Chaplin: Francis and Kirill will meet in Kazakhstan in 2021

Vsevolod Chaplin was president of the social sector in the Department for External Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. He was dismissed in 2015 for overly extremist positions. His revelation is an attempt to stop the meeting between the Pope and Kirill. For him, "the current pope has consciously decided to be the fifth column of the globalist project, which wants to destroy Christianity". In June 2018, Nazerbaev, then president, invited Pope Francis to the Inter-religious World Congress.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Pope Francis and the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow Kirill (Gundjaev) could meet in 2021 in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, recently renamed so in honor of President Nazarbaev, according to the ex-president of the social sector of the Department for external relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, the protoierej Vsevolod Chaplin.

He maintains the meeting could take place based on the programs of the leaders of the two Churches in the perspective of the VII World Congress of Heads of Traditional Religions, at which both they would intend to participate. The forecast is reported on the Nezavisimaja Gazeta of September 24th.

Chaplin pointed to a communication from Msgr. Khaled Akasheh, head of the Office for Relations with Islam in the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. Last September 18, Msgr. Akasheh met the current president of the Senate Dariga Nazarbaeva, daughter of the "eternal president" of Kazakhstan, in Nur-Sultan.

Msgr. Akasheh went to represent the Holy See at the XVII session of the Secretariat of the same interreligious World Congress. In June last year, President Nazarbaev himself, who today continues to monitor national politics at the head of the National Security Council, had invited the Pope to go to Astana, today Nur-Sultan, to crown his policy of "world peace" of religions.

The letter of invitation had been delivered to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, in Rome, who had thanked him stating that the Kazakh Forum "is becoming increasingly popular in the world", ensuring the Vatican's support for Nazarbaev's peace policy and coexistence between religions. Nur-Sultan's interreligious Congress refers explicitly to the Assisi prayer convened by John Paul II in 1986; the Polish pope visited Kazakhstan in 2001, and 2021 would be the twentieth anniversary of the historic visit, as Chaplin himself recalled.

The historical collaborator of the patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev) was dismissed in 2015 for his overly extremist positions, and since then he has not ceased to intervene in public debates to affirm his positions and try to condition national religious politics. He noted that in the same days of the Congress that the Pope could intervene, "even the patriarch intends to visit Nur-Sultan", and his intention is precisely to warn against the possible realization of this historic meeting, after that of Cuba in February 2016, which took place just three months after his dismissal.

According to Chaplin, "today we must not meet Bergoglio, who recently said he does not fear a new schism with the traditionalist Catholics of the West, but we must meet the latter". According to the protopriest, the traditionalists are the true allies of Orthodoxy, indeed they would be "potentially orthodox", in view of a restoration of the true Christian Europe. He also argues that "the Vatican has long failed to control its own, and is no longer even a true Christian power; the current pope has consciously decided to be the fifth column of the globalist project, which wants to destroy Christianity ".

Chaplin’s opinions, a very popular figure in Russian media, express the most warlike and intransigent soul of Russian Orthodoxy, which renews the hopes of a "world renaissance" of "true" Christianity led by Moscow, the true "third Rome" against Rome and Constantinople, now condemned to disappearance because of global secularization and their own doctrinal failures.