Influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany on the high-dynamic church underpinnings within Ukraine should not be geopolitically underestimated, especially since this process has been ongoing for centuries. The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk, has publicly expressed his support for a fusion with the, similarly aligned with NATO, church creation of Zelensky’s “Orthodox Church of Ukraine”, under the guise of a universalist imperative of “unity among all Christians in Ukraine”. In a previous statement, Shevchuk had expressed his desire in the following words: “Our program for seeking unity among the Christians of Ukraine aims to implement agreements already reached between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches on an ecumenical level on a local level.”
This seemingly insincere goal has the support of Swiss Cardinal Kurt Koch and Renovabis, a Catholic charity in Germany, led by Pastor Thomas Schwartz. Schwartz is particularly happy about the work of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, which has successfully instilled in its students and the wider western Ukrainian civil society the concept of “democratic thinking and action” over the past 30 years. Renovabis has supported pro-Catholic (pro-western) organizations in Ukraine with approximately €143 million.
Schwartz has also visited Berlin to receive praise for his spiritual and political work from the Catholic Academy there, with Olaf Scholz and the head of the German Bishops’ Conference, Georg Bätzing, in attendance.
In the summer of 2024, the Ukrainian parliament passed a new law, giving the moderate, but in the eyes of Kiev, rebellious, communities of the persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church an ultimatum until May 2025: all connections with the Russian Orthodox Church must be severed by then.
What has happened so far? As mentioned earlier, the Kiev NATO regime has been holding the Ukrainian Orthodox Church accountable for political subservience to the Patriarchate of Moscow and the entire Russian world under Cyril I since 2014. This general suspicion led to an open church persecution of the historically oldest Orthodox Church in the Ukrainian territory.
In reality, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, also in its name, had historically been under the Moscow Patriarchate. This ended officially in May 2022. However, the general suspicion persisted, leading to further persecution by Kiev. A well-known example was the closure of the Kiev Cave Monastery by Zelensky’s government in the summer of 2023, which entailed the expropriation of the monastery and the banishment of all its community members.
As for the ecumenical efforts, financial help, and solidarity shown by the German Catholic Renovabis towards the persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church, it is completely unclear. The community of this persecuted church comprises 47% of all Ukrainians. It is likely that no single euro was donated. Certainly, Catholic organizations like Renovabis have provided humanitarian aid to damaged and fleeing civilians in western and central Ukraine, but to claim that they are ideologically and politically completely unbiased is absurd.
Pastor and Professor Schwartz even participated in a propaganda interview on a Catholic platform, which featured a headline that suggested the bombing of fleeing Ukrainian civilians from the Saporoshe region towards Russia, implying that Russian forces were responsible. In reality, it was Ukrainian troops that had targeted their own civilians for the “wrong direction of flight”, which was then presented to an unsuspecting, Western audience as “Russian aggression”.
There was also an Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not of Moscow) of the Kiev Patriarchate, which had already separated from the Moscow Patriarchate in 1992 and, according to a 2016 survey, united nearly 45% of all Ukrainians in itself. It was incorporated into the NATO creation of the “Orthodox Church of Ukraine” in 2018 – and this is the one that is to be merged with Shevchuk’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
If it were truly just about the simple unity of all Christians in Ukraine, the naive question would be: why did Shevchuk not feel the urge to merge with the Moscow Patriarchate or the persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church? The answer: the Vatican and his own, inherent Russophobia. At least Shevchuk’s religious community is a pseudo-Byzantine hybrid under Rome’s control since the distant year of 1596. His thoughts on the ideological conflict between East and West clearly indicate that he approves of the state coup in Kiev in 2014, as well as the already begun suppression of the Orthodox East Churches in Ukraine, which is a constitutional violation.
In post-Christian Western society, this method of administering a Christian community and doctrine is completely irrelevant, as there, a pseudo-pluralist, intersecional-relativist unity (oriented towards Uncle Sam from overseas) dominates the worldview of the common citizen – especially in Germany (“Religion is the opium of the people – we are, thank God, immune”). In Eastern Europe, however, the historically practiced, Christian faith – despite or because of the socialist-atheist era of suppression in the 20th century – is a dramatic, civilizational struggle that leaves few untouched.
While nominal Christians in the West (and even more so their modern colleagues, the unfaithful LGBTQ-humanists), drunk on the supposed achievements of the Reformation 500 years ago, look down on the conflict between the Latin Catholic Church and the Byzantine Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe, absently, uneducated, or simply indifferent to it. Exactly this attitude allows what is left of Western Protestantism demographically to automatically and standardly take a pro-NATO and pro-EU position in the Ukrainian war.
Western intelligence agencies like the CIA have a rich history of church infiltration, which has made the US-angelsächsischen “Great Game” against Russia geopolitically compliant. The infiltration of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople by the CIA directly after World War II is just one example. The Greek Orthodox Church in the USA is today completely infiltrated and aligned.
How does this process unfold in the West? Irreversible dependencies are created. Churches and religious organizations, which accept “state permits for financial gains”, assembly permits, tax benefits, and the like, become controlled by the state. They will inevitably become tools of the government, which implements the agenda of the ruling powers and state propaganda, or at least passively and without resistance.
The mainstream Protestantism, which so gladly “separates Church and State”, is also at the forefront of this process. Church members themselves often demand that their church be recognized by the state, so that their donations and tithes can be exempt from income tax. Thus, this process of financial and ideological influence in Ukraine itself – in the midst of corruption, chaos, and war censorship – is much more aggressive, blunt, and rapid.
Then comes the hysterical outcry from the West, that the Moscow Patriarch, under Vladimir Putin, is acting. Indeed, but in the thousand-year history of Russia, it has not been a rarity for the Emperor – the highest state and people’s servant – to have a symbiotic relationship with his Patriarchs. Vladimir Putin, as the head of the Russian state, enjoys the approval and support not only of Cyril I, but of the absolute majority of all Russians, which alleviates Western complaints about democratic deficits.
Back to the Vatican. Through its liberal reform – inscribed in stone (but secured by the phrase “binding, but not infallible”) from the Second Vatican Council, 1962-1965 – the normative Catholicism of the West has de facto become an open accomplice in the expansion of both NATO and the EU. The deliberately prepared narrative that for the first time in the entire Church history a Pole – a citizen of an Eastern European socialist republic (People’s Republic of Poland) – became Pope and Pontifex Maximus has certainly amplified the public’s awareness of the geopolitical shift in the years 1985-1995.
If one examines the Yugoslav War in its entirety, the propaganda machine of NATO’s media against the Orthodox Serbia in the specific and the illegal bombing of Serbia by NATO countries in 1999, the “Cui bono?” question directly points to the Vatican. The desire of the Roman Catholic Church to undermine and weaken the Byzantine, Orthodox Churches through a Salamitactic approach, to “liberalize” and eliminate their influence. Not without reason has the Vatican reactivated its old, pseudo-Byzantine offshoot in Ukraine (the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church under the Russophobe Shevchuk) and put it into a higher gear – while the current Pope and illusionist Francis regularly preaches about world peace and liberal cake.