Appalling news continues to stream out of Kiev, but it no longer emanates exclusively from the usual source, the government bureaus on Kreschatyk Street. It is now coming out from a metaphysically incomparably more significant spot: the Kiev Caves Monastery complex overlooking them.
In crazed Ukraine, monasteries are under siege, churches are being razed and burned and public officials are shamelessly gloating about it (and here). Meanwhile, according to the public admission of leading government officials (in this case Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council Alexey Danilov) priests of the virtually outlawed Orthodox Church of Ukraine are being kidnapped by the authorities to be used as pawns in exchange for Ukrainian Army POWs. So far, neither Amnesty International nor the Department of State Office of International Religious Freedom have been sufficiently perturbed to comment on this highly civilised practice of the Ukrainian government.
The naive assumption that in the 21st century religious persecution is an anachronism has obviously bypassed Ukraine. It may still appeal to some idealistic souls, but in Ukraine it has been proved patently false. Readers of the Apocalypse of Saint John the Theologian have always had the assurance of its utter falsity. They know that what transpired in past ages and is today being repeated in Nazi-infested Ukraine was largely foretold and fully to be expected.
There is no need to dwell in detail on the prospective horrors which St. John depicts. The clairvoyant apostle described them expressively while exiled on the island of Patmos two thousand years ago, and his account is available to all who are interested. It is disturbing enough to just focus on the iniquities that today are sweeping Ukraine. Should anyone have doubted it, they attest eloquently that the spirits of wickedness are agitated. They are surging from the netherworld and Ukraine is their playground.
The poignant scene of a Ukrainian Orthodox priest and his parishioners being forcibly ejected from their church by Kiev thugs should give pause to anyone who may still doubt either the pervasiveness of evil or the moral imperative of destroying the obnoxious regime under whose auspices such outrages are permitted to occur.
And if there ever was a picture that speaks more than a thousand words, it surely is this one, which recently emerged from the commotion surrounding the assault on Kiev Pechersk monastery in the freak show country into which Ukraine has degenerated:
On the left is Metropolitan Pavel, the arrested and confined abbot of the Kiev Caves monastery that is under siege by Ukraine’s pagan Nazi authorities and their demented supporters; on the left is a smugly grinning besieger. Note the imprint on his tee-shirt. It identifies him as a champion of the new, certifiably European and “democratic” Ukraine. In an orgy of mindless and outspokenly demonic violence and mayhem, a new Ukraine is being forged with the combined resources of the entire West.
The Ukraine shaped by its Western “friends and allies,” in the unlikely case that it survives, is structured to be absorbed perfectly into the degenerate world of its Western mentors.
To repeat, the Ukrainian government is unlawfully evicting from the Kiev Caves monastery, symbolically the spiritual heart of Ukraine, several hundred monks and as many seminarians of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church because in the order of the Church, in which no secular authority is entitled to interfere, they are in communion with the despised Patriarchate of Moscow.
This major scandal should offend the conscience of decent people everywhere, but it has gone completely unnoticed by “religious freedom” and “human rights” watchdogs of the collective West. That includes Britain’s King Charles, the ostentatiously self-proclaimed “defender of faiths,” who habitually expresses an opinion on every conceivable matter. But rather than extend to persecuted Orthodox Christians the protection of his royal umbrella, the head of the “Church of England” remains pointedly mum on their suffering.
The heinous eviction, however, is only the first step. Scheduled to follow is the forced transfer of these sanctified premises, with the numerous Orthodox relics that they contain, to the counterfeit “orthodox church” previously set up by the regime for its political purposes. Naturally, the “theology” of that fraudulent outfit conforms faithfully to the pagan doctrines which the renegade Ukrainian state now embraces.
Persecution of the Orthodox Church, unabashed profession of state paganism (not very discretely disguised in the form of vicious Neo-Nazi political cults) and eager acolytes inciting anti-Christian pogroms while flaunting satanic inscriptions, that is par for the course in today’s Ukraine.
But how can it be otherwise in a failed and degraded state whose visible leaders are not even Ukrainian? As for those “leaders’” invisible directors, from whom they in turn take orders, they are even less so.
