MOSCOW, April 5 (Reuters) - The Russian Orthodox Church apologised on Thursday for doctoring a photograph of Patriarch Kirill to remove what bloggers said was a luxury wristwatch following accusations that he lives a lavish lifestyle.Read the rest here.
It responded after eagle-eyed bloggers said an archive photo of the Patriarch on its website showed the reflection of a Breguet watch worth about $30,000 in the polished surface of a table where his arms rested during talks.
Sounds like old habits die hard. Stalin use to do this sort of thing all the time. Whenever he got rid of another crony they would be quietly airbrushed from official photos. My real question though is why would the Patriarch of the Russian Church be wearing a watch worth $30,000.00? That should be a source of serious embarrassment.
9 comments:
John:
Please read the article carefully. The photo shows the Patriarch wearing a watch, but so far there has been no confirmation that the watch is indeed a Breguet, aside from the accusations of liberal bloggers.
And, oh, did I mention that the Pope has much more wealth and luxury than this? His own private Alitalia jet, for instance? No one questions his spiritual expertise, nevertheless.
Sorry I don't buy it. If the watch were a $20 knock off the Patriarchal press office would have paraded the thing in front of a room full of cameras and reporters. Their silence says it all. As for the Pope, I learned somewhere around the age of 5 that "but David does it!" doesn't cut any ice. What the Pope does or doesn't do is irrelevant to this subject.
Disillusioned Catholic,
How about you stop referring to yourself as Catholic, as any faithful Catholic would find it offensive. The Pope has nothing to do with any of this, except that it provides you with a platform to dump your ill conceived opinions. To say that nobody questions the spiritual expertise of the Pope betrays an ignorance so profound that it is astonishing. The Patriarch of Russia is human, and like everyone else, is prone to lapses in judgment. One should expect the media and political enemies to pounce on it, and use it to divide and scatter. It is par for course in being a christian leader, as any true church of Christ will be hated by the world as Christ was hated by the world.
One of the first steps in the process of deprogramming oneself from cult-think is learning that the fact that one's group is hated almost always has to do with human disagreements, or, that your group has a disproportionate number of disagreeable people in it, as well as learning that the fact that your group is hated is not a divine proof of One True Churchiness. All sorts of Christian and quasi-Christian sects are hated by lots of people. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Fundamantalists of all stripes, Latin Mass Catholics, Old Believer Orthodox, ROCOR, you name it have held out the persecution of their groups as a "proof." Obviously, if God intended hatred and persecution of your group (whatever it is) to be a proof, He is schizophrenic, or suffers from multiple personality disorder.
The Patriarch is known for his expensive tastes. That fact has not been a secret. He is a major player in Russian society now, and major players in Russian society at this time are big on swag. It's not the end of the world, but I agree with John - I'm not really sympathetic with such clerics.
Surrounded by and enveloped in swag, one forgets which piece of swag might offend.
ochlophobist said,
[---
Obviously, if God intended hatred and persecution of your group (whatever it is) to be a proof, He is schizophrenic, or suffers from multiple personality disorder
---]
First of all, who said God intended anything? Not me. That was your first straw man. Secondly, nowhere did I posit a proof saying: The church is hated therefore it is a true church. I said the reverse: It is a true church therefore it is hated by the world. That was your second manufactured straw man. Furthermore, I never spoke of “one true church” but “any true church” so as to avoid having distracting conversations with people from pre-programmed sensitivities to the phrase “one true church”. Overall, I was taking for granted that the reader was familiar with scripture, as it attests to Satan being the prince of the world, and therefore a church which is of Christ will be opposed by him. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before you. If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” Jn15:18
A friend in England told me this. Some years ago he went to a meeting at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens, London (those were the old days before Moscow moved in with heavyweight power and oligarchs' money). An old man came to the door. He was wearing a grubby cassock, a threadbare cardigan and very old shoes. He looked as if he had been cleaning the floor of the church - he had. He lived in a single room at the back of the Cathedral, and the congregation had great difficulty in persuading him to allow them to spend money on building him a larger set of rooms with certral heating and an ensuite bathroom. Now this old man was not the janitor, he was actually the fifth most senior bishop in the entire Russian Orthodox Church - Metropolitan Anthony. Of course my English friend thinks that this has to be the norm for all bishops, and feels scandalised (as I do) by Kirill's apparent greed for money and power, and his servility towards the corrupt regime of Putin. I can't blame my friend. And a Serbian friend tells me the late Patriarch Pavle used to travel about on the bus with everyone else, and possessed only one set of vestments. The difference is that people loved Patriarch Pavle, who was a true man of God, and despise Kirill. After all, the Lord said "No man can serve two masters" - a bishop can choose to serve God or to serve Mammon.
Iren of NY,
I bet you're a blast at parties.
I didn't mean "proof" in the deductive sense, but rather in the intuitive sense, in the "reasons" we go grasping for to justify or confirm our ecclesial allegiances in the context of religious anxieties sense, hence my beginning assertion regarding cult deprogramming. Changing the order of the assertion hardly matters. Going with 'It is a true church therefore it is hated by the world' is meaningless when hundreds of ecclesial bodies can say it, and in fact one can't find a single ecclesial body that can't make some claim to people hating it. It is also meaningless because that hatred is not manifest always and everywhere - in fact for every religious institution I've mentioned most of the time objective observers would say that the instution and its members are not being treated with hatred, thus, as is obvious - 'hated by the world' is so vague as to be of no help. As for Christ, one should take anything he says with a grain of salt - he also said, for instance, in John 13 that all men would know his disciples by their love for one another, and obviously that measure isn't exactly useful either. Christ seems to have liked hyperbole.
Cheers!
"You will know them by their fruits" is not hyperbole and works every time it's tried.
Post a Comment