Thousands show support for under-fire Orthodox Church

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church led thousands of believers in a nationwide day of prayer yesterday to defend the Church against what he says is an attack by anti-Russian forces trying to erode its authority.

Large crowds gathered at Christ the Saviour, Moscow’s main cathedral, to show their solidarity with the Church after an upsurge in criticism of its close relationship with the state, and particularly with President-elect Vladimir Putin, since a women’s punk rock band sang a protest song in the cathedral.

The arrest of three members of the Pussy Riot group ignited a debate about the Church’s role in politics and opened Orthodox Patriarch Kirill to criticism over his lifestyle which critics say is ostentatious and unbecoming of the Church’s leader.

“We are under attack by persecutors,” said Patriarch Kirill. “The danger is in the very fact that blasphemy, derision of the sacred is put forth as a lawful expression of human freedom which must be protected in a modern society.”

He depicts Christ the Saviour as a symbol of the resurgence of the Orthodox Church since the end of atheist Soviet rule in 1991. It was rebuilt in the 1990s after being razed in the Soviet era and converted into a swimming pool.

But Partriarch Kirill, who has steered the Church towards a more active role in politics, has faced criticism over his overt support for Mr Putin.

“This series of acts of vandalism ... it’s because the Church now backs the state very strongly and this wave is mostly against the current authorities,” said Anastasia Pavlukhova, 20, a theology student, who made an 800-mile journey to the event from the southern city of Pyatigorsk by bus with her parish.”

The Orthodox Church describes Pussy Riot’s protest as part of a series of anti-clerical acts of vandalism.

On 6 March, a man took an axe to icons in a church north-east of Moscow in Veliky Ustyug. Two weeks later, an assailant with a hunting knife desecrated the altar and beat up a priest in the city of Nevinnomyssk.

“I came here because there is a very big threat of returning to our godless past. I can’t imagine Russia not being an Orthodox country,” said Olga Golubeva, a 54-year-old lawyer.

The Patriarch has also been criticised over his ownership of a luxury watch and for winning thousands of dollars in compensation in a lawsuit against neighbours of a flat he owns in central Moscow. Aides have dismissed the criticism.

His call for tough punishment of the three members of Pussy Riot, who on 21 February burst into the cathedral and performed a “punk prayer” at the altar in short dresses and coloured masks, has divided the Church, with some clergy and faithful urging him to show leniency.

Alexei Makarkin, of the Moscow Centre for Political Technologies, said: “Within the Church itself, opinion has been divided over what was worse: The ‘punk prayer’ or the Church’s reaction to it.”