Andrew Lloyd Webber’s opera Jesus Christ Superstar was banned in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. The Day wrote about it (No. 58, October 4, “Russia’s Eastern Orthodox zealots vs. North American rock opera”).
This happened because a group of religious activists appealed to the city administration.
A draft law on amendments to the Criminal Code of Russia became an information background of the ban. The draft law provides for an up to 300,000 roubles fine, or 200 hours of compulsory labor, or an up to three-year prison sentence in case of “insulting citizens’ religious beliefs and views.”
The opera has been staged in Russia for 22 years. Does this story have to do anything with faith? Even the Moscow Patriarchate states that it does not. “People who signed this petition, express their personal opinion,” said the secretary of Don Metropolis of the Russian Orthodox Church Igor Petrovsky. “A lot of those related to the Church treat this opera in a positive way. The appellants should have asked for the priest’s blessing first.”
In fact, Orthodox Christianity is to be protected from such “defenders” now.
Present political context is the main component of this situation. Today, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are overwhelmed by a wave of ridiculous all-round prohibitions.
The government is afraid of the new social reality, it is not sure whether it can cope with it, because they see the experience of Libya, Egypt, etc. Hence the initiatives that surpass each other’s absurdity. In Russia, participants of single rallies are arrested. In Belarus, demonstrative silence was prohibited recently.
The governments of these morally exhausted countries have a lot of people of the “Sergeant Prishibeev” type, and a whole herd of the common ones follows the leaders. By the way, in Chekhov’s story, that sergeant tried to break up the crowds too: “On what grounds did these people assemble here? What for? Does the law say for people to walk around in crowds?” And also “the other day, he went from door to door, ordered not to sing and put out the lights. There was no such law for people to sing, he said. It was time to sleep; instead they were talking and laughing.”
During the 17th and 18th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Old Believers, people made in the image of God, were killed in Moskovia only because they used a different number of fingers to cross themselves. Though, even a century before that, Shakespeare wrote that “it is a heretic that makes the fire, not she who burns in it.” The point is, that when people lack love, they fight over trifles. Hundreds of strange in their savagery sects existed in Russia, and some of them are still there. Francois Chateaubriand wrote that when people do not believe in anything, they are eager to believe in everything.
There is no doubt that a tide of prohibitions caused disagreements within the Moscow Church, which is unable to conceal its problems and become a guiding light for people. The Moscow Patriarchate is in plain view in the modern information society: here they use Photoshop to add more people to their service, and there they erase watches from the pictures.
Six months ago, when journalists asked what was really hiding behind the story of a photo of the Patriarch wearing a Breguet watch, worth a few tens of thousands of dollars, the Head of Church said that the photo did not correspond to the reality. “After this photo appeared, I went and started looking for it. Since a lot of people bring presents. And there are a lot of boxes that we never open and don’t even know what is inside. And I really saw that there was a Breguet watch, and that is why I never said that the Patriarch did not own such a watch. Yes, there is a box with this watch that has never been worn, and it just stays there.”
After this statement was made, the photo archive of the official website of the Russian Orthodox Church patriarchia.ru was revised, and all the photos from April to July 2009, where the Breguet watch was clearly visible on the Patriarch’s wrist, were edited. This nationwide scandal was revealed by journalists.
Another story is about the doctor Yury Shevchenko’s trial. He supposedly damaged Patriarch’s apartment by doing redecoration in his own flat, which was one floor below the Patriarch’s. The materials relating to the case contained information that the “nano-particles” dust inflicted damage worth almost one million dollars. As it turned out later, it was common plaster. The Head of the Russian Orthodox Church was defended in court by some woman, who the press service of the Church announced as the Patriarch’s second cousin.
Recently, head of the synodic department for relations between the Church and public of the Russian Orthodox Church Vsevolod Chaplin stated about the necessity of a great war and participation of the whole male population of Russia in it. He also notified that the Moscow Patriarchate churches started collecting signatures in support of unification of Ukraine and Russia. It looks like the present-day Moscow Church accepted the ancient Mongolian motto: “to the farthest sea.” Even despite the fact that it contradicts the God’s commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, or his field.”
Russian church looks for its mission not in serving God, but in the mechanistic expansion of the country’s territory. By the way, it is in this country that the most people were killed in the history of humankind. Hence numerous statements from the Moscow Patriarchate priests defending Joseph Stalin, the killer of millions of people, created in the image of God.
As a result of such moral priorities, according to the statistics, Russia ranks the second among non-belligerent countries with a number of serious felonies.
By the way, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine states that crime in Ukraine directly correlates to the closeness to “Russian world.” For example, in 2011, the highest crime rate was in Crimea: 1,898 crimes per 100,000 people, that opposed by 422 crimes in the less criminalized Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, which is almost five times as high. According to the MIA, the top five of the most criminalized regions of Ukraine has stayed the same for many years: the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Luhansk, and Donetsk oblasts. For example, according to the 2011 population census data, three percent of Ivano-Frankivsk oblast residents were not born in Ukraine. In the Crimea this number was 35 percent, in Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Luhansk, and Donetsk oblasts it varied from 14 to 15 percent.
For some reason, Odesa Eparchy of the Moscow Patriarchate creates the most scandals. Not so long ago, a priest seduced a woman, left her without alimony, taking all the money for his own entertainment. A more recent case: an 11-year-old boy was knocked over on the pedestrian crossing by a priest driving a Mercedes. The boy died in hospital, and later, his school teacher died of a heart attack.
The worst part is that the self-discredit of the Moscow Patriarchate harms the general image of the Church. Because people usually do not make difference between patriarchates, saying, “They are all the same.”
In its turn, the spread of violence and the cult of hatred in Russia causes apocalyptic mood within Russian society. A lot of people feel that the country is falling into the abyss, and some of them are sincerely trying to find a way out. But they find the most simple and formal one: prohibition.
Though the Apostle Paul said once: “God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”
If a savage does not believe in a wooden idol, it does not mean that God does not exist. It only means that God is not made of wood.
And only savages (and communists) could think that by exterminating people and Churches, they could push God away. It is known that in the 18th century, Rousseau “prophesied” that religion will disappear in the 19th century. Instead, in the 19th century, a publishing house of the Biblical community was founded near the house where Rousseau used to live, and it still functions today.
