PATRIARCH
KIRILL
HINTS AT CONFLICT WITH STATE, LUKASHENKO WITH CHURCH
by
Andrei Melnikov
Nezavisimaia
Gazeta,
23 August 2020.html
On
Thursday, 20
August, Patriarch Kirill surprised the public not a little with
the tone of his
dialogue with the state. He was participating on Solovki in a
conference on the
development of the archipelago and in a rather irritated manner
made clear that
it is necessary to consult with the RPTs [Russian Orthodox
Church] more.
"The church cannot play . . . a secondary role," he declared.
"The church's opinion should be taken into consideration, in the
first
place, in everything that is done." The patriarch warned that if
the
opinion of church personnel "is ignored, then that will mean
that we will
enter into conflict." The next day he returned to the topic of
the
church's self-determination. The patriarch seemed to be
addressing the monks,
but the publication of the speech on the RPTs website seems to
suggest a wider
circle for the audience of the speech. "We should be able to
resist. We
should not be followers; we should be leaders," the patriarch
said.
Many
heard in these
words more than dissatisfaction regarding one specific occasion.
They recalled
the outcry over the closing of churches because of the pandemic
and because of
the decoration of the main church of the armed forces in
Kubinka, which is
dubious from the point of view of Orthodox tradition, and of all
those cases
where the patriarch yielded to the demands of the leadership of
the country and
of individual regions. Something was going wrong in the symphony
of church and
state, observers decided.
Something
similarly
dissonant resounded in the symphony of the "Orthodox atheist"
Lukashenko with Belorussian Christians.
It came between the old-new president and politically
active clerics at
a Friday rally in Grodno. "My dear clergy, settle down and mind
your own
business," Lukashenko advised. "Churches and temples are not for
politics. Don't follow the renegades. You will be ashamed and
embarrassed for
the kind of position you, some of you, are taking now." "And the
state will not view this with indifference," the head Batka
["Daddy": popular name for Lukashenko—tr.] warned the priests [batiushki]."
On the
same day the
Belorussian exarchate of the RPTs issued a special statement:
"We again
remind the clergymen of the promise they gave before God not to
participate in
the political life of society, so as not to be a temptation and
cause of
division of the people." This was occasioned by speeches of
Archbishop of
Grodno Artemy, who earlier had predicted the end "of satanic
neo-bolshevism in Belarus." Artemy posted this statement on the
diocesan
website and, alongside and bolder, his sermon where he says that
"the
blood of the victims and people severely injured these days is
on the
conscience of those who deliberately themselves slew, or forced
others to slay,
the truth."
The
leader of
Belorussian Catholics, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, also displayed
action. On Friday
he was received by the head of the Belorussian MVD, Yury Karaev.
Over the
course of a week, Kondrusiewicz's representatives were not
permitted into the
SIZO to visit the victims of harsh arrests. As the website of
the Catholic
metropolia reported, Kondrusiewicz expressed concern for the
harsh arrests by
law enforcement agencies. "The second largest confession in
Belarus cannot
remain on the sidelines of what civil society of the country is
experiencing at
the present time," the notice on the church website states.
Karaev agreed
to create a joint commission for investigating the abuses by the
police.
On
Friday the news
spread widely: the president of Turkey, following Hagia Sophia,
intends to turn
the monastery of Chora, which had the status of a museum, into a
mosque.
Representatives of the RPTs reacted instantly: the unique
Byzantine mosaics
will be inaccessible for tourists, as is evident from the
example of Hagia
Sophia. Returning to the topic of Solovki and Patriarch Kirill's
remarks,
delivered at the same conference, that tourism to the
archipelago should be
limited for the sake of the monks' peace, I would like to remind
the leadership
of the RPTs of the gospel parable about the beam in one's eye.
In both
Constantinople and Solovki these beams are just as thick. (tr.
by PDS, posted
24 August 2020)
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