The Russian Orthodox Church should be ready for public debates with its opponents but not reply in kind to a smear campaign against it, the church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, said on Tuesday.
“Today, we are all witnesses to a powerful antichurch rhetoric that unfortunately coincided in time with the Great Lent,” the patriarch said while speaking at a meeting of the Church’s Supreme Church Council he led.
“We hear many attacks on the Church, to begin with the infamous case in the Christ the Savior Cathedral, followed by three appalling desecrations of churches,” Patriarch Kirill said.
In February, five members of the all-female punk group Pussy Riot, clad in bright balaclavas, chanted a song entitled “Holy Sh*t” against Vladimir Putin that also contained words insulting to Patriarch Kirill in Moscow’s downtown Christ the Savior Cathedral. The performance took place next to the main altar, which is off-limits to all but priests.
The group said the performance was a response to Patriarch Kirill’s support for President-elect Putin in the run-up to his March 4 election victory. Their actions have been widely condemned by believers and the Church.
The females have been charged with hooliganism, which means they may face up to seven years behind bars. Their detention pending trial split Russian society on the issue of possible punishment. However, the Church has said it would ask authorities for leniency should the sentence be too harsh.
“After that, there were personal attacks on my humble self,” the patriarch said apparently referring to a recent high-profile scandal involving his neighbor and fellow Orthodox priest, doctor and former health minister Yury Shevchenko. The scandal was covered by many media some of which harshly criticized the patriarch over the issue.
“That is why we can certainly say we deal with a certain information strategy against the Church,” the patriarch said.
The head of the Russian Church said Church representatives should be “ready for public and open debates and remember that ill-wishers may use ‘weak points in their speeches’ against the Church.”
“We should not become like those who lie, slander, and are full of malice. We should not reply in kind, otherwise the uniqueness of our message to the world is lost,” the patriarch said.
“On the other hand, we should never lose spiritual sight, or fail to realize what is going on, or take the stream of lies and slander that is falling upon the Church at its face value,” he said. “We should work out reasonable answers that we would never be ashamed of.”
In the high-profile scandal, a court ruled that Shevchenko’s family should pay some 20 million rubles ($682,000) for damage caused to the patriarch’s downtown apartment by dust from repairs conducted in his own apartment below. Many people said the sum was unjustifiably big and should not be claimed.
But in a conversation with journalist Vladimir Solovyov in late March, the patriarch denied that he was involved in the claiming of an unjustifiably big sum from Shevchenko. According to Solovyov, who later described his conversation with the head of the Russian Church on Vesti FM radio, the patriarch said that three of his cousins were living in the apartment, and one of them was registered there.
According to Solovyov, Patriarch Kirill told him that there were many unique rare books inside the apartment, whose restoration and cleaning from the dust cost a lot of money. He also said there was so much dust from repairs in Shevchenko’s apartment that his cousins began suffocating. The patriarch said he did not take part in the court process. He instructed his cousin registered in the apartment to do everything in line with the law and did not want to participate in the process himself.
Solovyov said then Russian president Boris Yeltsin signed an order to give Kirill, who was then Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, the apartment in mid-1990s, but that Kirill did not live in it even for a week, moving his father’s library to the apartment instead.
Russian tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets reported in late March that Patriarch Kirill and Shevchenko have been in conflict for a long time, in particular because Shevchenko, who had good relations with previous Russian Patriarch Alexy II, went to Ukraine to be ordained by a Ukrainian archbishop rather than turning to the new Patriarch when Kirill was enthroned in 2009 following Alexy’s death.
But Solovyov said it was impossible for a newly ordained Russian Orthodox priest to choose where to serve of his own accord. He said Shevchenko should have met with Kirill anyway. Solovyov said nothing to confirm the tabloid’s claim that Shevchenko’s independence and his current court problems could be linked.
In his speech on Tuesday at the Supreme Church Council’s meeting, Patriarch Kirill also said the Church’s reaction to conflict situations should not be associated with “aggressiveness or harshness” but should be focused on Christ and its core should be the message of salvation.
“While assessing the information stream from the Church, I, frankly speaking, do not always notice this core,” he said.
The patriarch thanked all those who opposed attempts to damage the Church’s reputation.
