President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin intends to convene on December 10, 2021, the annual Human Rights Council. Rights activists are set to discuss with the head of the ruling regime such pressing issues as attempts to close the Memorial NGO, the law on foreign agents, and torture in prisons.
According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, surprisingly, the Russian Orthodox Church’s voice isn’t part of a chorus of voices outraged by violence against prisoners, attempts to suppress freedom of speech and deprive people of the memory of totalitarian repression. And it is about ROC’s individual representatives expressing their views, it’s about a conciliar position of clergy and respectable believers.
The ROC’s silence is surprising, to say the least. How is the church, which is loudly indignant when it sees violations of own rights or privileges in anything, able to remain stubbornly silent about what angers so many.
How can the clerics, these “Christians by vocation,” so to speak, calmly watch videos showing a naked man lying tied to the bed with sheets as if he is crucified? From high chairs, parishioners are intimidated on a daily basis by “European gay parades,” while violent sodomy in pre-trial detention centers leaves these clerics totally indifferent.
Since the video of torture in remand centers emerged online, the Moscow Patriarchate has been asked many specific questions. They were pointed to the granting of church awards to officials of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service, to the fact that the “torture hospital” has an Orthodox church on its premises. The only response was a timid promise to deprive these figures of awards if the court proves their guilt. No concrete cases of the ROC recalling their awards have been reported so far.
The ROC continues to work on perpetuating the memory of those shot at the Butovsky site in Moscow. At the same time, the church is indifferent to the persecution of the Memorial community, which symbolizes the will to preserve the memory of the horrors of mass repression.
When Russian Communist leader Zyuganov recently accused ROC Metropolitan Ilarion (Alfeyev) of being ungrateful to Stalin, the cleric had nothing to say in response. The communist reminded the hierarch how Stalin “created” the ROC.
Today, most clerics have a negative view of the communist dictatorship, while finding it difficult to admit that the tyrant Stalin made the decision to liberate from the concentration camps all clerics who survived was ultimately under pressure from Christians from the United States and Britain, Soviet allies within the anti-Hitler coalition. It is now impossible to acknowledge the fact that the believers of the Soviet Union were saved by Western lobbying, as this threatens the immediate recognition of such a person or organization as a foreign agent.
Thus, the ROC forgot about the ancient custom of interceding for the persecuted. Eloquent silence may be useful for survival, but it deprives the ROC of the right to be called the conscience of the nation. There are even doubts about the encroachment on the role of the largest public organization uniting people of different beliefs. The thing is that the clerics who preach divine truths fail to show elementary humanity.
