Activist sues Russian church

AFP Published:Apr 08, 2008
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MOSCOW - A Russian consumer rights activist is suing the Orthodox Church for poor service, including the holding of mass funerals where several coffins are laid side by side, a newspaper said today.

Alexei Konyev told the independent Novye Izvestia daily he was fed up with “careless, low-quality” services after he recently buried a relative and found that several others were to be given a send-off at the same time, without any advance warning.

“When paying for a ceremony of whatever kind people often don’t realise what may happen and have no idea the priest may perform in a careless, low-quality fashion,” said Konyev, head of the Consumers’ Helper organisation in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg.

“The clergy are being cunning and seem to operate by double standards. The Church recognises the federal law on property rights but rejects the law on consumer protection, which is applicable to all,” he said.

The diocese has rejected Konyev’s criticism, denying that it profited by holding funerals en masse and saying that all payments were in fact donations, the paper said.

The paper carried a photograph of a price list of payments on the wall of a church. It included a fee for having a prayer said for a deceased relative at another person’s funeral service.

“There’s a certain logic in Alexei Konyev’s argument,” commented Novye Izvestia. “A dentist doesn’t rush from one chair to another, but pays attention to one patient at a time. Why shouldn’t the same rule apply to pastors?”

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