RUSSIA RELIGION NEWS


Moscow patriarch presents dour view of church's place in Russia

THE NATIONAL CATASTROPHE THAT CULMINATED IN THE REVOLUTION BEGAN 200 YEARS BEFORE IT—PATRIARCH KIRILL

Interfax-Religiia, 6 November 2017

 

Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill expressed the opinion that the causes of the October Revolution are rooted in events occurring 200 years before it.

 

"If one sweeps away all the political forces connected with events of 100 years ago and if one abandons this ideological view, then we will see a great deal from this impartial view. And we will understand that the start of our national illnesses that led to the catastrophe of 100 years ago began not one year before, not five, and not ten but at least almost 200 years before, and perhaps even more, when the spiritual foundations of the life of our enlightened society, the so-called elite, began to crumble," the patriarch said on Saturday, the Day of National Unity, after the liturgy in the Dormition cathedral in the Kremlin.

 

He said that this began at the time "when people lost internal sovereignty, surrendering their mind and soul to something that came from the outside,  taking these signals from the outside absolutely uncritically, subjecting their faith, their worldview, and their view on life to these ideas."

 

The primate thinks that this "led to the loss of faith and to spiritual and intellectual merkiness."

 

He noted that many pose the question: "And what about the church, why did it not stop it?" "And the church has an answer for this," the patriarch added.

 

In his opinion, "the church, while it had visible prosperity, was bound hand and foot to the state" and "it was deprived of what is most important, the possibility, without considering either the state or any force lying outside, of speaking to the people God's truth concerning their spiritual condition and if necessary to give its assessment of political processes occurring in the life of our society, not from a political point of view but from a spiritual point of view."

 

"The church was forbidden to appeal to people with such a message because the head of the church was the autocrat and he spoke as if from the church," Patriarch Kirill recalled

 

He thinks that "this loss by the church of the possibility of speaking its prophetic word, of course, to some degree facilitated the way that an ever greater and greater number of educated people ceased listening to the voice of the church."

 

Patriarch Kirill expressed the opinion that even "today there are certain forces in society that do not want for the church to speak truth to its people and to address people with a prophetic voice."

 

"They say to us: shut up and close the doors of your churches and do what you want there. We will not engage in polemic with those who speak and act thus, although we know that every good word of the church is subjected to slanderous comments and often they want to belittle it and destroy its meaning so that it does not reach the consciousness of the contemporary person," the primate said.

 

At the same time he again recalled that "it is impossible to isolate the church from the people because the church is the people." "It is impossible to shut up our mouths by any means. We will proclaim God's truth, knowing full well that this is a very risky ministry," Patriarch Kirill concluded. (tr. by PDS, posted 11 November 2017)


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