Soviet Church berated

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32874, 24 March 1972, Page 9

Soviet Church berated

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) ■ t MOSCOW, March 22. ; A “Lenten letter” at- ' tributed to the Nobel ’Prize winning novelist, ■Alexander Solzhenitsyn, decrying the Russian Orthodox Church’s submission to the atheist Soviet State, is being passed to Patriarch i Pimen of Moscow, and • declares that the Church •he heads is “ruled dic- • tatorially by atheists—a spectacle unseen for : two milleniums.”

The author pleads: “Do not let us suppose, do not make us' think that for the archpastores of the Russian Church, earthly responsibility is more terrible than responsibility before God.” Solzhenitsyn, aged 52, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 but his accounts of the Stalinist past have won

him only official disgrace in his homeland and expulsion from the Writers’ Union. The letter, a copy of which was made available by usually reliable sources, denounced the Church’s compliance with the ban on teaching religion to children, and recalled the hardships faced bv early Christians. The letter began: “A gravestone presses upon the head and breaks the breast of the Russian Orthodox People, who have still not died off.” The writer said ’ that he could no longer be silent when one more little stone was placed upon the gravestone. Such a little stone was the patriarch’s first New Year message, the letter said, in which he appealed for Russians abroad to bring up their children to love the Church. Patriarch Pimen, who is 61, became Patriarch of Moscow last vear, succeeding the late Alexii, who died in 1970. “Whv is this honest call addressed by you only to Russian emigrants?” the letter asked. “Why do you only call for those children to be brought up in the Christian faith, why do vou warn onlv the distant flock to ’discern slander and falsehood’ and be strong in justice and truth.” Russian children were deprived of the right to cany on their fathers* faith and for their moral upbringing all that was left was “the gorge between the agitators’ notebook and the criminal code.” “We are losing the last traces and signs of a Christian people. Surely that cannot fail to be the chief concern of the Russian patriarchate?” the writer asked. “The Russian Church has its indignant opinion on every evil in distant Asia or Africa, onlv on domestic ills nothing, ever. . . . "From one serene message to another. Will the need to write them not fall off alto-

gether one gloomy year? There will be no-one to address them to. there will be no flock left. Except the Patriarch’s office.”

The writer complained that in his year of office. Patriarch Pimen had done nothing to reinstate two priests unfrocked for questioning the hierarchy seven years ago, nor to end the enforced monastic seclusion of Bishop Yermogen of Kaluga, who refused to close churches in his diocese.

For every working church in Russia, 20 had been closed, and the north “from ancient times the repository of the Russian soul,” was left with none.

“Priests have no rights in their parishes, onlv the conduct of church services is still entrusted to them for the while, and that without leaving the church,” the letter said.

“But to go beyond the threshold to a sick person or the cemetery he must ask for a resolution by the town council.”