Gay lobby scandal brewing in Russia

This a collection of articles reflecting the developing news from Russia. The short of it is that a popular theologian, professor and thinker Deacon Kurayev decided to publicly condemn homosexuality and possibly pedophilia in his beloved Orthodox Church, to which he has every intention to remain faithful. The accusations take the form of a series of publications in Kuraev's blog; the accounts from the victims are published and the peculiar pattern of careers blocked or promoted based apparently on the intimacy of the candidate to a gay sponsor. The abuse itself is rarely criminal (other than grounds for a harassment charge) since the victims are young adults and the alleged sexual acts are technically speaking consensual. Kuraev does not disclose the victims' identity, but claims that they are his personal acquaintances who are ready to appear in court. "Victim" here is typically not a young man raped (even though some allegations include use of violence), but a young man slowly groomed for a homosexual relationship in exchange for a rapid career in a growing Russian Church.

For his trouble, Kuraev got fired from the Moscow Theological Academy for "shocking behavior in the media".

Are Russia's Gay-Haters in the Closet?

The official homophobia of President Vladimir Putin's third term in power is threatening to backfire on the Russian Orthodox Church, in whose name the anti-gay campaign began in 2012.

Andrei Kuraev, a widely-known Orthodox theologian and proselytizer, is using social networks to expose a "gay system" within the church, fanning a scandal not unlike the one that occurred in the Roman Catholic church shortly before Pope Benedict XVI's surprise abdication last year.

Deacon Kuraev, 50, a fiery missionary and a protege of the previous Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Alexis II, is a controversial figure. Known for anti-Semitic statements denouncing the country's oligarchs as a Jewish clique, he penned an apologetic article, explaining, "I don't consider the Jewish people in any way worse than Russians or any other people. I just don't consider Jews better than all the others. Even that, however, seems to be seen as anti-Semitic these days."

The church leadership tolerated Kuraev's idiosyncrasies and frequent disagreements with the official line, including his protests against the imprisonment of punk performance artists Pussy Riot for a crude song-and-dance number in Moscow's main cathedral. Kuraev is popular: His LiveJournal blog is the 37th most read in Russia, and he is one of the church's best public speakers and most erudite scholars.

On Dec. 31, however, the Moscow Theological Academy, the Russian Orthodox Church's top learning institution, removed Kuraev from its faculty, explaining that "Deacon Andrei Kuraev regularly appears in the media and in the blogosphere with shocking statements, and his activity in these areas remains, in a number of cases, scandalous and provocative."

It was not the deacon's stand on Pussy Riot or his recent support for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch turned political prisoner pardoned by Putin late last year, that tipped the scale against him. It was, according to Kuraev himself, a LiveJournal post about a teacher from the Kazan Seminary who was fired for making homosexual advances to students and then transferred to a higher post in another diocese. Kuraev wrote that the case exemplified a broader "gay metastasis" in the church.

The Russian Orthodox Church considers homosexuality a grave sin, and Patriarch Kirill has s aid that the legalization of gay marriage is a "dangerous apocalyptic sign." This stance encouraged Orthodox Christians in Putin's United Russia party to propose anti-gay legislative initiatives that crystallized into a law banning "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors." Putin, a devout churchgoer, has publicly denounced "so-called tolerance, genderless and without issue."

Kuraev's firing from the theological academy only made things worse. The deacon has used his blog for daily attacks on an alleged "gay system" within the church, including a selection of testimonials by former seminarians, altar boys and clerics, who are quoted recalling their sexual encounters with bishops and ranking priests. One related how a bishop "poured almost a full bottle of vodka into me and started pawing me. That stunned me so -- I couldn't even imagine something like that -- that I even sobered up."

Kuraev claims he wants to clean up the church. "I am not sure the path of publicity is for the good," he wrote in his blog. "But I am sure it at least provides an opportunity. The path toward self-cleansing in the church is firmly clogged."

As a warning to the Russian church hierarchy, the deacon recalled the gay scandals in the Catholic Church, which led Pope Francis to admit the existence of a "gay lobby" in the Vatican. The Catholic church "seems to have realized now that if you keep sweeping garbage under bishops' prayer rugs, the stink in the church will be unbearable," he wrote.

Kuraev is taking a calculated risk: He has plenty of supporters among churchgoers. "The cleansing he wants to carry out using his reputation and public status will hurt many people's reputations and, what's more, their connections, their finances, their long-term alliances with bureaucrats and law enforcers, who knew everything but covered it up or even used it," political commentator Alexander Morozov wrote on Facebook. "God will help him."

The political stakes are high. Once the church and the state agreed it was legitimate to attack gays, they became vulnerable to attempts to prove their hypocrisy. After all, Russia has as many gays in positions of power as any other country, except here they have to nod along with the homophobic official rhetoric.

"The all-around homophobia actively pushed by our bosses in the last two years will now start bearing fruit," editor Alexander Shmelyev wrote on Facebook. "How soon should we expect a fired bureaucrat to start outing a 'gay lobby' within the presidential administration?"

(Leonid Bershidsky, an editor and novelist, is Moscow and Kiev correspondent for World View.)

Q&A with Russia’s Renegade Deacon

Andrei Kurayev talks "gay lobby" cover-ups within the church, Pussy Riot and the need for revolution

It seems unlikely that many members of the Russian Orthodox Church clergy are familiar enough with the plot of Star Wars (the superior 1970s trilogy, naturally) to drop casual references to the Death Star and Luke Skywalker into conversation. But Andrei Kurayev—deacon, theologian and popular blogger—is no ordinary clergyman.

Frequently at odds with the church’s hierarchy, Kurayev, 50, has in the past faced censure over his defense of anti-Putin punks Pussy Riot, barbed criticism of authorities, and attacks on the “Jewish oligarchs” he says have bled Russia dry.

All that paled in comparison, however, to when Kurayev alleged on his blog earlier this month that a powerful “gay lobby” exists and actively covers up the widespread sexual abuse of altar boys and seminarians by Russian Orthodox Church bishops and priests. (That’s right, the same church whose championing of “traditional values” led to Russia’s notorious law banning “gay propaganda.”)

Days after his explosive first post on the topic, Kurayev was fired from his faculty position at the Moscow Theological Academy, the church’s most prestigious center of learning. His dismissal prompted Kurayev to escalate his attack on the “gay lobby” by posting testimonies from its alleged victims.

I spoke to Kurayev as he was being driven to the offices of an opposition-friendly magazine in central Moscow. As we crawled through Moscow’s rush-hour traffic, Kurayev—complex, controversial and absolutely non-PC—expounded on his crusade to “clean up” the Russian Orthodox Church, called for a new revolution in the country, and explained why he didn’t have the heart to tell Pussy Riot they were Kremlin pawns.

You say you’ve known of the existence of the “gay lobby” and sexual abuse within the Russian Orthodox Church for years. Why are you speaking out about it only now?

I felt the time was right. It’s like in Star Wars, when the rebel fighters are trying to blow up the Death Star. They need to wait for exactly the right moment. It’s the same thing here. I believed the patriarch was serious about cleaning up the church. I believed I was helping. Perhaps I miscalculated, but we are just at the start of our journey.

Did you realize that your claims would be particularly embarrassing for the church, in light of its enthusiastic support for the Kremlin’s “gay propaganda” law, which forbids the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations” to minors?

Complaints from children should be considered irrespective of any political considerations. But those members of the gay lobby who publicly back the anti-gay law are obviously hypocrites. I should, however, note that I support the law, which bans the promotion of homosexuality to children. It helps to make society more tolerant by clearly defining the line between what is a crime—pedophilia—and the right of adults to make free choices.

Are you likely to face any consequences over your claims of sexual abuse within the church?

It’s possible I could be defrocked. I’ve also received threats from ultra-Orthodox activists. We’ll see what happens.

The importance of this, in this thread, is that Ward's attacks on the Church were entirely because they wouldn't let him use the Church as a platform to access children for his pedophile practices, not to improve the Church. Ward is the bad guy, a progressive homophile criminal, and as bad as they get.

I don't know a thing about Russian Orthodox, except they survived in spite of the Communists, so why wouldn't Gays use these same clandestine tactics against the Orthodox Church?

I need more background on all of Russia and Eastern Europe, what the heck is going on?

Generally, yes, — treating homosexuality as a curable mental illness is not hating the homosexuals, not more than recognizing illness in people who think they are Napoleon means hating schizophrenics.

The alleged situation in the seminaries, however, does evoke a strong and judgmental emotion. These are very young men, opting to pursue religious life in a society largely not recognizing the nobility of their vocation. The gay clergy grooms them with great skill, combining what seems to them a genuine friendship and genuine spirituality with — at first — rather innocent moments of intimacy, like shared sauna baths. Kuraev describes a sophisticated system of gradual corruption starting from there, that combines sexual gratification with friendship, mentorship, and the sense of belonging. Some grow up in the system, and become molesters of the youth themselves. Others leave the seminary and try to rebuild their lives, — not an easy thing to do with sexuality already messed up and with education irrelevant to the labor marketplace. Yet others refuse the advances and fall out from the privilege of large city cleric life. The gay system will put them in a small parish far from civilization where they would live a life of numbing poverty from then on. Naturally, a priestly vocation IS a sacrifice but in this case, it is a cruel system built on perversion that preys on people.

You are starting from a wrong parallel if you thing the Bernie Ward is a relevant figure here. Kuraev is certainly not gay. Nor is he attacking the Church because of some personal angle. He authored dozens of books, has a lecture circuit, travels where he wants, keeps his face on TV, has a professorship in Moscow University — that won’t be taken from him. He may end up defrocked, but that would only elevate his visibility.

I can’t judge his inner spirituality, but there is nothing to suggest any defect of Orthodox Christian faith in him. He also plans to remain faithful to Patriarch Kirill, even though I suspect that trust is being shaken now quite a bit. He is not going to convert to Catholicism, nor Protestantism, nor to some splinter Orthodox group.

The difference with the US is, pun acknowledged, in the climate. In modern Russia the Church is generally seen as a part of national revival, and the Church under Kirill is very close to the Putin’s government. The concept of separation of Church and state is not as popular as it is here. Criticism of the Church is often muted in the media. The widespread atheism of the population nevertheless looks upon the Church benignly, as an institution that somehow survived the Soviet Period and is a national asset in some sense or another.

The seminarians are not children, so there is usually no criminal aspect. Internal checks and balances in the seminaries do not exist: a seminarian who gets unwanted sexual attention cannot lodge a complaint because the same lobby characters will be reviewing and acting upon the complaint.

So in that environment the gay lobby did not have to fear anyone outside of the Church; it had to be a voice from inside, and a voice without self-serving objectives. It had to be, in short, a rarity: a cleric with good reputation and a strong base in the secular world.

The idea that the Russian Orthodox survived “despite communism” is a myth. In fact, communism propped them up, and gave them KGB priests, many of them (if not all) are still active within the RO.

Furthermore, religion in Russia is not like how it is here. People identify as Russian Orthodox even if they are atheists over there. It is a nationalistic thing, and a very anti-semetic, racist, and dangerous kind. It is not the patriotism of the United States. There is nothing noble with these people. Only hypocrisy, vanity and lies.

Those Freepers who take these goons too seriously in the things they boast about will be in for a rude awakening the next time Russia invades a country like Georgia.

I was referencing Ward as my understanding of motivation of enemies of the Church, and that I don't trust leftists, progressives, or those that throw in with them, so I watch for the ulterior motive.

You post helps a lot, I have a few Russian friends, all truly Orthodox, but young, and they all are sure Americans understand little if anything about Russians. It's like pulling teeth to get 'em to explain anything.

Everything you say matches up, except the many atheists, they say fewer.

Thanks.

communism propped them up

Both statements are true and complementary. It is true that properly organized Orthodox Church free from government overseeing only survived outside of Russia. However, the Sergian (collaborationist) Russian Church of Moscow Patriarchy was both a tool and an adversary of the Soviet power. Stalin indeed set it up as a docile church to his liking, but he never allowed it to flourish, attract followers, teach the doctrine, or -- of course -- have independent system of electing bishops. Khruschev swore to crush it completely, and closed even some parishes that Stalin allowed to open. There was a sever shortage of both priests and places of worship. Most people outside of big cities would not be able to go to a Sunday service simply because of the distance to the nearest church.

The Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchy is not the only Orthodox Church in Russia, even though it is, arguably, the only canonical one. There are several independent Orthodox bishops that operate small dioceses that either were planted by ROCOR or claim provenance from the Russian Catacomb Church, -- clandestine communities of Orthodox believers who kept the faith and the priest secretly. Besides, of course, there are various Old Believer groups, often with enviable vibrancy of faith.

Surely, the peculiar fact that a vast majority of Russian are both self-proclaimed Orthodox and are not sure if God exists, nor ever set foot in the church is not a defect of the Church itself; it is a 70 years of artificial selection that produced that theological illiteracy.

many atheists, they say fewer.

See my previous post also.

This is another difference in climate. Nobody really knows how many atheists there are in Russia, because the Church is often seen as a cultural and national institution rather than a place of worship. I suspect there are many who consider themselves Orthodox Christian because they baptize their children and like church music, but cannot name any of the Ten Commandments and doubt Christ really lived and went to heaven.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.