Per the Pope, I guess it is official: Putin's Russia is now the defender of Christendom

[Trumpinator]

Pope Francis if the first Rome and Patriarch Kirill of the third Rome are to release a joint declaration to touch on the single most important issue of shared concern between the Catholic and Orthodox churches today: the plight of Christians in Iraq and Syria and Africa who are being killed and driven from their homes by Islamists.

I guess that makes Putin's Russia the defacto defender of Christendom.

Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and a fourth there will not be." The Russian Monk Philotheus c. 1520

I have not seen the declaration yet to post it on here.

[ETL]

Per the communist pope.

[1rudeboy]

Did you get a tingle up your leg?

[ETL]

Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality?

September 2014

(excerpt from a long, detailed article)

First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the Soviet KGB, a truly diabolical organization nonpareil, which stood for murder, terror, and grand deception.

It was the Soviet Communist Party's tool for the brutal suppression of religion, including the persecution of Christians: denying them jobs and education; spying on and entrapping them; arresting and imprisoning them; torturing them in unspeakable ways; desecrating and demolishing their church buildings; infiltrating their agents into churches to subvert them. The KGB destroyed thousands of Christian churches, monasteries, convents, and schools, and slaughtered millions of Christians.

But it did not destroy the churches utterly. There remained an underground church, whose members were always at risk of discovery, arrest, torture, and martyrdom. Above ground, the KGB took control of the Russian Orthodox Church, which became a very useful organ of the Soviet atheist state.

In January 2009, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, was elected, from a short list of three candidates, to be the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the highest position of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The election was called to fill the post that had been left vacant by the death of Patriarch Alexy II, who had headed the ROC since 1990.

Documents from the KGB archives have confirmed what sensible observers had long ago deduced from his actions: that Patriarch Alexy II (also spelled Alexi or Alexei) was a long-serving KGB agent (code-named Drozdov, "Blackbird"), in other words, a traitor to his Christian brethren and the God he claimed to serve. Putin's KGB/FSB was taking no chances with his replacement. All three candidates - Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk (code-named Topaz), Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk (code-named Ostrovskii), and Metropolitan Kirill (code-named Mikhailov) - also have been reliably identified as agents of the KGB/FSB.

Russia expert David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times (of London) and the Wall Street Journal, wrote of the election in 2009 for Forbes:

According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.

Because Patriarch Kirill is of central importance to the myth of Putin as the Saul-to-Paul, Christian persecutor-to-Christian champion, it behooves us to more closely examine the man. He has publicly presided over, and provided official benedictions and exhortations for, Putin's cynical and Stalinesque exploitation of Russian nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy. Josef Stalin, who had very nearly consummated the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Vladimir Lenin, reversed course in 1941. The reason? His erstwhile partner in crime, Adolf Hitler, had turned on him and had invaded Russia.

Stalin, needing all the help he could get, cut a deal with ROC Metropolitans Sergius, Nikolay, and Alexy. In exchange for their support in rallying the Russian people, he would cease (temporarily) the persecution and allow the reopening of churches and theological schools. In fact, Stalin's Soviet government paid for the rebuilding of many of the churches. The ROC was thus placed even more firmly under the control of the NKVD, which was later to be reorganized and renamed as the KGB. ..."

much more at link

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/19162-putin-defender-of-christian-faith-and-morality

***********************************************************

"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[stocksthatgoup]

Actually more so than the Obama Adm.

[cloudmountain]

Putin doesn't care about faith. He wants the title and position of CZAR or TSAR to be reinstated and HE wants to become the first Czar of the 21st century.

Being former KGB, he just might do it.

[stocksthatgoup]

However one still wonders if this Pope is Catholic.

[Trumpinator]

Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality? Yes. See Infallible Pope.

[Trumpinator]

I like the spelling of Czar. All the books from the 19th century spelled it that way. For some reason modern scholarship went with the Tsar spelling.

[ETL]

Mr Putin, what do you think of your "useful
idiot" supporters in the United States?
For example, "Trumpinator"

____________________________

Useful idiots

Thomas Sowell
May 20, 2003

"The term 'useful idiots' has been attributed to Lenin, as a description of those mindless people in the Western democracies who would always find ways to excuse whatever the Soviet Union did. Columnist Mona Charen's new book Useful Idiots shows that such people are still with us.

Long after the Soviet Union's horrors had become too widely known around the world for their sympathizers in the West to be able to get away with whitewashing the USSR, new Communist dictatorships arose to become the new objects of the affections of the Western intelligentsia and of like-minded people in the media and in politics. ..."

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2003/05/20/useful_idiots

[cloudmountain]

I like the spelling of Czar. All the books from the 19th century spelled it that way. For some reason modern scholarship went with the Tsar spelling.

Czar = zzzzar.
Tsar = "ts" sound with "ar" at the end. There IS a slight difference.

That's how I learned it from a displaced Russian woman and her family some years ago.

[freedomjusticeruleoflaw]

Nature abhors a vacuum. When America started leading from behind, the Putin’s of the world stayed put. Nice.

[Mariner]

"Per the communist pope.

There is no doubt this pope is a communist, who hates western civilization and America.

[Trumpinator]

Stalin once asked hoe many divisions the Pope had. Now we know.

[Trumpinator]

Stalin once asked how many divisions the Pope had. Now we know.

[abclily]

Putin said that the church would save Russia.

Obama puts his faith in the prophet of islam.

Big difference right there.

[ETL]

Sorry, I missed that. Can you repeat it?

[Trumpinator]

You can’t - reread?

[Samogon]

Dealing with russians is certainly not Catholic. They smell funny. Like sulfur...

[Trumpinator]

I guess you are the fool in Plato’s analogy.