Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 2 -- A VTsIOM poll intended
to show that Russians support Patriarch Kirill’s proposal to increase the amount
of Russian used in services unintentionally highlighted instead how little Russians
know about the situation in the churches of the confession Kirill and Vladimir
Putin like to claim is the religion of more than 80 percent of the population.
According to the survey, 63 percent
say they know what language is used in church, while 37 percent admit they don’t.
But of those who claim to know, only nine percent correctly identify the
language of the church as Old Church Slavonic, 27 percent say it is Russian,
and four percent say it is neither the one nor the other (wciom.ru/index.php?id=236&uid=10181).
This is the functional equivalent of
Roman Catholics saying in the years before Vatican II that they didn’t know
church services were conducted in Latin. Had those identified as Catholics said
that, most people would have assumed that they hadn’t been in church in some
time if ever and certainly weren’t closely tied to the church.
Exactly the same conclusion is
justified by this Russian finding.
The
VTsIOM survey did generate some other intriguing findings: It found that 30
percent say they would be more likely to attend church if services were in
Russian, but another 30 percent said that it would not make any difference to
them whether the services were in Russian or Old Church Slavonic.
Twenty-one percent say they would
like to go to churches which used both languages, while 15 percent say that
they would like to see religious services conducted exclusively in Old Church
Slavonic. Given this divide, it isn’t surprising that 75 percent say they back
the patriarch’s proposal for more Russian, while 15 percent are opposed to one
degree or another.
Despite this pattern, VTsIOM
reports, 94 percent of Orthodox Russians say that they generally understand the
meaning of prayers in Orthodox churches, claims that are likely exaggerated.
No comments:
Post a Comment