Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 8 – Many Russians
view the current campaign of the Russian Orthodox Church to build new churches
as the mirror image of the earlier campaign of the Bolsheviks to close and
destroy these facilities, with both efforts being marked by illegality,
deception, and a lack of regard for the feelings of the population, according
to Ilya Brazhnikov.
|
And because that is so, the commentator
says, the excesses of the Patriarchate today in promoting the construction of
churches are likely to have the same effect as the excesses of the Bolsheviks
did, alienating the population from the values that its authors say they are
promoting and causing them to turn against the Church (pravaya.ru/comments/23805/).
This is an argument Mikhail
Zhebyatyev, a specialist at the International Institute of Humanities and
Political Research, has also made (portal-credo.ru/site/?act=news&id=114449),
Brazhnikov notes. But the Pravaya.ru commentator’s argument puts the current
conflict about church building in an even broader context.
“Future historians,” he says, “will
be interested in the trauma which [his] generation experienced in the second
half of the 1980s,” when the media suddently exposed the tragic history of
Russia under communism. While young people in their idealism wanted to “continue
a great history,” they also were told daily about what the pursuit of that in
fact would cost.
One consequence of that
cognitive dissonance, Brazhnikov says, was a desire to eliminate the source of
trauma by acting as if one could “begin everything anew from a blank slate,”
a delusion that almost certainly guaranteed that the horrors of the past
would be repeated if under other names and by other people.
In part this happened, he suggests,
because the descriptions of the crimes the Bolsheviks had committed were
enormously detailed, but these descriptions were not accompanied by
explanations – or at a minimum, such explanations as were offered either
seemed incomplete or never reached the entire population.
And yet it is precisely
explanations and not descriptions that are needed. The Bolsheviks, Brazhnikov
continues, “were something like the ISIS of the beginning of the 20th
century.” When they blew up the
Cathedral of Christ the Savior, they filmed it; and had they been able to,
they would have posted on Facebook a video clip of the murder of the Imperial
Family.
That is because the Bolsheviks wanted people to see that they could
destroy the sacred. If Orthodoxy was sacred to Russians a century ago, today,
“’the sacred’ in the consciousness of the contemporary Russia is above all
the good, the beautiful, the natural … and which does not bring harm.”
What Patriarch Kirill doesn’t
appear to understand, although he should, Brazhnikov continues, is that when
the Church attacks those “’sacred’” spaces by its brutal campaign to
construct more churches, it is not only behaving as the Bolsheviks did when
they destroyed churches. It is setting itself up for a fall.
The Patriarchate’s program to construct 200
new churches in Moscow regardless of what the population wants “violates the
fundamental understanding about what is ‘sacred’” and makes the church into a
scandal just as the Bolsheviks actions against the churches made a scandal of
that political party and its regime.
The population can “see what the construction
of a church in fact is” under the Patriachate’s program: an act of theft,
force, lies, deception and so on. Not
surprisingly, the Russian Orthodox Church will be blamed for “any excesses,”
and that means that “the wave of ‘popular anger,’ which three years ago [at
the time of Pussy Riot] … defended the church, may now shift in the opposite
direction.”
|
No comments:
Post a Comment