Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 18 – It would be
comforting to believe that Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin was speaking only for
himself when he suggested that it is reasonable and just to kill the domestic
opponents of the Russian state as he did earlier this week in an interview on
Ekho Moskvy (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2016/08/chaplin-zhirinovsky-from-orthodox.html).
But that would be a major mistake,
according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russian scholar at the University of Bremen,
whose volume, “The Russian Orthodox Church: Its Present-Day Situation and
Current Problems,” is widely considered to be a fundamental study of
post-Soviet Orthodoxy in Russia (svoboda.org/a/27926421.html).
In an interview he gave to Radio
Liberty’s Valentin Baryshnikov, Mitrokhin said that “the rank and file clergy
and most of the episcopate are very militantly inclined and [like Chaplin] do
not exclude the use of force.” Indeed, he says, “in church practice, force is the
norm” with bishops “beating” priests, something almost all accept.
“The church now is also the leading
social institution which speaks against so-called juvenile justice” and defends
the rights of parents to use force against their children. Moreover, it “supports militaristic rhetoric,”
organizes “numerous military-patriotic circles,” and otherwise backs the use of
force by the strong against the weak, Mitrokhin says.
Indeed, he continues, “if you were
to speak with a rank and file priest, he of course would express himself
exactly as Chaplin did or even worse.”
“In the Russian Orthodox Church,”
the Germany-based Russian scholar says, “as is well known, Christ does not
exist.” There is an Orthodox tradition
based on Christ, one that was “formed by the Russian intelligentsia at the
beginning of the 20th century.”
But that tradition, one that was most promising, has largely been
suppressed.
Unlike the liberal intelligentsia
which promotes one or another “variant of Western Christianity and of ‘post-Holocaust’
thought,” leaders and followers of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow
Patriarchate view their faith as “a national religion which gives them
spiritual power to ‘oppose the godless West’ and so on.”
After losing his position in the
patriachate a year ago, Mitrokhin says, Chaplin “began consciously to excite
the public” by presenting what “the conservative half of his brain” thinks –
perhaps largely because that is exactly what “any average Russian priest”
thinks and what many bishops do as well.
“The overwhelming majority” of the clergy
support Russian nationalism and militarism, and their voices drown out those
who say that “God is love.” Some have
little problem with doing that because they have never been taught otherwise.
Perhaps at best “only a few hundred” of the Russian Orthodox Church’s
priesthood do.
Many find it hard to believe that
Orthodox priests who share the robes of those who were killed by the Soviet
state and are now celebrated as the new martyrs can support the use of force.
Chaplin’s words in fact justify exactly what Stalin and other Soviet leaders
did to the church and its leadership in Soviet times.
But very few Orthodox priests,
Mitrokhin points out, had any connections with the new martyrs, and with each
passing year, their number has declined.
“The larger part of the church are former Soviet people who up to 1991
completely believed in some socialist ideas, had party cards, were in political
organizations and never thought about [the new martyrs].”
At the end of the 1980s, many talked
about the new martyrs. Now, they only do so to get money to paint a church. But
very few want to talk about why their martyrdom happened. Instead, far too many
and not just Chaplin “consider that it is possible to kill [opponents’ but one
must choose the correct group for murder.”
That and not the love of God,
Mitrokhin insists, is “the present-day ideology of the Russian Orthodox Church.”
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