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To: vladimir998

And even ROCOR may be a problem under Putin:

http://sobor2006.livejournal.com/313944.html


9 posted on 05/18/2015 9:21:19 AM PDT by vladimir998
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To: vladimir998; NRx

The chekists succeeded in splitting ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) into several splinter groups, and declaring ecclesial community with one of them. At this point, excepting a handful of bishops that rejected the union, ROCOR is no longer opposed to Sergianism, even if some differences remain.

The Moscow Patriarchate has no intention of denouncing Sergianism, and in fact is fully on board with the Putinist agenda of gradual rehabilitation of the Soviet Union by creating a Russian Orthodox version of it.

MP is different from a variety of local and national churches, both Roman Catholic and Orthodox that collaborated with the powers that be — Stalinist or Nazi or Fascist depending on the local conditions and for reasons of expediency. If that were the case, nothing would prevent Moscow Patriarchate from denouncing at least some excesses of Sergianism: such as when for example, Sergei made sermons saying “the misfortunes of the Soviet Power are our (the Church’s) misfortunes; the joy of the Soviet Power are our joy”, while the priests under his pastorship were machine-gunned or sent to rot in the GULAG; or when lives, let alone careers of priests were wholly contingent on being at the same time NKVD/KGB agents; or when the Moscow Church lied to international organizations how there was no persecution of religion whatsoever. Today, the blending of Soviet imagery with the Orthodox imagery is commonplace; there are icons of Stalin mass-produced, sold and displayed. Of course the iconography in Orthodoxy is nothing like free artistry; it is a canonical matter. If the Moscow Church allows such sacrilege, it is because it likes it.

The Moscow Church simply merged with the Communist state, without obtaining any lasting reform of the militant atheist apparatus of that state. When the things were changing in 1991, the Moscow Patriarchate simply remained inserted into the workings of now-benign post-Soviet political machine; but it was not a force working for that change. It in fact suppressed dissident priests. Now that the regime is rolling back to the Soviet times, the Moscow Church is rolling back with it.


14 posted on 05/18/2015 9:06:11 PM PDT by annalex (fear them not)
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