Posted on 12/09/2001 5:16:44 AM PST by truther
You may want to put this in the "If You Can Believe This" file:
The BBC reports this weekend that "It has merged that [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and all members of his family are true believers. Putin is a true Christian and a member of the Orthdox Church, he goes to a confession, makes his communion and realizes his responsibility before the God for the high services he performs, Archimandrite Tikhon, the prior of Moscow's Sretenskiy monastery said."
Tikhon is also "Putin's confessor."
Another quote from this interview: "Anyone who truly loves Russia should pray for Vladimir Vladimirovich whom the Providence has made the head of Russia".
It's unclear if Putin has "confessed" for his toast to Joseph Stalin.
Putin gave the toast soon after assuming the presidency, when he praised the great mass murderer for his rule of the Soviet Union.
russia's problems have been spiritual in nature and predate the commies.
God knows who is sincere in their confession. Someone attending church when they don't have to is more likely to be a sincere confessor than someone like DIRTXPOTUS who attends church to campaign for votes or pose for the cameras.
Church attendance may not make a person a Christian. Making a confession of belief which is not only insincere, but is cover to go and work against what Jesus taught would do far more than negate the validity of that confession.
Putin said that Stalin was a genius commander. You could say this was inappropriate or you could say he found one good thing to say about Stalin. You could also go back and see if, in your life, there was one thing you said that others around you found to be inappropriate. Get back to me when your slate is perfectly clean....
What a lovely and sincere statement.
In remarks to reporters January 6, Putin spoke of the religious meaning of Christmas in a way that no politician had previously been able to. "Why has Christ come into the world?," the acting president asked. "To liberate people from sicknesses, troubles, and from death. In its essence, Christmas is a holiday of hope. I want to congratulate everyone, first and foremost all Orthodox Christians, on the joyous holiday...."
"Without Christianity, without the Orthodox faith and culture which sprang from it, Russia would have hardly existed as a state," said President Vladimir Putin during a visit to the Solovetsky monastery, on the Solovki Islands, part of Russia's northern White Sea archipelago.
The Russian Orthodox Church is more than one thousand years old. According to tradition, St. Andrew the First Called, while preaching the gospel, stopped at the Kievan hills to bless the future city of Kiev. The fact that Russia had among her neighbors a powerful Christian state, the Byzantine Empire, very much contributed to the spread of Christianity in it. The south of Russia was blessed with the work of Sts Cyril and Methodius Equal to the Apostles, the Illuminators of the Slavs. In 954 Princess Olga of Kiev was baptized. All this paved the way for the greatest events in the history of the Russian people, namely, the baptism of Prince Vladimir and the Baptism of Russia in 988.
Just as being photographed leaving Church with a Bible before going back to the Oval Office to meet Monica does not make one a good Baptist.
Blessed art thou, O Russian Land, purified by the fire of suffering! Thou hast gone through the waters of baptism; thou passest now through the fire of suffering; thou shalt also enter into rest. At one time, the Christians reverently used to gather up the sand in the Colosseum, saturated with martyric blood. The places that witnessed the suffering of the martyrs and the ending of their earthly lives, became especially venerable. And now, all Rus' is an arena of passion-bearers. Her soil has been sanctified by their blood, her air -- by the rising-up of their souls to heaven. Ho, sacred art thou, O Rus'! Not mistaken was the ancient writer who said that thou art the Third Rome, and that a fourth was not to be. Thou hast transcended ancient Rome by the multitude of thy martyrs' spiritual feats; thou hast also surpassed the Rome that baptised thee [Byzantium], by thy standing firm in Orthodoxy -- and thou shalt remain un-excelled until the world's end. Only that land which was sanctified by the suffering and the earthly life of the God-Man is holier than thee in the eyes of the Orthodox.
St. John Maximovitch
That's open to debate, too. Stalin lost half a million square miles to the Wehrmacht in a month. By the end of the war, the kill ratio was one German soldier for every four Russian soldiers. And should we bring up the 'glorious' war between the Motherland and Finland that Stalin fought before the Great Patriotic War? His management of forces during the Russian Civil War was also lackluster, according to his own comrades at the time.
Stalin was an incompetent bungler in everything but accumulating and maintaining bureaucratic power. Either Putin doesn't know this, or he's just praising Stalin for public consumption -- which is probably what his Christianity is about, too.
At any rate, Putin cut the tax rate down to 13%, and I'm willing to give him a lot of slack for that.
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