Here are some observations of Russian Orthodox priest
Fr Ioann ( Burdin) who has walked a fine line his dissent of the invasion of Ukraine. There seem to centuries of deep rooted problems within the Russian Church. I have been following his blog for the past year. This is a long pasted post & I just thought it might be worth sharing. I am not making any inferences to anyone’s posts in the thread,
OLD SONGS ABOUT THE MAIN THINGS
(a cursory look at the history of the Russian church)
The Mongol rule was a golden age for the Russian church. The Mongols completely freed the clergy from any duties - tribute and taxes. While Rus' was impoverished, church wealth grew at breakneck speed.
In a hundred years (from the beginning to the end of the 14th century), as many monasteries were built as in 400 years before. By the middle of the 16th century, there were about 200 monasteries in Rus'. Some are huge.
The monks did not have time to cultivate those lands that were donated to them in large quantities. It was the monasteries that were among the first landowners who asked the king to attach the peasants to the land.
At the time of its heyday, the Trinity-Sergius Monastery owned hundreds of thousands of serfs who cultivated monastic estates in 15 provinces.
In general, the church owned a third of the land in Russia and two million slaves out of a total of 12 million (at the time when Catherine 2 took them into state ownership).
In the 14-15 centuries, the monks mostly lived not in the monastery, but in the villages belonging to it, where they supervised the agriculture, trade and crafts of their brotherhood.
According to many testimonies of foreigners, in the 16th century only one Russian monk out of ten knew "Our Father", the Vologda bishop was unable to answer the foreign guest's question - how many evangelists were there, and ordinary lay people did not know at all either the Gospel, or the Creed, or even "Our Father" and "Virgin Mother of God rejoice".
Maxim Grek, who arrived in Russia to translate liturgical books, was horrified by the decline in morals among the clergy.
The Russian clergy is so absorbed in worldly wealth, wrote Prince Andrei Kurbsky, that
"it lies motionless, caressing the authorities and pleasing them in order to keep their own and gain even more."
This conflict between the worldly and the spiritual resulted in the well-known clash between the supporters of Nil Sorsky and Joseph Volotsky. It was finally resolved in favor of the "covetous" after the disciple of Joseph, Metropolitan Daniel blessed Prince Vasily 3 to divorce his barren wife, marry again and took upon himself the royal sin. In gratitude, the prince gave the Josephites the opportunity to put their opponents behind bars (including the famous Maximus the Greek).
The Russian Church did not just support the monarchy, it developed the entire ideology of Russian autocracy: the idea of the Third Rome, the crowning of the kingdom, the divinity of the origin of royal power, the Moscow sovereigns as the heirs of Emperor Augustus - the universal Christian rulers and emperors of all the Orthodox world ...
The delusions of grandeur that developed from Moscow sovereigns - from Ivan to Vladimir - and resulted in the desire to subdue all the surrounding peoples, we are indebted precisely to the leaders of the Russian church, who for centuries cultivated this mania in the "autocrats".
Realizing their greatness, the kings began to remove and appoint metropolitans, appropriate church money and property, and finally abolished the patriarchate and expropriated church lands. The carefully fed dragon grew up and ate the mother.
And all the same, right up to the revolution itself, Russian monasteries were "a cemetery of useless riches."
Nikolai of Japan complained that, having millions of dollars in turnover, the church did not want to fork out for missionary work in Japan, and he had to collect money from private individuals for a penny.
Semyon Fudel bitterly recalled how in the bell tower of the Novogorodsky-Yuryevsky monastery precious deposits rotted, stuffed there from floor to ceiling.
He also wrote about the colossal salaries that diocesan bishops received from the state. Metropolitans of Kyiv and Moscow (with ready premises, servants, departures, table) had in cash: the first - over 100 thousand, and the second - over 60 thousand rubles. in year. Ordinary dioceses gave their archpastors 30-50 thousand a year, not counting apartments and other maintenance. Departments with salaries below 10 thousand rubles. per year (with full maintenance) were already considered poor. At the same time, a factory worker (in 1908) received an average of 240 rubles a year.
The meager crumbs of these useless riches were spent on the poor. Everything else fell into the tenacious hands of the Bolsheviks, who spent something on the civil war and attempts to unleash a world revolution, and something else that rotted in other cellars in the same way.
But even having become poor, the church did not get rid of the habit of "serving the sovereign" and, seeing off curses to the grave of the new martyrs - "enemies of the people", sang praises to their executioner:
"We pray for the strengthening of your strength and we send you a prayerful wish for many years of life for joy and happiness our great Motherland, blessing your feat of serving it and being inspired by this feat of yours" (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, N 12, 1949).
Dreaming of expanding the boundaries of his empire, Stalin tried to use the church to promote his influence abroad, including through the world council of churches, however, the project of a great empire "from ocean to ocean" died with him on March 5, 1953.
Subsequent general secretaries were small in caliber, and therefore used the church for small-scale intelligence work and sponsoring the "Peace Fund", which fed the communist parties and terrorist movements around the globe.
And only perestroika allowed the Russian church to take its rightful place as one of the pillars (or legs of the presidential chair) of Russian power.
And here the flourishing of church and monastic construction began again in Rus'. Well, yes, the financial river is not so wide. And serfs have not yet been allowed to attach to parishes and monasteries ... But on the other hand, familiar bells tinkle loudly from the church pulpit (even in Moscow itself!) - "Holy Rus'", "foreign languages" ... And there - choo! - something new: "globalism", "liberal values", "Motherland or death"...
These close embraces of the Russian church and power are strong. What can separate them?
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Блог Иоанна Бурдина
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