The Russian Orthodox Church has asked for clemency for the three jailed members of the punk band Pussy Riot, provided they repent for their "punk prayer".Read the rest here.
The statement came a day before an appeal hearing and appeared to reflect a desire to put to an end to the case that has caused international outrage.
But it was unclear whether the women, who were sentenced to two years last month, would offer a penitence sought by the church and how much leniency a court may show.
There are so many things I admire about the Russian Church. But its historic inability to resist becoming an arm of the state is disconcerting. Not that it should have any relevance on the P---- Riot case. What they did was a crime in any civilized country. One can argue about the sentence. But not that they committed a serious offense.
3 comments:
@John: "There are so many things I admire about the Russian Church. But its historic inability to resist becoming an arm of the state is disconcerting."
I think it is time we put that chestnut to rest.
Here is what Fr. Andrew Phillips has to say about the matter. I agree with him:
http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/atbbc.htm
"What Western secularists want for the Russian Orthodox Church is for it to become an irrelevant, Protestant-style, disincarnate Church, which only concerns itself with personal piety and academic theories about ‘Divinisation’ and suchlike. This would be a denial of the essential Christian teaching of the Incarnation – according to which the whole of life and society, all political, economic and social life, have to be Churched.
"Thus, what those who attack the Church want is for the Church to be made irrelevant and invisible, to disappear into a museum, sect or ghetto, which is exactly what has happened to Christianity in the post-Protestant West. In this way, the whole of life, thus made a vacuum sucked out by secularism, can be occupied by this Western ideology. This is a heresy. It is exactly what Communism, also a Western ideology exported to Russia, tried to do, forbidding the Church to preach, baptize, marry, visit the sick, bury and have any social role whatsoever. Now the ex-Communist atheists in Russia, fully supported by the Western media, are trying to impose this irrelevance on the Church again."
In case anyone thinks Fr. Andrew is exaggerating, Walter Russell Mead confirms the above in this intemperate blast:
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/09/30/sacrilege-is-sometimes-hard-to-spot/
Mead is a smart man, and I have quoted him in the past. However, I have come to the same conclusion about him that Ralph Waldo Emerson came to about Daniel Webster:
"Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail?
He wrote on Nature's grandest brow, For Sale."
"There are so many things I admire about the Russian Church. But its historic inability to resist becoming an arm of the state is disconcerting."
There are so many things I admire about Americans. But their historic inability to resist imposing their standards on just about everything on every other nation on the face of the Earth is disconcerting.
The churching of life and society is to be accomplished, of course, by repeated strong doses of coercive force to stamp out religious freedom and toleration. Cassocks aren't dissimilar to ayatollah duds in a political context.
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