The Romanian Patriarchate’s Spokesperson Vasile Bănescu, speaks about the way a real cristian should face Ukraine crisis:
A real Christian, cleric or layman, inspired by the Gospel, has the decisive moral duty to relate lucidly and appropriately to reality, especially when it is pockmarked by injustice, ideological hatred and the killing of thousands and thousands of innocent people in a war unleashed by an emerging anti-Christic character, posing by gestures of Luciferic inversion as a caring father of the fatherland, the benefactor of the peoples, the protector of Christianity or the greatest founder of churches.
The real Christian, but not the deluded one, will react, in such a context, reeking of suffering and death, with moral deeds and clear words of peace, separating justice from injustice, truth from lies, complicity from honesty, cruelty from humanity, without unnecessary diplomacy, even ecclesiastical diplomacy. Calling evil evil and good good.
The real Christian will not blindly launch himself into the field of false news emitted by the perfidious anti-European propaganda, because he is naturally faithful to the real Christian Europe. Neither he will launch himself in contortionist appeasement speeches, nor in sermons full of byzantine ornaments, dusty quotations and commonplaces without any meaning and tangency to the cruel reality that besets him.
And above all, the real Christian will not confuse the spirits, nor the characters of the European historical narrative (of which he himself is a part), by not distinguishing the victims from their aggressors.
For a real Christian possesses clarity and moral imagination, spiritual sagacity, being able to discern between what is allowed and what is useful, between what is possible and what is forbidden, between what is obligatory and what is optional or between a genuine and worthy Primate of the Church of Christ and one who is morally and Christianly disgraced by cynical complicity in the most hideous things that man without God is capable of committing:
The war of conquest, the terror, torture and mass murder of people whom Christ has gently commanded us to love as ourselves, not to crush under the heavy and encroaching boot of death.
The war-stricken face of the neighbor forces the real Christian to step out of the tepid comfort of Sunday Christianity and to do what he would want other people to do to him if he were in the place of the one who needs him today.
That is exactly what the Romanian clergy and laity, admirably mobilized by Christian common sense, have done and are doing in the archdioceses of the Church located in the areas through which the refugees have come to us because of this war.
A war caused by a political pathology, by a clinical imperialist vision and, outrageously, blessed, even implicitly, by someone who, totally lacking in moral acuity, has identified the “forces of evil” exactly where they are lacking, thus cleverly, but utterly dishonorably, substituting the aggressor for the victim.
The presence in front of us of the other, a poor man who has become homeless, requires of us gestures proportional to our own degree of Christianity, to the strength of our moral fiber, to the nobility that we do not even know we have. These gestures greatly honor our Christian witness and the community to which we belong.
At a truly crucial moment for Christian Europe when democracy must remain politically sacrosanct, Christians of all denominations and all people are united around universal moral values. When assimilated, these values act as an antidote that eliminates from society the uncontrolled impulse towards mass murder, towards atrocity as a hobby, towards aggression against neighbors, towards the suppression of the freedom and the dignity of men.
All of us must pass together the test of courage: to confess the truth at the right time, to stand firm against barbarism and to fight to save at all costs the civilization of the Decalogue and the European culture of Dialogue – the healthy frameworks which diminish and can even make disappear the serious danger for our salvation that comes from calling good what is evil and calling evil what is good.
Source: basilica.ro