The Supreme Church Council is looking for enemies outside the Church, and Fr. Vsevolod Chaplin - inside

On April 3, 2012, an appeal from the Supreme Church Council was published regarding the confrontation between the Church and “anti-Christian forces,” which “is becoming more and more obvious and acute.” Attacks on the Church, according to the authors of the document, have a political and anti-Russian background.

The confrontation, as follows from the appeal, is manifested by “a series of acts of vandalism and desecration of churches,” which began with the Pussy Riot action , and “a slanderous information attack on the Primate of the Church.”

The authors of the appeal compare the performance of the punk band and the publications about the legal battle over the apartment with the persecution of the Church at the beginning of the twentieth century, accompanied by the appearance of “traitor-renovationists.”

The All-Russian Central Council calls on “to maintain unanimity, not to succumb to lies and provocations, to learn to critically perceive dubious information about the Church, not to rush into a reaction, with public and private statements,” but at the same time take into account “the opposition of the Church from its enemies” “in everyday church activities." On April 22, it was proposed to hold a “prayer service and standing in defense of the faith, desecrated shrines, the Church and its good name,” which suffered “from attackers and madmen.”

On the same day, the head of the Synodal Department for Relations between the Church and Society, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, developed the theme of “traitors-renovationists”, mentioned in passing in the All-Russian Central Council’s address. In his opinion, the renovationist movement is emerging again in the Church today. We are talking about that part of the believers whospoke out in favor of forgiving the members of Pussy Riot, and whose statement the head of the OVSO called “spiritual blackmail.”

“I see a very serious danger in the fact that a very small group of clergy and laity, probably a total of fifty people, a maximum of one hundred, are now trying to firmly push their position in the public space, declaring that this is, as it were, the position of “all advanced, intellectual , looking to the future, the progressive part of the Church,” said Father Vsevolod.

He is convinced that true Orthodox Christians “need not an opportunistic Christianity that would adapt to the fashion of the secular-political crowd, but a fiery Christianity, militant in the true sense of the word, a Christianity that is not ready to live according to the laws of this world, but ready to live according to the laws of the Kingdom of God "

Sources

• Appeal of the Supreme Church Council of the Russian Orthodox Church // Patriarchia.ru. 2012. April 3.
• Renovationism is emerging again in the Church, says Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin // Interfax-religion. 2012. March 3.