Nuns aren’t the everyday alternative to push pro-war narratives, however the Church of Sweden found that a convent was actually working to boost money for Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Nicknamed ‘Z-Nuns’, a notorious Belarusian convent which was selling trinkets to churchgoers last 12 months was found to have links to Russia’s military intelligence.
The Church of Sweden has since issued warnings to other churches, after 20 churches within the Nordic country were found to have sisters from the St Elisabeth working for pro-war initiatives.
The nuns had previously been pictured in occupied Ukraine, working with Russian soldiers to ‘boost morale’ and even wearing military fatigues.
Michael Öjermo, the rector of Täby, Sweden, said he wasn’t aware of the convent’s history before inviting them, an investigation from The Telegraph found.
The revelation prompted the Church of Sweden – known for its friendliness and outreach – to issue a sobering warning to all other Catholic churches, telling them concerning the ‘spy nuns’.
Within the statement, it was explained that the sisters of St Elisabeth’s use their income to support Russian nationalism, support Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and have close ties with GRU’.
Those small trinkets the nuns had been selling in Swedish churches were actually getting used to support Putin’s war machine.
‘The Church of Sweden advises against supporting their activities in any way.’
Rector Öjermo said he knew the convent was from Belarus – which is a key ally of Russia – but in his ministry, he had at all times worked with Christians in ‘dictatorships’.
He added: ‘I’m sufficiently old to recollect when ministers got here from the German Democratic Republic [Soviet East Germany]… if three got here, two can be for real and one can be a spy for the Stasi.
‘So, to me, it wasn’t an enormous problem to satisfy people from a church that I knew was depending on a state that wasn’t ‘OK’ in my eyes.
‘What I understood this time, that I didn’t understand before, is that they may be used as propaganda. I didn’t make that conclusion before, and I see that generally is a problem.’
The pinnacle of the Church of Sweden’s crisis planning unit, Kristina Smith, said they’ve warned the Russian Orthodox Church about renting church facilities, after it was revealed they wanted to make use of facilities near military installations.
‘It’s a brand new thing for Sweden as a society… the full-scale invasion of 2022 was a rude awakening for a whole lot of Swedes,’ she said.
‘We prided ourselves on not being at war for 200 years, for being a pleasant country, a rustic that everybody desired to be nice towards, but I believe it was an awakening for the complete country that that just isn’t really the case.’
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