The Synaxis of the New Martyrs of Russia

January 25

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On the Sunday that falls nearest to January 25, we commemorate all the faithful throughout the former Russian Empire who died at the hands of the atheists, beginning in the year 1917. Among them are the Royal Family (see July 4), followed by Patriarch Tikhon the Confessor (see Mar. 24), and an innumerable multitude of clergy, monastics, and layfolk who confessed the Name of Christ in the face of every conceivable mockery, torment, and bitter death.

Apolytikion in the Third Tone

 

In these latter times, a host of Martyrs, * newly crowned with grace, rejoice in Heaven, * glorified with diverse forms of martyrdom; * for having censured the madness of godless foes, * they gained the laurels of triumph and victory. * Hence, they fervently entreat Christ for us unceasingly, * to grant great mercy unto us who sing their praise.

Kontakion in the Plagal of the Fourth Tone

 

The choirs of Martyrs who contested in the ancient times * welcome the hosts of victors newly crowned by Christ our God, * and they form one common festival in divine joy. * For these ranks which fought for faith throughout the Russian land * set at nought the wicked schemes of godless tyranny. * Hence, we cry to them: * Rejoice, ye Passion-bearers of the Lord.

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SAINT OR FEAST POSTED THIS DATE 2012(with 2011's link here also and further, 2010, 2009 and even 2008!):

Honor a Literary Giant, but Be Careful Where

The mayor of Moscow has said that Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Ulitsa, Big Communist Street, will become Ulitsa Solzhenitsyna, Solzhenitsyn Street.

By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
Published: September 25, 2008


MOSCOW — In death as in life, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn remains a difficult, polarizing figure for Russia, a fierce critic not only of Communism but also of the decadence and materialism of post-Soviet Russia. So it was perhaps inevitable that the seemingly simple act of naming a Moscow street in his honor would become complicated.

The priests at St. Martin the Confessor, an Orthodox church on the street, have posted a sign saying Bolshaya Alekseyevskaya, to honor the church of St. Aleksy, a medieval Orthodox metropolitan of Moscow.

When President Dmitri A. Medvedev decreed last month that Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who died on Aug. 3 at 89, be memorialized “for his extraordinary contribution” to Russian culture, he did not set any deadline or single out any street. But the office of Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov quickly said that Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Ulitsa, or Big Communist Street, would henceforth be known as Ulitsa Solzhenitsyna, or Solzhenitsyn Street, in honor of Mr. Solzhenitsyn, the writer whose book “The Gulag Archipelago” is credited with revealing the horrors of the Soviet system and, ultimately, helping to destroy it.

That was too much for the Communists, who consider the writer little more than a traitor. Early this month, on the eve of the 40th day after Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s death, when Russian Orthodox custom calls for commemoration of the dead, Vladimir Lakeyev, a leader of the Communist Party faction in Moscow, read a statement saying that Big Communist Street was named after the Bolsheviks who fell in battle there in the revolution of 1905 and the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917.

Renaming the street — one of Moscow’s best preserved, with rows of elegant prerevolutionary mansions — is “inadmissible” because the current name “reflects the feat of Communists who gave their lives for freedom, the happiness of the people and the strengthening of the state,” Mr. Lakeyev said. By contrast, he said, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was “a public figure who devoted his life to fighting the Soviet people’s state and spoke out with anti-Communist and anti-state positions.”

This week the Web site of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation said that “citizens across the country continue to express their displeasure with the campaign of canonization of the false prophet.”

Mr. Lakeyev has petitioned the city prosecutor’s office to investigate the legality of the decision, saying that the law clearly states that a person has to have been dead 10 years before a street may be named after him or her. In response, Vladimir Platonov, an official in Mr. Medvedev’s party, United Russia, proposed a loophole in the law that would lift the restriction if the name change was based on a decree by federal authorities.

But this being Russia, it is not clear that such a move is necessary. In 2004, a street on the outskirts of Moscow was hastily renamed for Akhmad Kadyrov, a Chechen rebel turned pro-Kremlin strongman, who was killed by an assassin’s bomb.

Some have raised a different issue, saying that Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s memory is more likely to be dishonored by having his name attached to a busy city street.

“It will inevitably end up in amusing, and at times simply idiotic, contexts,” wrote Stanislav Minin, a columnist for the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “For example: ‘The Interfax agency reports that a drunken fight took place tonight on Ulitsa Solzhenitsyna.’ ”

In all likelihood, the renaming will go ahead despite the Communists’ protests. The presidential decree, dated Aug. 12, states that a plaque should be erected on the street and specifies the text — identifying Mr. Solzhenitsyn as a Nobel Prize winner and winner of the State Prize of Russia but making no mention of the gulag, the Soviet prison system — and says that new street signs and the plaque should be in place no later than Jan. 1, 2009. On Tuesday, the Moscow government gave preliminary approval to amendments that would fully legalize the name change. In the meantime, a handful of Communists and residents of Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya demonstrated, holding banners with slogans like “Don’t Live a Lie.”

Andrei Metelsky, the leader of the Moscow City Duma’s pro-Kremlin United Russia faction, said during the legislature’s session that dissenting opinions were getting much more of a hearing than in Russia’s past.

“This isn’t the situation of nearly 100 years ago when no one was asked, and it was just renamed and that’s it,” he said. “If anyone tried to object, they faced an unenviable fate in the camps.”

If nothing else, the squabble over Ulitsa Solzhenitsyna has spurred a new round of discussion about Moscow’s toponymy — a debate that had fizzled after a post-Soviet spate of renaming in the 1990s. Moscow still has a number of streets, squares and metro stations named after Lenin, lesser Communist figures and dates connected to the revolution. One of the major thoroughfares near Big Communist Street is still called Marksistskaya, or Marxist Street.

“Now that Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya, a street name with such ideological meaning, is being renamed, I think it will be easier to rename others,” said Viktor Moskvin, director of the Russia Abroad Foundation, a repository of Russian émigré memoirs and archives that Mr. Solzhenitsyn helped compile and strongly supported — and that will now also bear his name.

Meanwhile, the priests at St. Martin the Confessor, a beautiful Orthodox church on Big Communist Street, have taken matters into their own hands and simply erected a sign with its pre-1917 street address, 15 Bolshaya Alekseyevskaya, which honors the church of St. Aleksy, a medieval Orthodox metropolitan of Moscow.

“We shouldn’t be like the Communists, who went around renaming everything,” said the Rev. Valery Stepanov, who serves at the church and hosts a television show about Moscow. “But Solzhenitsyn Street is better than Big Communist Street.”

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The Russian Church compares current situation with Christianity in Europe to the epoch of USSR militant atheism

31 July 2008, 16:07

Kiev, July 31, Interfax - The Moscow Patriarchate is concerned with current situation with Christianity and morality in Europe.

"Soviet atheistic policy once implemented in our countries echoes in various attempts to prevent the influence of faith on society and restrict it only to divine services and social care for disadvantaged citizens," Priest Georgy Ryabykh, an acting secretary for Church and society relations the at the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations said at a conference attended by members of the Russian Church and the European People's Party in Kiev.

According to him, Orthodox Christians are concerned with "developing aggressive secularism in Western European countries, as its spirit is similar to the Soviet course in religious field."

"Public sphere often promotes unattractive or even intentionally perverted image of Christianity. Some believers in West seriously speak of Christianophobia. They even made a website to record such incidents," the priest noted.

He pointed out that "frankly anti-Christian films and materials" find their way to public space more often.

"It hurts us in Eastern Europe where we build new churches to hear that Christian churches in the West are sold or let for commercial purposes. Some European cities consider a possibility to transfer Christian churches to other religious communities," Fr. Georgy said.

He further said "a wave of fighting against Christian symbols in public places" raises every now and then "for example, removing crosses and Christmas trees from schools," and heads of some European states congratulate their citizens on "season festival" instead of Christmas.

The Russian Church official also worries that "moral relativism and law nihilism" is still usual for European states.

"European culture promotes material consumption, unisexual relations, debauchery, easy attitude to abortion and drugs. On the political level, it's difficult to consider moral tolerance to violating rights of national minorities in some counties of the European Union and glorification of various types of fascism," the priest said.

Besides, he believes it is "apparent deviation from moral norms" that "some states are indifferent to the heritage of Orthodox Serb people and situation in Kosovo."

"Orthodox Christians sometimes feel they see a new dogmatic ideology to appear, but today in a liberal variant. It shares Communist hostility to the same values," the Russian Church's representative said.

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The Russian Church urges European Christians to answer Islamic challenges by baby-boom

25 July 2008, 13:05



London, July 25, Interfax - The Moscow Patriarchate urged Christians who are scared of increasing Islamic influence in Europe protect values of traditional family.



"Many Christians fear that Muslims will gradually push them out of Europe as Muslim families have many children, while Christian populations is implacably decreasing," the Russian Orthodox Church representative to the European Institutions Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria said at the Shared mission in Europe hearings in frames of the Lambeth conference of the Church of England in Canterbury.



According to the Bishop, Christian leaders should raise a question: "do we do enough to protect Biblical vision of a family as unbreakable union between man and woman and children as God's blessing?"



Bishop Hilarion believes that the main challenge for Christian mission in Western Europe is militant secularism that strives to push religion off the public sphere.



Among the participants were Primate of the Albanian Orthodox Church Archbishop Anastasy, Metropolitan Ambrosius of Helsinki (the Autonomous Orthodox Church of Finland), head of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland Archbishop Jukka Paarma, President of the Conference of European Churches Rev. Jean-Arnold de Clermont and the Conference's general secretary Rev. Collin Williams.



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Atheists tried to set an Orthodox church on fire in Kiev

10 June 2008, 14:19

Kiev, June 10, Interfax - The attempt to set on fire a wooden church in the Solomensky District of Kiev was taken in the end of the last week, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church press service reported on Tuesday.

The incident took place in the Pervomaisky Park. A crowd of people gathered there with protests against building the church complex of the canonical Ukrainian Church. Among the participants were elderly people and radical youth from various extremist groups of the Communist trend, totally about 30-40 people, the press service said.

The local community of believers also came to back up the building of the church. Their number exceeded the protestors by a third.

The atheists disputed with the believers and cried: "Aha, you are faithful, aren't you?" "Read Blok's poems, he proves - there's no God!" Fence of the building site was soon chocked with slogans: "Away with obscurantism!" "Churches, brothels, casino - out to the suburbs!" Young people also depicted hammers, sickles and five-pointed stars there.

"Then they suddenly ran out to the building site and started crushing it. They had petrol in big 6-liter bottles with them and poured it over to the wooden church and other wood and tried to set it on fire," a press service representative said.

Law enforcement agencies prevented the church complex from burning, though they had to call for a fire-brigade and about ten more police cars to oppose aggressive atheists.

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A US temple where faithful don't have to believe in God

There are no sacred symbols and the faithful who gather at the monumental Art Nouveau edifice off Central Park believe deeply that there is not necessarily a god. They're members of the Society for Ethical Culture, a humanist group with some 3,000 followers in New York. An AFPTV report.(AFPTV)
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by Luis Torres de la Llosa

Fri May 23, 9:49 AM ET

NEW YORK (AFP) - It looks more like a theater than a church, there are no sacred symbols, and the faithful who gather at this monumental Art Nouveau edifice believe deeply that there is not necessarily a god.

Here, across from Manhattan's Central Park, the Society for Ethical Culture, whose motto is "Deed before Creed," along with other US non-theist, atheist, agnostic and independent groups, are gaining ground in the United States.

According to the Pew Forum, those who see their spiritual dimension as "unaffiliated" make up 16 percent of Americans, but they are the fastest-growing segment of the complicated patchwork of US spiritual life.

"It feeds my spiritual, ethical and social needs," said Judith Wallach, a member of the ethical society for years who acknowledged having a religion but not a strong belief in God.

God's popularity would appear to be somewhat under fire in the very religious-minded United States: books such as Christopher Hitchens's "God is not Great," Sam Harris's "The End of Faith" and Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion" have all become US best sellers in the past three years.

Some experts see the trend as a reaction to hard-line attitudes among Christans, Jews and Muslims in a world that is traumatized and skeptical after the September 11, 2001 terror strikes.

Others think it is part of a broader shift.

"More and more people are discovering that they can lead good, fulfilled, moral lives without religion," said Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who teaches at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of essays such as "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life."

"God is not exploding -- which is what Nietzsche supposed -- God is slowly evaporating before our eyes," he said.

New York's Society for Ethical Culture was founded in 1876, with Darwin's ideas in full flower, by Felix Adler, a humanist son of a rabbi who immigrated from Germany. Today, it has 3,000 members.

The society admits atheists and people who maintain their religious affiliation. Its Sunday morning meetings are not masses, but rather "platforms."

They start with a brief concert and include conversations, song and a half-hour discussion of a particular topic. They wrap up with a collection of funds for a humanitarian cause.

This week, it was for victims of the massive earthquake in China. Next Sunday the society will debate the war in Iraq and the use of torture, to which it is opposed for "humanist" reasons.

"These services bear some similarities to traditional religious services in regard to the inclusion of music, community sharing, and a sense of aesthetics.

"They differ in their flexibility and openness to different perspectives and absence of worship to a supreme deity," explained Bart Worden, president of the National Leader's Council of the American Ethical Union.

Says Worden: "Families bring their children to learn how to live in a world of diversity, respecting differences and finding common ground with others, and making a contribution to the well-being of the world."

Jesai Jaymes is 55 and works in theater. He joined the society last week after finding it on a stroll through Central Park.

"I am meeting bright, intelligent people who want to do things and that is what attracted me to it," said Jaymes, who was raised Catholic and has a Jewish father.

It is "an organization in which it is possible to participate and be active, rather than contemplate things," added Jaymes, who was happy "finding an organization that supports social activism rather than belief and prayer: I can pray in the park, where I do my yoga and my meditation."

With a doctorate in art history, Ruth Cohen, a society member for years, has a special appreciation for the imposing building home to the society, built in 1910, called Viennese-secession Art Deco style.

Its decorative motifs are somber and abstract, there are human figures and no traditional symbols of major historic faiths. "The auditorium is built in such a manner that the speaker is even with his audience," she noted.

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Ten Scientists, including Two Nobel Prize Winners, Demand an End to the Clericalization of Russian Society

May 17, 2007.CHRIST THE SAVIOUR CATHEDRAL, MOSCOW. At the ceremony signing the Act of Canonical Unification between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. On the left: Metropolitan Lavr, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad; on the right: Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Alexii II.


(Version anglaise seulement)


In an Open Letter to Vladimir Putin, Ten scientists, including Nobel Prize winners Zhores Alferov and Vitaly Ginzburg, demand an end to the clericalization of Russian society :

" We have watched with deepening concern the increasing clericalization of Russian society, the Church's infiltration of all areas of public life. The Constitution of the Russian Federation declares our country to be secular and separates the Church from the public education system. We address this letter to you as the holder of the highest office in this country and guarantor of the Constitution’s basic principles.

In March 2007, the 9th World Russian National Council was held in Moscow. One of its resolutions caught our attention: “On the development of a national system of religious education and science.” It is a peculiar title. If religious education is an internal affair of the Russian Orthodox Church, then why should the Church concern itself with science? And would science be well served by such concern? The text of the resolution is unequivocal. The resolution calls for an appeal to the Russian federal government to “include theology in the list of scholarly disciplines recognized by the State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles and to preserve theology as an independent scholarly field.”

The Church's attempts to introduce theology to the list of government-recognized scholarly disciplines have a long history. Previously, however, the pressure exerted on the Academic Degrees and Titles Commission remained hidden from the public eye. Since the Council in March 2007, the pressure is out in the open. But why is it that theology — an assemblage of religious dogmas—should occupy a place among scientific disciplines? Scientific disciplines deal with facts, logic, and proofs, but not faith.

The Catholic Church, it should be noted, has almost completely renounced interfering with science (in 1992 the Church even recognized its fault in the Galileo affair and cleared his name). In conversation with V. I. Arnold (March 1998), Pope John Paul II recognized that science alone is able to determine the truth, whereas religion, in the words of the pontificate, sees itself as better suited to evaluate the possible uses of new discoveries. The Russian Orthodox Church holds a different view:

“We need a dialogue between the government and society at large in order to end the monopoly of the materialist worldview that was created in the Soviet era.” (From the resolution of the Council.)

All the achievements of science worldwide are based on a materialist view of the world. Modern science is simply not concerned with any other views. Steven Weinberg, the American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, put it aptly:

“The experience of being a scientist makes religion seem fairly irrelevant. Most scientists I know simply don't think about it very much. They don't think about religion enough to qualify as practicing atheists.” (New York Times, August 23, 2005)

So what are we being offered to replace the “monopoly of a materialist worldview”?

But let us come back to the Academic Degrees and Titles Commission. The incorporation of the Church into a government body is an obvious breach of the Constitution. The Church has already infiltrated the army and now the media broadcast the blessings of new military equipment (battleships and submarines are now required to be blessed — which, alas! does not always help). Religious ceremonies attended by high government officials are also widely covered. These are all examples of the clericalization of this country.

The Council’s abovementioned resolution contains another urgent call “for the recognition of the cultural significance of Orthodox culture and ethics education in all schools and for the inclusion of this subject in the standard federal curriculum.”

Church officials are calling on the government to make Introduction to Orthodox Culture a mandatory subject in all Russia’s schools. The idea has been in the works for some time. In Circular #5925, dated December 9th, 1999, addressed to “all eparchial officials,” Alexis II states that “the task of spiritual and moral education will not be fulfilled if we fail to pay attention to the system of public education.” The conclusion of the same document reads:

“In case difficulties should arise teaching ‘Introduction to Orthodox Beliefs,’ the subject should be called ‘Introduction to Orthodox Culture,’ which the teachers and school principals raised in atheism will find more acceptable.”

It follows from the quoted text that under the guise of “Introduction to Orthodox Culture,” we are going to have (in breach of the Constitution, once again) religious education.

Can We Treat Other Religions With Such Disrespect?

Even if we assume that the course is truly about “Orthodox culture,” such a subject would still — as has been said so many times — be unacceptable in an ethnically and religiously diverse country. Nevertheless, the Council considers this subject necessary in our country, where Orthodox Christians, so they say, constitute an absolute majority. If you count all ethnically Russian atheists as Orthodox Christians, then they would indeed make up a majority. Without the atheists, alas, Orthodox Christians are in the minority. But that is not the point. Can we treat other religions with such disrespect? Is this not a form of Orthodox chauvinism? Church functionaries ought to take the time to consider whether such a policy will ultimately unite the country or lead to division.

In the European Union, where religious intolerance has already shown its colors, it has been recognized after much discussion that schools should teach a course in the history of the main monotheist religions. The main argument for such a course would be that teaching history and cultural heritage of other religions would promote understanding between members of different ethnic and religious groups. No one even thought of demanding the teaching of an “Introduction to Catholic Culture.” At last year’s Christmas Readings, Education Minister Andrey A. Fursenko announced the publication of the history of world religions textbook. The Orthodox lobby gave the announcement a hostile reception. Meanwhile the textbook, written by scholars of the History Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (the title is Religions of the World, to be used in grades 10 and 11), is a well-balanced account packed with information that any educated person should know.

Courts Must Now Decide Whether the Theory of Evolution is True

And what do we have instead? In 2006, a St. Petersburg high-school student Masha and her dad went to court to demand that the high-school biology curriculum of “outdated and erroneous” Darwinism be replaced by the theory that man was created by a Divine force (creationism). It’s an absurd situation: for some reason the courts must now decide whether the theory of evolution, which states that life emerged on Earth three billion years ago, is true, or whether the truth lies rather in the theory of creation, which, unlike the theory of evolution, does not present a single fact but states that life on Earth has existed for a few thousand years. It seems to be a question exclusively within the competence of science. Yet Masha and her dad received support from the Patriarch Alexis II who declared at the Christmas Educational Readings:

“There is no harm in knowing the Bible’s account of the origin of the world. If someone wants to think that they descend from apes, let them keep their view, but without imposing it on others.”

But what will happen if school education gets deprived of elementary proofs, of basic logic, if the last remnants of critical thinking are eviscerated, and instead dogmas are learnt by rote — would that do no harm either? By the way, to be precise, neither Darwin nor his successors have ever stated that man descended from the ape. They only stated that apes and humans have common ancestors. But it is not only Darwinism that the Church has problems with. For instance, how does the Bible’s account of the origin of the world relate to the facts demonstrated by modern cosmology and astrophysics? What should be taught in school: these facts or the Bible’s account of the world created in seven days?

To believe in God or not is a matter of each individual’s conscience and convictions. We respect the feelings of religious people and our goal is not to fight religion. But we can not stand by when attempts are made to cast doubt on scientific knowledge, to extirpate the “materialist worldview,” to substitute the knowledge accumulated by science with faith. We shouldn’t forget that the government’s policy of innovative development can only be realized if schools and universities equip young people with the knowledge acquired by modern science. To this knowledge there is no alternative."

Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Evgeny ALEXANDROV,
Zhores ALFEROV,
Garry ABELEV,
Leo BARKOV,
Andrey VOROBIEV,
Vitaly GINZBURG,
Sergey INGE-VECHTOMOV,
Eduard KRUGLYAKOV,
Mikhail SADOVSKY,
Anatoly CHEREPASCHUK

English Translation by Dmitri Ponomarenko and Eugenia Simacheva, 2008.

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