Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 28 – Aleksey Pluzhnikov,
a former priest in the Volgograd bishopric who now edits the Ahilla.ru portal which provides one of the freest
places in Russia for a discussion of Orthodoxy, says that the Moscow
Patriarchate is ever more influential in the Kremlin but ever less so among the
population.
Indeed, he says, the share of active
Orthodox parishioners in the Russian Federation is no more than one percent, a
figure that despite all expectations after the collapse of Soviet power has not
risen in recent years and is unlikely to in the future (znak.com/2019-07-28/pochemu_vmeste_s_rostom_vliyatelnosti_rpc_iz_nee_uhodyat_veruyuchie_intervyu).
The
reason for that, Pluzhnikov says, is that the church is divided between the masters
who control everything and for whom the only truly unacceptable sin is
disobedience to those above them in that hierarchy or the state and the peasants
who have no say in the church or society.
As
a result, the church has lost much of its Orthodox content and become little
more than a mouthpiece for state propaganda. There are exceptions, of course, people
who truly religious; but when they attract people to the church, the latter
soon leave complaining that “you led us to Orthodoxy but we ended up in the ROC
MP.”
The
portal editor is deeply pessimistic about the capacity of the ROC MP to change.
He says it could do so only under three conditions, none of which are likely to
emerge: the state becoming indifferent to the church, the state resuming its
persecution of the church, or the appearance of multiple Orthodox churches in
Russia so people could vote with their feet.
Pluzhnikov
dismisses the idea that there is something unique about the way the ROC MP
functions under Putinism or that it will change once Putin passes from the scene.
The ROC, he says, “always was attached to the authorities.” When there will be
a new ruler, the ROC will attach themselves to it just as it did in 1917.
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