Orthodox activists from the United States, Silouan Wright and Panayiotis Makris, have published a book analyzing the religious doctrine of Moscow Patriarch Patriarch Kirill.

This was reported by religious scholar Lera Furman in the publication Novaya Gazeta Europe.

The era of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia coincides with what is perhaps the most scandal-ridden patriarchate in Russian history, embodied by Kirill (Gundyayev). What is arguably the most comprehensive analysis to date of his specific teachings and views has now appeared in open access, the book “The Heresy of Patriarch Kirill” by Silouan Wright and Panayiotis Makris.

According to the religious scholar, the authors collected, with remarkable meticulousness, all available evidence demonstrating the incompatibility of Patriarch Kirill’s teachings with Orthodoxy and Christianity in general, using the official resources of the Russian Orthodox Church itself. In response, they cite the Bible, church canons, statements by saints, and other authoritative sources on the subject.

Wright and Makris begin their book with the traditional criticism directed at the Moscow Patriarchate by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and the Orthodox underground in the USSR. Its key point is known as the “heresy of Sergianism,” named after Metropolitan, and according to the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Sergius (Stragorodsky), the first head of the Russian Orthodox Church reestablished in 1943 at Stalin’s initiative. Sergius’s actions became the model for the contemporary practices of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The article’s author writes that Patriarch Kirill emphasizes his ideological connection with Stalin’s patriarch, calling him a “confessor” who “worthily endured his path of the cross.”

She also recalls that for 20 years before becoming patriarch, beginning in 1989, Kirill headed the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, created in 1946 at the suggestion of Lavrentiy Beria. According to numerous former employees, the department was staffed entirely by KGB agents, primarily from the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence branch.

“The theology of the special military operation is the apotheosis of Sergianism. The Russian Orthodox Church and Kirill personally had long been moving toward a theological merger of the army and the church. All that was lacking was, to use the patriarch’s own language, an energetic blow powerful enough to erase the boundary between them. That blow became the attack on Ukraine, declared a ‘holy war,’ through which the path to paradise supposedly opens for all who enlist in the Russian armed forces and give their lives for Putin’s ‘denazification,’” the book’s authors write.

They provide an extensive body of patristic quotations refuting another of Kirill’s dogmas, namely that death in the “special military operation” automatically “washes away all sins,” supposedly making a deceased convict or Wagner mercenary a saint.

According to Lera Furman, the word “heresy” sounds too academic and, if one wishes, too neutral to describe what the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church preaches.

“His views can be analyzed theologically and compared with the teachings of the Bible and the saints, as the authors of ‘The Heresy of Patriarch Kirill’ meticulously do. But the living human heart, hearing the characteristic metallic tone of Kirill’s voice calling for endless war, hatred, and bloodshed, instinctively flees from him, as described in the Gospel parable of the Good Shepherd (John 10:5). The religion of the special military operation rests solely on fear and coercive force,” she emphasizes.

As LF previously reported, the Kremlin is attempting to justify the prolonged war against Ukraine by using long-standing false narratives claiming that “the Ukrainian government suppresses religious freedoms.” This is stated in a report by analysts at the Institute for the Study of War.

Earlier, we reported that the head of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, praised the efforts of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow aimed at supporting participants in the “special military operation.”

According to information from LF, in November 2025 Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev stated that military heroism is “inseparable” from spiritual heroism and that participation in war may be regarded as a form of Christian service. This attempt to justify war through spiritual rhetoric provoked an immediate and sharp reaction within church circles.

According to Regina Elsner, a researcher of Eastern Christianity and ecumenism at University of Münster and Doctor of Theology, the Russian Orthodox Church has become one of the key institutions of mobilization and propaganda.

Earlier we reported that Pope Leo XIV and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I condemned attempts to use religion to justify violence.