We are publishing an article by the Russian priest Prot. Pavel Adelheim (1938-2013) from “Live Journal” from 2010. With great pain, the priest missionary and confessor, who paid with his life for his faithfulness to God, describes how imperceptibly the spirit of Christ is pushed out of church life in his Church. Compromises with God’s justice, made in the name of expediency or personal gain, naturally and invariably lead to falling away from God. In this sense, his words, spoken more than ten years ago, sound prophetic today.
What is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church cannot leave indifferent the clergy who have connected with it and have lived with it all their lives as a bride. When I was ordained, the Russian Church was completely different. Spiritual changes were slow. The old spiritual environment was preserved. The main mass of believers and clergy, even the bishops, were confessors, their spiritual children and admirers. Gradually this core, which guarded the fullness and purity of church ritual, the striving for spiritual life and the moral principles of the Gospel, went to God.
Over the years, this environment began to be blurred by the new people who came to the Church from the Soviet society and introduced a different hierarchy of values into parish life. Evangelical ethics became more and more blurred with new concepts about the meaning of church life. The environment has changed and become very different. We have reached a catastrophic destruction of evangelical ethics in the Church. Evangelical moral principles have been destroyed in the minds of bishops, clergy and laity. The reminder of ethics does not cause repentance, but irritation and a desire to destroy the speaker. Hierarchy demonstrates immoral behavior without narrowing down or justifying it. Those who have promised to be “a rule of faith and an example of meekness” silently do evil: deceit and violence, injustice and betrayal, rage and revenge. How then can we call for missionary work and catechesis? Where do we call people to come and what will they say in response?
Bishop Nikon, tainted by homosexuality and abuse, was barely expelled from Yekaterinburg a few years ago. Under the new bishop, the diocese refused to pay for the gold and precious stones taken on debt. She is being sued for millions of debts. The Latvian Metropolitan Alexander sells off church properties that he received by virtue of restitution. The facts were presented to the attention of the patriarch with documents and photographs. The result is the same: the cleric who reports the facts is defamed, discredited and excommunicated, in violation of all canonical regulations of the Universal Church. Archdeacon Kuraev published that an episcopal ordination costs one hundred thousand dollars. Simony deprives the one who was ordained and the one who ordained him. According to the new canons: there is no persecution for simony.
In the name of the Church, the houses and property of the poor are confiscated, and clergy and laity are persecuted without fault. Ecclesiastical courts gloss over bishops’ crimes and punish innocents by falsifying court decisions. Ecclesiastical judges and officials answer all questions in silence.
They can say that the facts are singular, but they cannot be called a general rule.
Unfortunately, they already can! Individual facts become public because others are carefully hushed up. They erupt in tongues of fire as from under the closed door of a burning furnace. The information space is cleared, censorship is introduced. From all dioceses, the groans of clergy tortured by the bishops are heard.
I was told a typical episode with Patriarch Kirill. In response to a request to intercede for a priest persecuted by a bishop, he says: “I need a bishop more than a priest.”
This was actually Pilate’s answer. Pilate formed his own opinion about Christ and expressed it to the bishops: “I find no fault in Him.” But the bishops threatened him: “If you let Him go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Anyone who pretends to be a king opposes Caesar.”
Pilate had no need to risk his office for a poor preacher. He refused, unwilling to defend justice against his own gain. He asked for judgment, washed his hands and said: “I am clean from the blood of this righteous man. Think of him.”
The crowd unanimously agreed to take all responsibility: “His blood be on us and on our children.”
The church hymn evaluates his act thus: “Pilate washed his hands, but defiled his heart.” This is an assessment of Pilate’s crime for all time. Pilate’s action can be understood, but it cannot be justified. Why spoil your relationship with a bishop you will still need? It is easier to renounce Quixotic justice, the spirit of Christ, and deliver the innocent to the bishop’s slaughter. Fewer problems. Justice? – emptiness!
This is how Pilate reasoned, but he was not the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. If Patriarch Cyril reasoned in the same way, he stood against Christ on the side of Pilate. Hypocrisy has become the norm of ethics. Abandoning justice in the name of efficiency robs everyone, including the patriarch, of their Christian dignity. The principle of expediency is enshrined in the Statute of the Russian Orthodox Church.
If Patriarch Kirill is a politician and businessman, this is his business. If he does not respect evangelical ethics – this already affects God and us. I have nothing against politics as long as it is understood as applied ethics. But when politics rejects ethics, the jagged jaws of monsters open before us: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler… and now… Cyril.
A society that has abandoned justice and mercy in the name of prosperity has been abandoned by God. It becomes Sodom. If the ROC has given up its evangelical ethics, who needs it? It will be thrown away like saltless salt.
By announcing publicly that the patriarch and the metropolitan “faithfully transmit the word of Christ’s truth”, the cleric bears responsibility for the witness with his conscience. To respect them, we must see a pure and blameless life. The priest is engaged in missionary and catechizing activities. He calls, invites his spiritual children to the ROC and is responsible for their destiny. If he knowingly delivers them into the hands of shepherds who “come in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” he becomes an accomplice in their wickedness (Matthew 7:15).
The Soviet power persecuted a Church worthy of respect and love.
Today, the Church has become an apparatus for violence and persecution. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matt. 7:16). The persecuted in the Church is still Christ, who suffers for His younger brothers.
Illustration: Orthodox icon of Adam and Eve, 19th century, Bulgaria.
