KGB in RUSSIAN CHURCH: DOUBLE AGENTS IN THE CHURCH

After much hesitation, Priest Georgy Edelshtein decided to write a letter to the Russian president, a former KGB officer, about other KGB officers - Metropolitans Methodius and Cyril, the most likely aspirants for the post of patriarch (see MN No.19, 2003)

Dear Mr. President,
On September 26, 2002, Metropolitan Methodius of Voronezh and Lipetsk was awarded the Order of Friendship for "outstanding achievements and many years of conscientious work." On March 27, 2003 you presented the award to His Eminence in the Kremlin's Catherine Hall.

Talking about all those present, including Metropolitan Methodius, you said that those people "have set themselves the highest standards of excellence" and that without those people "Russia's success would have been impossible." The award was certainly highly symbolic: The head of state, the president of the Russian Federation, formally announced that the Voronezh metropolitan was a most worthy priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. Unfortunately, the decree does not specify the sphere in which the metropolitan has been laboring for so many years or the field in which the outstanding success has been achieved.

I would like to believe that while signing that decree you were not in possession of sufficient information concerning the personality of the future holder of the Order of Friendship.

Back in 1992, Bishop (now Metropolitan) Chrysostom of Vilnius and Lithuania, told a session of the Archbishops Assembly of the Russian Orthodox Church: "We have real KGB men within our Church who have made a brilliant career - say, Metropolitan Methodius of Voronezh. He is a KGB officer, an atheist, a depraved person who was sponsored by the KGB. The Synod was unanimously against that bishop, but we had to commit a sin; now consider his meteoric rise."

The Assembly, which heard such grave accusations against Methodius, kept silence; the Holy Synod, which was said to be unanimously against the bishop, kept silence; Methodius himself kept silence, and is silent to date. Hardly anyone will disagree that such eloquent silence is louder than the loudest shouting.

The Assembly also elected a commission, comprised of eight young bishops, to look into the allegations of our priests' possible involvement with the KGB. The commission is chaired by Archbishop Alexander of Kostroma and Galich, who is my bishop. For the past 11 years I have been humbly asking His Eminence, both orally and in writing, to say a couple of words about the results of the commission's investigation. All I got in reply was the same eloquent silence.

I do not have sufficient grounds to say that Chrysostom is right in his every word. This is up to the Holy Synod and the Church Court to decide. Yet it seems to be beyond doubt that if a bishop has consciously misled the entire Assembly, he has no right to stand at the altar, has no right to exchange kisses with the other brothers, and has no right to address them by saying: "Christ is among us and will be forever." If, however, the charge is well grounded, it goes without saying that Methodius cannot be a bishop, cannot be a monk, and cannot be a member of the Church in the first place. I hope that everyone will agree that a priest's cassock is not meant to conceal his shoulder boards.

Although the Kremlin administration for some reason considers Metropolitan Methodius to be a more worthy candidate, I am not going to say that preference should be given to Metropolitan Cyril. One is as bad as the other.

An official document issued by Russian parliament in March 1992 says in part: "KGB agents, using such aliases as Sviatoslav, Adamant, Mikhailov, Nesterovich, Ognev, and others, made trips abroad, organized by the Russian Orthodox Church External Relations Department, performing missions assigned to them by KGB leadership. The nature of their missions shows that this department was inseparably linked with the state and that it had emerged as a covert center of KGB agents among the faithful" (a finding by a Russian Supreme Soviet commission investigating the causes and circumstances behind the activity of the State Committee for a State of Emergency).

The ROC External Relations Department - that "covert center of KGB agents among believers" - at the time, as now, was headed by Metropolitan Cyril, one of the most likely candidates for patriarch.

I have no doubt that there is no need for me to tell you all this: You can, if need be, receive, from the relevant agencies, far more comprehensive and accurate information about corruption in any department of the Moscow Patriarchate than what is available to me, an ordinary rural priest. This said, I am not in a position to pass judgment on the basic difference between Cyril and Methodius.

Accepting from the Russian president a high state award, Metropolitan Methodius said the Church had become an organization that wielded great moral power in Russia. I am afraid, however, that this happened (if it did) not thanks to but despite much of what our top priests did in the past and are still doing today.

It is not at all a matter of morals of particular priests nor even of the authority of the Church, which the president need not concern himself about. The said finding by the parliamentary commission, dated March 6, 1992, opens with the words: "The Commission draws the attention of the Russian Orthodox Church leadership to the fact that the Central Committee of the CPSU and KGB agencies have used a number of church bodies for their purposes by recruiting and planting KGB agents. Such deep infiltration by intelligence service agents into religious associations poses a serious threat to society and the state: Agencies that are called upon to ensure state security can thus exert uncontrolled impact on religious associations, numbering millions of members, and through them on the situation at home and abroad. The coup attempt on August 19-21, 1991 showed that the use of religion to anti-constitutional ends was a reality."

The president is the guarantor of the Constitution while the use of religion for anti-constitutional purposes cannot but arouse his concern.

It is commonly believed that the Russian Orthodox Church has fully extricated itself from the bone-crushing embrace of the state, but a most paradoxical situation has recently developed .

Professor Dmitry Pospelovsky, a leading authority on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 20th century, wrote: "In the last decade, when the late Patriarch Pimen was already on the sidelines, the Church was, in his name and on his behalf, run by a bunch of time servers while those time servers, in their turn, were run by a certain ‘office,' oftentimes through blackmail." Pimen died on May 3, 1990 and was replaced by Alexy II.

The year the millennium of the baptism of Rus was celebrated, he was reportedly awarded a special diploma from the KGB, signed by Vladimir Kryuchkov. But it was never reported that Alexy is a career KGB officer. Plenty has already been said about the most likely aspirant - importantly, not by sensation-seeking journalists, but by his brother in faith and member of the clergy - a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church.

I will be frank and say that I was afraid to write and publish this letter: It is very dangerous to stand in the way of such people as Metropolitans Cyril and Methodius, impeding their great-power aspirations. This must be why I hesitated for a month. Yet I am even more afraid to become an accomplice to treachery.

There is a popular myth that our high priests were "forced," "coerced" into collaborating with the belligerent atheists, into lying to the whole world about the great freedom of conscience in the Soviet Union and praising the Brezhnev-era Constitution. Unfortunately, none of the high priests have as yet said exactly how they were "forced" and "coerced" at a time when no one could any longer be threatened with a gun or labor camp.

I would very much like to hope that in a dozen years after a possible enthronement of the "KGB officer, atheist and depraved person," some bishop who took part in that Assembly meeting, will not reveal the terrible secret to us: "The entire Assembly was unanimously against that candidate for Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, but we had to commit a sin."

And yet certain posters here scoff at the possibility that Communist agents might have been planted inside the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

* I am a certain poster. And I repeat, Scoff.

Ping me when you have evidence rather than a general conspiratorial impression the Hierarchy is populated by one, a few, several, many, majority, all Commies.

Unless they prove themselves unworthy of it,I adopt the Traditional approach of thinking well of my Prelates. You appear to have adopted the quite politically radical approach of thinking our Prelates guilty until proven innocent; if not guilty, then certainly suspect of being Commies.

Now, couldn't that have been a goal for a Commie? Couldn't an author write a book making the false charge and tempt otherwise faithful Christians to hold their prelates in suspicion despite the Biblical injunction to obey their Prelates? I imagine a Commie would think it a success to have sown such doubt. He would have turned that Christian into one easily manipulated by consiracy theories which "prove" his Church had been corrupted and taken over by Commies.

As you appear to be convinced Commies have snuck into our Synods, why don't you name names of those you think are Commies rather than acting like a pecksniff rhetorically rolling your eyes and singling me out me for what I guess is my benighted naivete as regards the moles in our Magisterium.

P.S. A well know Commie tactic is for the accuser to be engaged in the very activity he accuses others of. What better place for a Commie mole to burrow into than a traditional stronghold of Catholicism.

And what better s/n than loyalistcould one choose to throw-off the suspicions of Christian brethren while at the same time, both secretly and publicly, acknowledging, to one's handler specifically and to the Party generally, one has plighted their troth to the ideals of Lenin? I can almost here the vodka being poured....

See, Loyalist. I can do to you what you are doing to our Prelates. Do you want to prove you are not a Commie?

Not very fair, or Christian, is it?

Although, I suppose, one could argue the Commies did successfully seize control of the Hierarchy, engineering the collapse of Communism via Pope John Paul the Great and, finally, pushing through the Consecration to Russia. It just goes to show you how fiendishly clever them Commies are. They annihilated themselves to take power. If one stops and thinks about it; one realizes Commies imitated Jesus. Cool

You want evidence of Communist infiltration of the Church? Poland fears its Judas files: The Tablet, August 7, 1999:

"The heroic resisters were probably more numerous, but there were also traitors in the Church", explains Andrzej Grajewski. "Since they’re guilty of grave sins against society, they should apologise and accept the consequences. People who collaborated shouldn’t be holding important church positions."

Grajewski’s recent book, The Judas Complex, compares the role of Catholic agents and informers in Eastern Europe under Communist rule. He estimates that around one in ten Polish priests acted as informers during the post-war Stalinist period, and that the secret police later ran as many as 200 church agents in each of the 22 counties of Poland.

.... There was a sharp exchange this March in Poland’s mass-circulation Gazeta Wyborcza daily between the last Communist Interior Minister, General Czeslaw Kiszczak, and the Church’s former spokesman, Bishop Alojzy Orszulik. The bishop denied maintaining discreet, respectful ties in his many meetings with top Communist Party officials. "This is an attempt to turn me into an agent", he protested. "I never treated my meetings as private, but rather for obtaining as much information as possible which I could also show to the opposition."

But Andrzej Grajewski believes that one-time informers still hold senior posts in the Polish Church, and know their actions are being monitored by former Communist interlocutors. One example: he says a former colonel in the secret police, Adam Pietruszka, attended the Warsaw launch of The Judas Complex in an apparent effort to intimidate Bishop Orszulik and other speakers. Pietruszka served a prison sentence for the murder in 1984 of the Solidarity priest, Jerzy Popieluszko. "I was shocked he had the nerve to come, particularly since several people could recognise him", Grajewski added. "I took it as a signal: be careful, we’re still here, and we’re watching you."

In neighbouring Czechoslovakia, where a pro-regime clergy association, "Pacem in Terris", operated until 1989, around 10 per cent of Catholic priests are believed to have worked with the secret police, or Statni Bezpecnosti. Many former collaborators were later suspended or transferred to distant parishes – although only one, Fr Alois Kansky, based in Prague, publicly admitted wrongdoing. In a 1992 pastoral letter, the Czech Catholic Bishops’ Conference called for "forgiveness and reconciliation". In another neighbouring country, Hungary, the Catholic bishops admitted in 1989 that priests had come under pressure to inform. A parliamentary commission report on the role of church agents was left unpublished a year later. Though 6,000 judges, broadcasters and office-holders still face vetting under a 1994 law, the bishops have opposed calls for the Catholic Church to be included.

In the former East Germany, the Stasi secret police employed 86,000 full-timers in a population of 17 million, proportionately seven times as many as the secret police in Poland. The state institute handling Stasi archives, headed by Pastor Joachim Gauck, has reckoned regular informers in the Roman Catholic and Evangelical Churches together at just 156, with a further 300-500 acting as secret co-operators. A commission of the Catholic Church headed by Fr Dieter Grande reported in 1995 that 13 priests and lay church employees in the Dresden-Meissen diocese had had Stasi contacts; seven had consciously collaborated, but only one had signed a written undertaking.

Anastasio Somoza: It would have meant banishment of those Jesuit priests who preached Communism. These priests sought out the youngsters from the upper class families and indoctrinated them to the Leftist cause. Their effort never ceased.

One must understand that within the Jesuit organization there are two religious concepts. One concept is based upon the theological thesis that a priest should be apolitical. This thesis adheres to the philosophy that the Catholic Church has no place in partisan politics.

Now, the other thesis is that it is the responsibility of a priest to become directly involved in partisan politics. But there is a "catcher" to all this. These priests teach Communism. They believe that Jesus Christ was a Communist; and that we will have world peace when all the world is communistic. They teach that capitalism is evil and that all material things should be shunned.

.... In the Jesuit schools, the seeds of discontent and, basically, the seeds of Communism, were sown. Their doctrine was spread to the children from affluent families, and with many the doctrine was accepted.

You had young men like the Carrion Cruz boys, and the Langs Sacasa for example. They became avowed Communists and they had received their training from the Jesuit priests. Perhaps the foregoing again illustrates the liberty which existed in Nicaragua. Not a single school in which the Jesuits were teaching their communistic philosophy was ever closed.

It is my belief that Nicaragua was pinpointed in Latin America as the key government to destroy, and that the Jesuit priests figured prominently in the planning.

.... From my viewpoint, this is a fascinating article because it backs up my every contention in reference to the Jesuit priests. First, Riding recognizes there are two factions amongst the priests - the apolitical and political. In reference to the political segment, Mr. Riding had this to say:

In Nicaragua, this change was first apparent among priests, often Jesuits, teaching in private Catholic schools: by the mid-1970's, many of their former students, children of wealthy families, had joined the guerrillas. And as the fight against President Anastasio Somoza Debayle intensified, several priests joined the Sandinistas, while others helped organize slum neighborhoods in preparation for last year's successful insurrection. But at the level of the priests, the church was participating fully in the revolution. The Rev. Miguel d'Escoto was named Foreign Minister, the Rev. Ernesto Cardinal became Minister of Culture, the Rev. Fernando Cardenal was placed in charge of the literacy crusade and the Rev. Xavier Gorostiaga was given a key role in the Ministry of Planning. Many parish priests, who had collaborated with the rebels, began organizing their community for the reconstruction effort.

How could it be stated more clearly, and how could I ask for a more clearly defined position of the Jesuit priests? It's all there. It should be made clear, however, that, at the priest level, the Communists have successfully infiltrated Catholic orders other than the Jesuits.

And look! Not a single mention of Bella Dodd or AA-1025 or any of the other so-called discredited sources!

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