Posted on 12/28/2013 9:38:54 AM PST by annalex
... Some went to martyrdom. Others fled into exile or underground - the forests and ravines. Others went underground – the underground of the personal soul: they learned silent, unobtrusive externally, secret prayer, the prayer of the intimate fire.
But there were - the fourth.
These decided to say to the Bolsheviks: "Yes, we are with you," and not just to say, but actually to act and to speak, and to affirm by their acts; to help them and to serve their cause, to fulfill all their requirements, to lie with them, to participate in their deceptions, to work hand in hand with their political police, to raise their credibility in the eyes people, to publicly pray for them and for their successes, with them to suppress and to make provocations among the national Russian emigration and thus to turn the Orthodox Church into a true and an obedient tool of the world revolution and the world atheism… We saw these people. They all bear the typical, stone-masked faces and cunning eyes. They did not feel shame to lie openly, and to lie about the most important and sacred, -- th situation of the Church and the confessors tortured to death by the Bolsheviks. They agreed privately with the Soviet authorities, and not caring at all about the matter of church canons, "separated" from their environment a "patriarch" pleasing to the Bolsheviks, and officially headed up new paradoxical from the religious standpoint, unheard of heretofore "Soviet Church"... That is the meaning of what happened [1]. ... About this, to ask here - is already to answer. The Soviet Church performs in all his speeches - not the will of the Church, but the will of the soviet rulers. And the blind and the hypocrites are rushing to meet it.
- - -
[1] Compare “On July 29, 1927, [Patriarch Sergius] issued his famous Declaration where he professed absolute loyalty of the Russian Orthodox Church to Soviet Union and to its government's interests”. See Sergius I of Moscow.
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And......the take away point made here would be,...............?
Nothing changed today.
I read a book many years ago by a former Hungarian Communist Spy.
One thing which stuck in my mind is he wanted his baby Daughter baptized. This despite the fact that he knew the priest was a KGB agent and it would be reported.
That was a very common dilemma those days.
The Russian Orthodox Church suffering one of the greatest martydoms in Christian history at the hands of the Soviets.
They were specifically targeted for these mass murders.
During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot. (This doesn’t count many monks & nuns)
Alexander Yakovlev, the head of the Commission for Rehabilitating Victims of Political Repression (in the modern Russian government) has stated that the number of monks, nuns and priests killed in the purges is over 200,000.
About 600 bishops of both the Orthodox and the Renovationists were killed.
He could’ve done the baptism of his daughter himself and it would have been just as valid if he would have followed the correct procedure i.e. intention, prayers and flowing of water (any water, not necessarily Holy water)
His case should be considered an extreme emergency.
Despite all of this carnage, Stalin had ingeniously kept alive a handful of bishops and priests as trump cards for possible use in the future. These were not clergymen noted for their forthright resistance to communism. Quite the contrary. For the most part, and especially in the higher ranks, they were the "Sergianists," the followers of Metropolitan Sergius, who had stated in 1927 that the Russian Orthodox Church must maintain absolute loyalty to the Soviet State and Soviet leadership: "Your joys are our joys, your sorrows our sorrows," he wrote in his infamous declaration of submission to Soviet control
The KGB probably should have eliminated him. He later turned after living in the U.S. for a while.
Another thing which surprised me is they did not think very highly of the KGB. He said the Hungarian agents would always dress in the best quality clothes while they could literally identify KGB agents from their baggy pants.
If so, has the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) renounced it?
Was the current head of the MP, Patriach Kirill a soviet agent?
>>During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot. (This doesn’t count many monks & nuns)
It is worth noting that the same thing was happening to Spanish Catholic clergy at about the same time at the hands of the Soviets’ friends the Spanish Reds, who were getting a lot of advice and armaments from the Soviets. The Spanish Civil War, like most, wasn’t (civil).
On January 19, 1918, he anathematized the bolsheviks and their co-workers, saying: "I adjure all of you who are faithful children of the orthodox church of christ not to commune with such outcasts of the human race in any matter whatsoever". Addressing the pastors and archpastors, he said: "Do not hesitate for a moment in your spiritual activity, but with fiery zeal call your children to defend the rights of the orthodox church which are now being trampled on. immediately organize spiritual unions, call on them to enter, not of necessity but voluntary, into the ranks of the spiritual warriors, who oppose external force with the force of their holy inspiration..." The decree ended with an appeal to defend the church, if necessary, to the death.
That should be the governing document for the condemnation of Sergianism. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) condemned Sergianism as heresy, albeit after it broke apart following talks with MP; the Moscow Patrirachy never did. This an article that makes reference to anathema by Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church (ROAC) and the most recent anathema by ROCOR remnant (Agafangel):
To those who label the Godless power of Antichrist, ’blessed’, and not merely permitted by God; to those who dare work for these secular authorities for the purpose of a false-appearance of the outward Church arrangement of the Holy Church; to those who for the sake of pleasing worldly power trample God’s commandments, the holy canons, the Patristic tradition and the catholicity of the Church; to those who deny faith or honor to the holy martyrs and the confessors of Christ, who hurl blasphemy at them and who deliver them into the hands of their torturers; to those who justify Yudin* thinking and action and who speak of themselves as if possessing some sort of ‘special’ wisdom and salvation outside the Church; to those who respect and obey the temptation of the antichrist, prepared as though given to him by God; to the Sergianists, the new Renovators, ANATHEMA! And let all cry out three times, ANATHEMA! ANATHEMA! ANATHEMA!
Patriarch Kirill certainly has KGB ties, and at the same time we are not likely to ever know their extent:
In the early 1990s and later on, Kirill was accused of having links to the KGB during much of the Soviet period, as were many members of the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy, and of pursuing the state's interests before those of the Church.[32][33][34][35][36][37] His alleged KGB agent's codename was "Mikhailov".[38]
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