By Glauco D’Agostino
The news is unbelievable. Former housewife Ursula Albrecht, who, in defiance of Western feminist tendencies, calls herself by the surname of her most titled husband von der Leyen, and in the 1970s was hiding as Rose Ladson, the surname of her great-grandmother from South Carolina, challenges, under her insane omnipotence delirium, the Russian Orthodox Church authority sanctioning the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill.
There is no limit to the indecency of political and social climbers, mainly if they have never had to fight for an ideal and they lurk under the banner of a Christian party without knowing either the religious foundations or the history of Christianity. I underscore that the Patriarch’s family includes a prelate confined in the gulag of Solovetskij Islands and these sanctions insult hundreds of millions of Orthodox believers who suffered pogroms by an Atheist-Communist regime while Ursula had a democratic “fiesta” in the States. Her blacklists echo the worst of Stalin’s and legitimise a democratic resistance to such anti-historic impositions.
The willing Ursula, never up to the tasks entrusted to her, does not understand the lack of legitimacy, the diplomatic opportunity in attacking a religious leader of the value of Patriarch Kirill, and, above all, the disparity of culture and leadership levels separating her from the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Endeavour is clear, involving religious institutions in a conflict concerning secular states and their untold geopolitical and discriminatory interests. Nothing to do with the religious aims, which, anyhow, concern the faithful sensibleness in the relationship with the related symbolic institutions. National institutions, economic-commercial (such as the European Union) and political-military ones cannot interfere with religious affairs under the separation between secular and religious authorities. Albrecht violates these principles with impunity and instigates religious hatred to disguise her manifest inability to manage complex issues affecting, instead, her political-bureaucratic powers within the Union. Even foreign policy is not her commitment, and the attitudes of the so-called High Representative (an “official,” as some authoritative Head of State called him) do not mirror the stands of Union’s members that have never handed this function over.
On a political level, I believe the word goes to the party to which Ursula belongs, the Christian Democratic Union of Friedrich Merz, and the European People’s Party of the Polish Donald Tusk. They must immediately declare if they share Albrecht’s extremist positions on Patriarch Kirill’s sanctions and if it is appropriate to censor the makeshift stateswoman’s behaviour.
These obscene approaches push toward wars of religion, masking the atrocities of secular-fundamentalist nationalism currently in vogue. Attempts are underway to delegitimise the already difficult existing or ongoing peace talks. Those attempts could configure a crime against peace, and the international judicial bodies in charge could indict their instigators.
All men of goodwill, not only the Orthodox faithful, give solidarity to His Holiness the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Kirill, for this infamous outrage against his personal, religious and institutional figure.
