Too Awful To Pass Without Comment

If anything, the Orthodox tradition of Christianity has a legitimate claim to being longer than Western Christianity, it is certainly more complex than Roman Catholicism, covering histories of distinct national churches often quite different and each with long histories of their own, their own liturgical languages and practices.  Like with the long history of the Catholic and many Protestant churches, such long lived, large and varied institutions have produced everything, every degree of human goodness and wisdom and inspiration to every degree of evil.   I have thought that the sometimes, now-a-days quite strong independence of at least the official Catholic leadership from national governments had helped at least the modern Catholic church to avoid some of the evils inherent in a close relationship of some of the Orthodox churches with national and, sometimes, local governments.

It takes quite a bit to shock me but I was shocked and appalled by reading this in the National Catholic Reporter just now:

Moscow — Early one evening in May 2018, days before the annual parade celebrating the Soviet victory in World War II, a convoy of military trucks carrying long-range nuclear weapons trundled to a halt on the Russian capital’s ring road.

As police officers stood guard, two Russian Orthodox priests wearing cassocks and holding Bibles climbed out of a vehicle and began sprinkling holy water on the stationary Topol and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Since relations between Russia and the West plummeted after the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, such scenes have become common here. Priests have sanctified S-400 surface-to-air missiles, nuclear submarines, tanks and fighter jets. Several years ago, a priest in Russia’s far east explained that weapons, including nuclear missiles, were "perceived as a means of protection and salvation."
But the practice could soon be a thing of the past. Last month, a Russian Orthodox Church committee on ecclesiastical law recommended that clergy concentrate on blessing soldiers, rather than weapons.

"One can talk about the blessing of a warrior on military duty in defense of the fatherland," said Savva Tutunov, a bishop of the Moscow Patriarchate. "At the end of the corresponding ritual, the personal weapon is also blessed — precisely because it is connected to the individual person who is receiving the blessing. By the same reasoning, weapons of mass destruction should not be sanctified."

Not everyone agrees with the committee’s proposal, which still has to be approved by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Vsevolod Chaplin, an influential priest and former spokesman for the patriarch, told the Vzglyad newspaper that nuclear weapons were the country’s "guardian angels" and necessary to preserve “Orthodox civilization.”

"Only nuclear weapons protect Russia from enslavement by the West," Chaplin said.

In any event, a ban on sanctifying weapons of mass destruction is unlikely to affect the intertwining of Russia’s armed forces — including its nuclear forces — with the Russian Orthodox Church under President Vladimir Putin.

Kirill has described the Kremlin’s military campaign in Syria as a "holy war," while uniformed clerics embedded with the armed forces are being trained to drive combat vehicles and operate communication equipment.

Some critics have likened the role of priests in the modern Russian military to that played by Soviet-era political officers, whose task was to root out dissenting views.

 An alleged Christian Church blessing nuclear weapons held by a gangster government is certainly among the lowest of lows in modern Christianity.  I wouldn't be surprised if other acts of anti-Christ-like depravity done in the West had happened, but that only adds to the clear evil of this act which impeaches the Christian nature of Russian Orthodoxy as practiced by those with the most power in that church.

There is something that those who do such things certainly have heard, "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword."  That's certainly true if the moral life of the Russian Orthodox establishment is what's in question.  

It seems to me that having the cosy relationship that the Russian Orthodox hierarchy has with Vladimir Putin is as corrupting as the most corrupt Popes of the past were corrupted by closeness with gangster regimes in other countries and city states.  The Catholic Church, at least through much of the 20th century learned to avoid that - though I certainly think that John Paul II was corrupted by his association with the United States under Reagan.  

For anyone who cares about the Christian religion, this is certainly a warning showing how dangerous it is for following the teachings of Jesus to get close to kings of this world, inevitably church officials who do that end up as part of that kind of kingdom instead of the one Jesus taught.  

I could never take the Christianity of priests and patriarchs who do this kind of thing as more than an expression of the false prophecy that Jesus warned about.  I couldn't take anything they said as having legitimacy or authority.