Disputed Voting Turns Church, a Kremlin Ally, Into Its Critic

By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY
NYT

MOSCOW — Among the thousands of Russian voices raised against the Kremlin this month after parliamentary elections widely dismissed as fraudulent, perhaps the most surprising was that of Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, who defended popular protests as a “lawful negative reaction” to corruption.

Always a reliable pillar of support for the government of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin and his United Russia Party, the powerful Orthodox Church has been noticeably — to some, shockingly — critical of the elections. Arguably the only major national institution outside the state, the church could potentially play a significant role as the current political and social crisis unfolds.

Patriarch Kirill is by no means the only religious critic of the government since the elections, and certainly not the toughest. “People of the most varied convictions are now gathering on the square, but they are united by one thing, their unwillingness to live like this any longer,” Archpriest Aleksei Uminsky, a popular Moscow priest who hosts a television program about Orthodoxy, said at a public gathering last week. “The same thing is happening right now in the church.”

In addition to urging the church to invite serious discussion about Russian society, Father Uminsky called attention to injustices within the church ranks. He cited the case of a priest who died of a heart attack while fighting to preserve church property from Kremlin-backed development plans. “There was no reaction” from any church leaders in that case and other disturbing episodes, he noted, “but something is brewing inside.”

(More here.)