Anti-Cult Federation FECRIS

    Virtually all Ukrainian scholars of religion wrote to President Macron denouncing the complicity between Western anti-cultists and their Russian homologues who keep slandering Ukraine

  • Anti-Cultists Blame “Ukraine-Funded Theosophical Cult” for Russian Protests Against the War
    Anti-Cultists Blame “Ukraine-Funded Theosophical Cult” for Russian Protests Against the War

    They claim that Svetlana Peunova’s Academy of Development and Way to the Sun organized the opposition to mobilization on behalf of Ukraine.

Primary Sidebar

Support Bitter Winter

Learn More

Follow us

Newsletter

Most Read

  • Pro-Chinese Propaganda by The World Muslim Communities Council: Uyghurs Strike Back by Gulfiye Y
  • Zhanargul Zhumatai: “Help Me, I Just Want to Leave China” by Ruth Ingram
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 1. The Aesthetic Mind by Massimo Introvigne
  • Stricter Rules on Private Tutoring Protect Ideology Rather than Parents by Wang Zhipeng
  • Japan Religious Donations Law. 4. The Return of Brainwashing by Massimo Introvigne
  • Hong Kong: Christian Scholar Peng Manyuan Released but Not Rehabilitated by Gladys Kwok
  • The Weaponization of the CCP’s “Zero COVID” Against Tibet by Marco Respinti
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 3. Art as Communication by Massimo Introvigne
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 4. Art and Illustration by Massimo Introvigne
  • L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, and the Visual Arts. 5. Professionals vs. Amateurs by Massimo Introvigne

CHINA PERSECUTION MAP -SEARCH NEWS BY REGION

clickable geographical map of china, with regions

Footer

Instant Exclusive News
Instant Exclusive News

EDITORIAL BOARD

Editor-in-Chief

MASSIMO INTROVIGNE

Director-in-Charge

MARCO RESPINTI

ADDRESS

CESNUR

Via Confienza 19,

10121 Turin, Italy,

Phone: 39-011-541950

E-MAIL

We welcome submission of unpublished contributions, news, and photographs. Each submission implies the authorization for us to edit and publish texts and photographs. We reserve the right to decide which submissions are suitable for publication. Please, write to INFO@BITTERWINTER.ORG Thank you.

Newsletter

Follow us

LINKS

orlir-logo hrwf-logo cesnur-logo

Copyright © 2023 · Bitter Winter · PRIVACY POLICY· COOKIE POLICY