Posted on 05/18/2015 8:16:48 AM PDT by NRx
The commemoration of the New Martyrs of Russia in the church dedicated in their honor at the Butovo Firing Range and mass grave. Tens of thousands of Orthodox Christians were shot or buried alive there.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtu.be ...
Well, I think it would be more meaningful if the ROC fully admitted how it cooperated with the NKVD and KGB for so many years - and is now doing it all over again with Putin’s not-so-secret police.
Bookmark.
Chekists in Cassocks: The Orthodox Church and the KGB
https://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%20archive/01-04_armes.pdf
The KGB’s Agents in Cassocks
http://www.csmonitor.com/1992/0428/28191.html
Confirmed: Russian Patriarch Worked with KGB http://www.catholicculture.org/news/features/index.cfm?recnum=13868
Some facts about the history of the Church under the Communist persecution...
* Every single bishop who attended the Great Synof of 1917 was either murdered outright or died in a Communist concentration camp/prison.
* Patriarch Tikhon excommunicated the Communist leadership on Jan 18 1918 (OC). In retaliation dozens of bishops were summarily shot or murdered by other means. Tikhon would later die in prison.
* Between June 1918 and January 1919, official figures (which did not include the Volga, Kama and several other regions in Russia) claimed that one metropolitan, eighteen bishops, one hundred and two priests, one hundred and fifty-four deacons, and ninety-four monks/nuns had been killed. The numbers of laity murdered in this period is not known.
* In 1921 529 monasteries and convents were “liquidated.” The monks and nuns were mostly killed. Those who were not, died in concentration camps.
* In 1914 there were 55,173 Russian Orthodox churches and 29,593 chapels, 112,629 priests and deacons, 550 monasteries and 475 convents with a total of 95,259 monks and nuns in Russia. By 1940 there were less than 500 churches in the entire country, and only one monastery and seminary.
* Beginning in the 1930’s the persecution reached a level where the faithful laity and clergy were simply being exterminated without even a pretense to legality. The total estimate is upwards of ten million by 1939.
* By the time of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 the ROC had been all but annihilated. The “official” church with its handful of bishops and priests were almost entirely a front for the Soviet Secret Police. What was left of the church was operating almost completely underground. During this period the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad ceased to recognize the Communist backed church and broke communion.
None of what you posted changes the fact that the ROC collaborated with the Communist KGB. Alexy II was a KGB agent. This is known and irrefutable.
“None of what you posted changes the fact that the ROC collaborated with the Communist KGB. Alexy II was a KGB agent. This is known and irrefutable.”
So millions of martyrs have no meaning. The near extermination of the Russian Church is irrelevant because the secret police were able to set up a front with a handful of collaborationist bishops and clergy.
Got it.
If courser that makes the Roman Catholic Church guilty of collaboration as well since there is a long and well documented record of catholic priests and bishops who collaborated with Communist governments and secret police services. And of course there are those who collaborated with the Nazis.
One difference between our churches of course, is that we haven’t canonized our collaborators.
http://annakid.dinstudio.se/empty_72.html
“So millions of martyrs have no meaning.”
Do millions of good deeds excuse even one sin? If you answer that question like a Christian, then you have your answer to your own question.
“If courser that makes the Roman Catholic Church guilty of collaboration as well since there is a long and well documented record of catholic priests and bishops who collaborated with Communist governments and secret police services.”
No. The difference is this: While some Catholic bishops and priests supported the Nazis, none were ever ordained at their orders. The Nazis never ran Catholic seminaries, nor were they informed of what was discussed in confessions willingly by Catholic priests. The pope was never handpicked by the Nazis from the time he was a 20 something priest (as the communists did with Alexy II). The communists essentially owned the Russian Orthodox Church and the above ground part of that Church - the actual hierarchy of the Church - was entirely compliant with the communist authority and still is with Russian authority. That was NEVER the case with the Catholic Church or the papacy or even the German hierarchy.
“And of course there are those who collaborated with the Nazis.”
Plenty of Orthodox clergy (and some Catholic too) can still be accused of collaborating with Nazis (or what are considered Nazis by the lazy press) in Ukraine (both) and Russia (entirely Orthodox) and Croatia (entirely Catholic) today. And who knows what has been forgotten: http://www.srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2007/12/forgotten-1943-genocide-by-nazi-chetnik.html
“One difference between our churches of course, is that we haven’t canonized our collaborators.”
Don’t be so sure. This Orthodox saint, for instance, praised Hitler (and later was arrested by the Nazis!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolaj_Velimirovi%C4%87#The_Thirties
And if you want pictures of clergy (many Orthodox) mixing with Nazis, neo-Nazis, and various modern day fascists, anti-semites, and ultra-nationalists just look here: https://www.google.com/search?q=russian+orthodox+clergy+nazis&rlz=1C1FLDB_enUS531US531&espv=2&biw=1093&bih=514&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=QqlaVZuBL8-PyATUl4HQBA&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ
Serbian Orthodox clergy supporting the Nazis - the REAL Nazis:
The Serbian Orthodox Church openly collaborated with the Nazis, and many priests publicly defended the persecution of the Jews. On 13 August 1941, approximately 500 distinguished Serbs signed “An Appeal to the Serbian Nation”, which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis. The first three signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church. On 30 January 1942, Metropolitan Josif, the acting head of the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church, officially prohibited conversions of Jews to Serbian Orthodoxy, thereby blocking a means of saving Jewish lives. At a public rally, after the government minister Olcan “thanked God that the enormously powerful fist of Germany had not come down upon the head of the Serbian nation” but instead “upon the heads of the Jews in our midst”, the speaker of these words was then blessed by a high-ranking Serbian Orthodox priest.
A most striking example of Serbian antisemitism combined with historical revisionism is the case of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1880-1956), revered as one of the most influential church leaders and ideologists after Saint Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church. To Serbs, Bishop Velimirovic was a martyr who survived torture in the Dachau prison camp. In truth he was brought to Dachau (as were other prominent European clergy), because the Nazis believed he could be useful for propaganda. There he spent approximately two months as an “Ehrenhaftling” (honour prisoner) in a special section, dining on the same food as the German officers, living in private quarters, and making excursions into town under German escort. From Dachau, this venerated priest endorsed the Holocaust:
“Europe is presently the main battlefield of the Jew and his father, the devil, against the heavenly Father and his only begotten Son… (Jews) first need to become legally equal with Christians in order to repress Christianity next, turn Christians into atheist, and step on their necks. All the modern European slogans have been made up by Jews, the crucifiers of Christ: democracy, strikes, socialism atheism, tolerance of all religions, pacifism, universal revolution, capitalism and communism… All this has been done with the intention to eliminate Christ… You should think about this, my Serbian brethren, and correspondingly correct your thoughts, desires and acts.” (Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic: Addresses to the Serbian People–Through the Prison Window. Himmelsthur, Germany: Serbian Orthodox Eparchy for Western Europe, 1985, pp. 161-162). http://www.bosniak.org/serbian-nazi-past-and-genocide-against-jews-in-the-holocaust/
And Serbian Orthodox supporting modern Serbian fascists? Here you go: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/seselj-honour-from-serbian-orthodox-church-sparks-anger
And certainly there are leftists people out there who see Serbian Orthodox as being in cahoots with neo-fascists:
Two of the youth groups most closely linked to the Serbian Orthodox Church are Obraz (Honour) and Krv i cast(Blood and Honour). Founded in 2001, Obraz is an anti-communist, anti-globalization and clero-fascist youth organization. http://www.wluml.org/sites/wluml.org/files/Challenging%20the%20Growing%20Power%20of%20the%20Serbian%20Orthodox%20Church%20in%20Public%20Life_The%20Case%20of%20Women%20in%20Black-Serbia.pdf
At least in America the Orthodox are more likely to get it right: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/church-to-orthodox-fascists-repent/
Observe the scenes in the insets.
The chekists succeeded in splitting ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) into several splinter groups, and declaring ecclesial community with one of them. At this point, excepting a handful of bishops that rejected the union, ROCOR is no longer opposed to Sergianism, even if some differences remain.
The Moscow Patriarchate has no intention of denouncing Sergianism, and in fact is fully on board with the Putinist agenda of gradual rehabilitation of the Soviet Union by creating a Russian Orthodox version of it.
MP is different from a variety of local and national churches, both Roman Catholic and Orthodox that collaborated with the powers that be — Stalinist or Nazi or Fascist depending on the local conditions and for reasons of expediency. If that were the case, nothing would prevent Moscow Patriarchate from denouncing at least some excesses of Sergianism: such as when for example, Sergei made sermons saying “the misfortunes of the Soviet Power are our (the Church’s) misfortunes; the joy of the Soviet Power are our joy”, while the priests under his pastorship were machine-gunned or sent to rot in the GULAG; or when lives, let alone careers of priests were wholly contingent on being at the same time NKVD/KGB agents; or when the Moscow Church lied to international organizations how there was no persecution of religion whatsoever. Today, the blending of Soviet imagery with the Orthodox imagery is commonplace; there are icons of Stalin mass-produced, sold and displayed. Of course the iconography in Orthodoxy is nothing like free artistry; it is a canonical matter. If the Moscow Church allows such sacrilege, it is because it likes it.
The Moscow Church simply merged with the Communist state, without obtaining any lasting reform of the militant atheist apparatus of that state. When the things were changing in 1991, the Moscow Patriarchate simply remained inserted into the workings of now-benign post-Soviet political machine; but it was not a force working for that change. It in fact suppressed dissident priests. Now that the regime is rolling back to the Soviet times, the Moscow Church is rolling back with it.
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