(In addition, we wholeheartedly endorse President Trumps suggestion that 25,000 avid Republicans should be allowed to congregate in a confined space for a week of hand shaking and back slapping for a national Republican convention.)
-- Spinshield
Around the world, religious believers of many faiths have been among the most resistant to restrictions on public gatherings, seeing it as an infringement on their right to worship. But the clash between faith and public health has been particularly divisive in Russia
With some of the Russian church’s most important monasteries and other sacred sites now infested with the disease caused by the virus, Covid-19, the Orthodox Church faces not only a health crisis but a deep rift within its ranks about how the faithful should deal with the pandemic.
{A} group of confused believers complained last week in an open letter to {Patriarch Kirill, Russian Orthodoxy’s senior cleric}.
Voicing alarm that some priests “openly preach that it is impossible to become infected in a church,” the letter pleaded for guidance because “the fullness of the church needs the truth.”
RBK, a news outlet in Russia, calculated that churches remained open throughout Easter in 43 of the country’s 85 regions.
The soaring infections that followed have cast a shadow over plans for the opening of an enormous new cathedral dedicated to Russia’s armed forces.
{Metropolitan Longin, a senior churchman in Saratov, a region in southwestern Russia} threatened damnation for those who enforced or obeyed restrictions, warning that anyone who carried out instructions from state health authorities that violated the dictates of faith “will be held accountable.”
Declaring that the ringing of church bells was the best way to combat the pandemic, {a bishop in the northern Russian region of Komi} claimed that the word coronavirus — derived from the Latin word for “crown” — is “not coincidental but is linked to the coronation and enthronement of the Antichrist.”
Since Easter, churches and monasteries under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church have reported a surge of infections in both Russia and in neighboring Belarus and Ukraine.
More than 200 people have been reported infected in and around a convent in the Nizhny Novgorod region east of Moscow, including 70 nuns.
St. Elizabeth, a convent run by the Russian church in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where state officials have joined priests in playing down the risks of the virus, finally went into lockdown last week after scores of priests and nuns reportedly fell ill after testing positive.
By the time {Monastery of the Caves, in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv} was sealed off, according to the mayor of Kyiv, 142 priests, including the abbot, and visitors had been infected.
Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra {. . . } tried to keep out visitors over Easter but, according to an account of events posted online by Bishop Pitirim Tvorogov, the rector of a theological academy housed in the monastery, angry worshipers protested “very aggressively” and forced the abbot to open the doors.
“The pestilence began on Good Friday,” with many of the “best clergy” falling ill, Bishop Pitirim said. Worshipers, he added, “demanded a miracle but no miracle happened.”
Source: "A ‘Breakdown of Trust’: Pandemic Corrodes Church-State Ties in Russia" By Andrew Higgins - NY Times - May 5, 2020
Patriarch Kirill, in the white headdress, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, at a procession in Moscow last month. Experts say his reluctance to enforce orders against church gatherings has led to an explosion of coronavirus cases in monasteries and convents.
Source: Patriarchal Press Service, via Reuters
Flags waving at the American Patriot Rally, organized by Michigan United for Liberty.Credit…
Source: Jeff Kowalsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images