| “Families have stopped coming here for the holy days because they are afraid of what will happen if they try,” he added. Palestinians also charge that Israeli authorities have also erected large numbers of police checkpoints around the Old City of Jerusalem during the festivities, which attracts a large percentage of the 200,000-strong Palestinian Christian community. “Jerusalem has changed so much that it is difficult for me to see it anymore,” Benayot said. ‘Persecution against Christians and Arabs is always there’ Amid scenes of police violence against worshipers during last year’s Easter ceremonies, the video highlights policies it says are designed to limit Christian access to their sites of worship and interviews a number of prominent Palestinian Christian leaders. Issa Kassissieh, the Palestinian ambassador to the Holy See, argued that there is “systematic policy” to prevent Christian worship that has escalated in the past three years. During Easter last year, Kassissieh recounted, “the rooftop of the Church and courtyard were empty, except for checkpoints and police,” even while many worshipers were stuck at checkpoints nearby. Ibrahim Faltas, the General Administrator of the Custody of Holy Land, stressed that the restrictions imposed upon Christians are not, however, limited to Easter time, but reflect wider Israeli policies against Palestinians in Jerusalem. “Persecution against Christians and Arabs is always there,” he said, adding that he believed Easter week was “targeted” because it was the most visible demonstration of Christian presence during the year. In a report published in 2012, the US State Department highlighted Israeli restrictions on the freedom of worship of Palestinians, Christians and Muslims alike. “Strict closures and curfews imposed by the Israeli government negatively affected residents’ ability to practice their religion at holy sites, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, as well as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem,” the report said. |
| Accept The site uses cookies to help show you the most up-to-date information. By continuing to use the site, you consent to the use of your Metadata and cookies. Cookie policy Pyrrhic victory of the Ukrainian authorities: the fight against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Article by Vakhtang V. Kipshidze, vice-chairman of the Synodal Department for Church’s Relations with Society and Mass Media The persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is one of those processes in world politics that no longer requires special proof and is recognized by many public figures and publicists, enshrined in documents of international organizations, testimonies of religious figures and legal appraisal. Yet, the persecution does not stop, and this happens because somewhere in the “decision-making centers” the idea occurred that absolutely all means are good for the fight against Russian Orthodoxy. The Ukrainian Church’s belonging to Russian Orthodoxy is not a matter of immediate politics within the crisis in relations that has broken out between Russia and the countries of the Western world. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has never taken a stand in favour of the Russian leadership, has not called for the overthrow of the Ukrainian authorities, and has not excommunicated anyone, including even the incident when the authorities were planning the evidently anti-Christian initiatives, such as a bill to legalize gay marriage in Ukraine. In other words, this religious community has always remained loyal within the scope of the Ukrainian law. Therefore, there is no doubt that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is guilty towards those who decided to destroy it simply because it exists at all. This existence is predetermined by the fact that one people, the predecessor of the Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian peoples, received Baptism in 988, have come a difficult historical way together in the bosom of the one Church, venerating the same saints and praying in the same language. Acting on some invisible order, the Ukrainian authorities want to wipe out history and religious culture of their own people and rewrite it. People who used to live in the Soviet times remember that religion was declared an absolute evil after the Revolution, and all textbooks were rewritten, many churches were demolished, and those who did not fit into the concept of an anti-religious society were liquidated. Quite seriously they wanted to “show the last priest” on TV. This social project collapsed because the fight with God cannot be won without destroying oneself. The same is true of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church: “victory” over it will mean the self-destruction of the Ukrainian people. It is deeply symbolic that the state that pursues this policy is headed by the man who does not belong to Orthodoxy and therefore does not understand or does not want to understand against what he is fighting. |
| We are convinced that it is necessary to create, on the basis of international mechanisms of the protection of religious minorities, some standing effective centers for collecting and studying information about persecutions on religious grounds with the task to monitor the situation in this area and to prepare appropriate decisions for the executive bodies of international structures. The UN can and must see to it that the governments in some of its member states observe the commonly accepted norms of religious freedom. This should apply not only to Christians but also believers of any other religion whose freedom of conscience and faith needs to be secured legally and protected against encroachments by extremists. It is not for the first time that our Church speaks of the persecution of Christians in the world. In May 2011, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church adopted a document in which our Church not only condemned the persecution of Christians but also called the world public to give close attention to this problem and to work out together common measures for the struggle with discrimination against Christians. The Russian Orthodox Church spoke out and will continue speaking out against any form of xenophobia, religious intolerance and extremism. We understood the indignation of Muslims at the publication of caricatures of Mohammed in one of the Scandinavian magazines. We supported them after France adopted a law forbidding Muslim women to wear hijabs in public institutions. With sincere interest we are ready to discuss with our Muslim brothers the issues of public morality and to maintain cooperation with them in the most pressing areas, in a word, to develop an open and honest dialogue. An intensive interreligious and intercultural dialogue is one of the ways of combatting the discrimination of Christians. It can play an important role in creating conditions necessary for normalizing interreligious relations in the troubled regions of the world. A unique experience of peaceful coexistence of religions traditional for Russia has been accumulated in our country. And this experience can be useful for other countries and peoples as well. |
| As a result, many refuse the vaccination against Hepatitis B in the maternity hospital, some are even dissuaded by health workers. This vaccination has been in the national calendar for about 20 years, but many are still wary of it, they believe that they will not be affected by this disease. There are a lot of questions about vaccination against tuberculosis. People are not informed about the vaccine effect, they think that if a vaccinated person can get tuberculosis, then the vaccination is ineffective. In fact, the tuberculosis vaccine practically does not protect against infection: in this regard, its effectiveness is really low. Yet, it protects well from severe forms of tuberculosis in children. Therefore, for the vaccination to be effective, newborns, who have the highest risk of getting the infection, should be vaccinated. Yet, not understanding this, seeing the active promotion for non-vaccination, including the argument that everyone gets vaccinated and there are many of those who still gets sick, parents refuse this vaccination. There is also a problem with pertussis vaccination: DPT. Now many people are afraid of it and refuse to do it, because it is quite reactogenic. More than half of the children have a high fever after it, and a doctor has not warned about this symptom. It scares parents. Not everyone has the opportunity to get vaccinated with a cell-free pertussis component, so many children do not get vaccinated against pertussis. In this regard, we see a very bad epidemiological situation. In general, I consider the fact that parents are not sufficiently informed to be the main problem of Russian immunoprophylaxis. What happens if everyone gets vaccinated? — What does the 95% vaccination coverage actually mean? — It means that 95% of those who should be vaccinated will be vaccinated. That is, 95% of each risk group should get the recommended vaccine. — What does the expansion of the national vaccination calendar mean? Will more vaccines be available as part of the compulsory health insurance? |
| At the same time, the Ukrainian Orthodox churches and clergy not only have been suffering more frequently from the aftermaths of the hostilities, but they also are being subjected to purposeful attacks from the Greek Catholics and schismatics who maliciously take advantage of the civil commotion. Priests are subjected to humiliation, tortures and intimidation, as well as to forcible detention and interrogations. During such interrogations, armed men, belonging to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church or some uncanonical groups and claiming that they are authorized by the Ukrainian authorities, bring absurd accusations against the Ukrainian Orthodox priests and deliver them ultimatums, such as to leave the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and re-register the church property accordingly. In his letter to Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko, Metropolitan Onufry of Chernovtsy and Bukovina, Locum Tenens of the Metropolitan See of Kiev, described some cases of attacks committed by armed men against clergymen in the territory of the Donetsk diocese, including beatings and threats to inflict bodily harm. For instance, in the Amvrosiivka district some armed men tied up archpriest Yevgeny Podgorny, beat him up with a gunstock comb, stripped him of his priestly cross, shot from their guns above his head, and put him into a pit, threatening to kill his son. Many such reports are coming in from other dioceses of east Ukraine. For example, near Slaviansk some people with submachine guns made archpriest Vadim Yablonovsky dig a grave for himself and that same day handcuffed archpriest Viktor Stratovich, put a bag on his head and brought him to a forest where they made him stand on his knees while they were conducting an interrogation. We call the authority structures of Ukraine and competent international human rights watchdogs to immediately initiate an investigation into the abovementioned incidents. We are especially alarmed by the attempts of some Greek Catholic clergymen and representatives of schismatic communities to exchange the support of certain radical forces for the right of dictate and violence against parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, steadfast in her peacemaking position. There appear such Greek Catholic and schismatic figures who openly stir up fratricidal hatred, approving violence against civilian population and seeking to initiate persecution of all those, including priests of the canonical Church, who are committed to peace and dialogue. |
| The Syriac Didaskalia The situation was different in the Syrian capital of Antioch, where a strong Jewish presence posed a tangible threat to Christian identity. The Syriac Didaskalia, a 3rd century witness to Christian polemics against Judaic traditions, forbids Christians to observe the Levitical laws, including those concerning menstruation. The author admonishes women who abstain from prayer, Scripture lessons, and Eucharist for seven days during menstruation: “If you think, woman, that you are stripped of the Holy Spirit during the seven days of your menstruation, then if you die at this time, you will depart thence empty and without hope.” The Didaskalia goes on to assure the woman of the presence within her of the Holy Spirit, enabling her to take part in prayer, readings, and the Eucharist: Now think about it and recognize that prayer is heard through the Holy Spirit; and the Eucharist is received and consecrated through the Holy Spirit; and the Scriptures are words of the Holy Spirit and holy. Therefore if the Holy Spirit is within you, why do you isolate your soul and not approach the works of the Holy Spirit? He instructs other members of the community as follows: “ …You shall not separate those who have their period, for even the woman with the issue of blood was not reprimanded when she touched the edge of our Savior’s garment; she was rather deemed worthy to receive forgiveness of all her sins.” It is remarkable that this text admonishes menstruating women to receive Communion, and enforces its admonishment with the example of the woman with the flow of blood in Mt 9: 20-22. The Council of Gangra About a century later, toward the middle of the 4th century, we find canonical evidence against the concept of “ritual impurity” among the legislation of the local Council convened ca. AD 341 in Gangra (105 km northeast of Ankara) on the northern coast of Asia Minor, which condemned the extreme asceticism of the followers of Eustathius of Sebaste (@post-377). The Eustathian monastics, inspired by dualistic and spiritualistic teachings widespread in Syria and Asia Minor at that time, denigrated marriage and the married clergy. Against this Canon 1 of the Council reads: “If anyone disparages marriage, or abominates or disparages a woman sleeping with her husband notwithstanding that she is faithful and reverent, as though she could not enter the kingdom, let him be anathema.” The Eustathians refused to receive the Eucharist from married clergy out of a concern for ” ritual purity,” a practice likewise condemned by the Council, in its fourth canon: “If anyone discriminates against a married presbyter, on the ground that he ought not to partake of the offering when that presbyter is conducting the Liturgy, let him be anathema.” |
| For He is true, and lies not when He lays down with an oath: As I live, says the Lord God, for I will not the death of a sinner, but that he should turn from his way and live. Ezekiel 33:11 For if He wills not that one of His little ones should perish, how can we imagine without grievous blasphemy that He does not generally will allmen, but only some instead of all to be saved? Those then who perish, perish against His will, as He testifies against each one of them day by day: Turn from your evil ways, and why will you die, O house of Israel? Ib And again: How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not; and: Wherefore is this people in Jerusalem turned away with a stubborn revolting? They have hardened their faces and refused to return. The grace of Christ then is at hand every day, which, while it wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, calls all without any exception, saying: Come unto Me, all you that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you. Matthew 11:28 But if He calls not all generally but only some, it follows that not all are heavy laden either with original or actual sin, and that this saying is not a true one: For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God; nor can we believe that death passed on all men. And so far do all who perish, perish against the will of God, that God cannot be said to have made death, as Scripture itself testifies: For God made not death, neither rejoices in the destruction of the living. Wisdom 1:13 And hence it comes that for the most part when instead of good things we ask for the opposite, our prayer is either heard but tardily or not at all; and again the Lord vouchsafes to bring upon us even against our will, like some most beneficent physician, for our good what we think is opposed to it, and sometimes He delays and hinders our injurious purposes and deadly attempts from having their horrible effects, and, while we are rushing headlong towards death, draws us back to salvation, and rescues us without our knowing it from the jaws of hell |
| The reason for such a cannibalistic pathos is that Lenin hated the Church even more than religious ideology, because the Church is life in God. Personal satanic malice is felt in Lenin’s attitude to the Church, infernal hate, which he was unable to hold back. As soon as he got the chance to destroy the Church, Lenin forgot all his theories about strict laws of history, asserting which he as Marksist set himself against the narodnik movement. In his practical attitude to religion Lenin lapses into voluntarism. It is not a fruit of hypocrisy, but rather the result of doublethink, which reflects the dual nature of Marxism-Leninism. Lenin always declared himself complete materialist and atheist, but was he really such? No doubt, the Leninism ideology is materialistic: primacy of matter, concept of the world as a mechanism, and of the man as of a social-biological machine – a part of the world’s self-developing machine. But according to its objectives and deep orientedness Leninism could not be materialism. The logic of complete materialism does not offer any standards of conduct, has no ideas about proper and improper, for man being a socially biological mechanism cannot have any obligations before the world machine. Such materialism should regard the idea of God as a harmful mistake, but it cannot cause the pathos of maniacal denial or unrestrained passion for reviling. It is only the duty of theomachy that makes Lenin behave toward the world as if its basis is non-material. Denying existence of God Lenin fought against God and the Divine as against the most real essence. Fanatic atheism of Lenin’s type is possible only when they deny religion as a harmful superstition, but they fight against God as an absolutely hostile reality. At the same time it is absolutely logical that exactly materialism is the ideology of Leninism. Leninism is not materialistic according to its motives and goals, but only materialism may be the ideology of Leninism. Thought materialism with its logics cannot substantiate militancy of atheism, and all the more the pathos of theomachy, it is necessary as an instrument and the ultimate aim of theomachy. Such position cannot be consistent, for it is based on self-deception, playing with oneself, which allows to avoid direct denying of principles, and it is logically inevitable within the materialistic ideology. Leninism is unable of critical introspection, because it is philosophical and psychological doublethink described by George Orwell. The foundation of any kind of doublethink is doublethink toward God. |
| The irreconcilable battle against evil in all its forms has been the slogan of the Russian person over the course of almost a thousand years. It was in the name of this struggle against evil and in favor of Divine truth that all our wars were fought, first for the Orthodox faith, then for the house of the Most-Holy Mother of God, then for the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland. Remember the words that Holy Righteous Prince Alexander Nevsky addressed to his small regiment before battle: “Brothers, we are few, and the enemy is great, but God is not in power, but in truth… Let us not fear the multitudes of soldiers, for God is with us!” Deeply alien to the Russian person was any notion of compromise with evil. He always sensed its falsity and unorthodoxy in his soul and fervently rose up against it. Let us remember our Holy Passion-Bearer, Righteous Prince Michael of Chernigov and how he decisively rejected his boyars’ demand that he fulfill the requests of the soothsayers in order to preserve his own life, whom his subjects so needed, and they even promised to take the penance of this sin upon themselves. Let us remember how the great Muscovite hierarch St Philipp, refusing to make peace with the Oprichnina of Tsar Ivan Grozny; let us recall the truly self-sacrificial staunchness in the struggle for the faith and Homeland of Holy Hieromartyr Germogen, Patriarch of All Russia, who refused to compromise with the Poles who already occupied the Kremlin, even as he was in their clutches. How courageously the monks of Holy Trinity-St Sergius Lavra fought when their monastery became a military fortress! These are all edifying examples for us, in these troubled times, times of feeble spirit and all sorts of compromises with evil even among those who are not threatened by evil! The abandonment of this third sacred commandment by the Russian people began during those unfortunate Petrine times—the shearing of beards, the establishment of so-called “assemblies” with their frivolous activities, then, the infection from the West of sentimental “rosy” Christianity. The teaching, in the Protestant spirit, that salvation is easy and requires no spiritual struggle with the bodiless enemy, the dismissal of Christian asceticism and the overly comfortable attitude towards everything, including what is anti-Christian, that false Christian love which exceeds love for Christ and is prepared to make any compromise with all forms of evil. On this basis of fantasized, distorted Christianity, the Tolstoyan teaching of non-resistance of evil, which prepared the way for truly Satanic evil in our Homeland. And now, to our great sorrow, we note that this Tolstoyan non-resistance to evil is taught in many circles, even religious circles, of our diaspora under the attractive slogan of the Church “not interfering in politics,” as though the struggle against a clearly Satanic evil is wrong from the outset for a believing member of the Church?! |
| Researcher Father Alexander Mazyrin’s thesis also shows that the state was changing its strategy from provocation against, and schisms within the Church to its total destruction. It was no longer a case of Tikhonites vs. Sergianites. People from the so-called Living Church, used by the state as a sort of “battering ram” against those loyal to Patriarch Tikhon, also found themselves among the accused, as did Old believers and other sects. Cases against former “secret police colleagues” working within the Church can even be found. But behind the outwardly formalized characteristics is revealed a living history in between the lines of faith and faithlessness, the podvig of a confessor and blindness, courage and human weakness. By 1937 an entire generation had grown up in an atmosphere of militant atheism, and witnesses were more easily coerced, or even came forth voluntarily against members of the clergy. The pervasive propaganda of “sabotage” and “wrecking” made people extremely fearful for their own lives, and many caved under the pressure to “bring the obscurantist priests into the light of soviet progress; to rid the nation of that vermin.” How they conducted themselves, or, a little about the “counter-revolutionary goats” It is almost impossible, based upon the protocols of 1937 in many cases, to picture the spiritual countenance of the people who were interrogated. Some case records were obviously manipulated: the page numbers were changed more than once (the original page numbers were crossed out or erased). As for their appearance, their service; about what one or another of them was forced to endure (and some of them are already glorified among the hosts of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia)—more detailed information can be found from the records of the early 1930s. The stages of a priest-confessor’s path before World War II and the first years of collectivization are more clearly outlined in them. 1937 became the “final frontier” for many of them. Just the same, regardless of the “compressed” nature of the material in the investigative archives from 1937, certain details stand out, and in some, you can hear an open confession of faith. |
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