ROC—to defend or judge?

A cross cut with a knife, shot in the 20s and chopped with an ax this spring, is an icon of the 20th century - an image of attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church, which today gathers people for an all-Russian prayer service in “defense of its good name.”

As the Russian News Service reports, believers gathered at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior are fainting - those who came to the religious procession feel ill in the sun. Security for this event in the capital is provided by about 14,000 police officers.

Once again - a cross cut with a knife and two icons - shot through 80 years ago and chopped up recently. Well, of course, that’s not all - three more Pussy Riot girls raised their legs in the pulpit. What's on the other side?

A library thrown into a landfill and pianos played by Richter and Neuhaus, torn out by a bulldozer from the building that once belonged to Moscow State University, now the Church of Tatiana on Mokhovaya. The lost museum and libraries of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the Novodevichy Convent. Students and teachers of the Russian State University for the Humanities expelled from the building on Ilyinka by Cossack whips.

The Chelyabinsk Organ Hall, which had been in operation for 25 years, was closed, the only one in the Southern Urals. The richest Perm art gallery is being evicted to the streets, as are hundreds of children's hospitals, libraries, museums, schools, institutes, and concert halls.

Despite the fact that today the Russian Orthodox Church introduces legislative initiatives to introduce a church income tax, establishes banks, trades tobacco, oil, caviar and shares on stock exchanges. And he doesn’t pay a single ruble in taxes despite having assets comparable to Gazprom, the locomotive of the Russian economy.

However, this is only recent history. The Russian Orthodox Church reminds us on every occasion that Orthodoxy and the history of Russia are inseparable, that it, as it were, personifies Russian culture. That in the pre-Christian era, supposedly semi-wild Russians ran through the forests, lived in dugouts and copulated en masse on Ivan Kupala.

At the same time, he is silent that the true Russian culture was destroyed a thousand years ago by the Christians who came to Rus' - it was they who burned all the books, all the historical evidence of what the Russian state was like in the pre-Christian era. Only today, thanks to archaeologists, facts are emerging that we, it turns out, had writing, statehood, and a rich culture before Cyril and Methodius.

It is hushed up that the spread of Christianity in Rus' continued for many centuries, right up to the twentieth century, and this expansion is not completed today. That the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church did not hesitate to destroy entire peoples who did not want to accept Christianity. That the priests “tormented many people, starved them to death, threw them into the water, burned men, elders and small children in huts, burned out their eyes, impaled babies on stakes and killed them.” According to the cathedral code of 1649, criticism of the Church and its dogmas was punishable by burning at the stake, as was conversion to another faith.

I don’t remember a case when a representative of the clergy, having gained access to the media, did not recall the “crimes of Bolshevism” against the church and did not appeal for “restoration of justice.” However, no one - neither the heirs of the financial capital lost in the 1917 revolution, nor the property owners - has yet received restitution - with the exception of the Russian Orthodox Church, which even today, not with fire and sword, but with the heavy tread of bailiffs, takes away everything it lays its eye on . Everything that belonged to her and even what she had never owned.

Immanuel Kant was right when he once said: “God is terrible without morality.” And if we talk about historical justice, then it would be fair to raise the question of a tribunal that will consider the crimes of the Russian Orthodox Church against its people, which were committed over the course of a millennium - and continue today.