The recent censuring of US Army Catholic Archbishop Timothy Broglio by the Obama Defense Department for resisting the pro-abortion aspects of Obamacare is reminiscent of an earlier time. Then, the Russian clergy realized that to in order to keep their places of worship open and their flocks unmolested, they had to become “progressive.” An Obama administration “Department of Cults” may be on the horizon.
--Bernhard Thuersam
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“Less optimistic about the immediate success of atheistic propaganda, they [Bolsheviks] strove to “Sovietize” religious organizations…[though] Krasikov [head of the Justice Commissariat’s Department of Cults]…argued along the fundamentalist line that the task of the Bolsheviks ought to be the elimination and not the renovation of religion….
[The] right to enjoy a narrowly circumscribed freedom of religious worship was to be limited to religious groups which had supplied proof of their loyalty to the Soviet state. [The] political and moral price to be paid by churches and sects for the uncertain right to legal existence sharply divided their ranks, and those ecclesiastical leaders who were willing to meet the regimes conditions eventually found themselves in the position of docile hostages held captive by the state to ensure the submission of their flock.
The Russian Orthodox Church and some other religious groups were compelled by the necessities of survival to revise step by step their overt attitude toward the Soviet regime [from initial hostility; to withdrawal from political activities to an apolitical position and professions of loyalty; to de jure recognition of the Soviet regime and unconditional loyalty].
Moreover, the Sobor adopted a pro-Soviet political platform and even attempted to bridge the doctrinal gap between Christianity and communism.
“The Sobor declares capitalism a mortal sin and regards the struggle against it as sacred for a Christian. The Soviet regime, alone in the entire world strives to realize, by governmental methods, the ideals of the Kingdom of God. Therefore every believing churchman should not only be an honest citizen, but also struggle in every possible way, together with the Soviet regime, for the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth.”
[The "progressive" clergy in 1925] recognized the Soviet regime as divinely ordained and urged the faithful to submit themselves to the government…It invoked prayers for divine aid for the regime’s “labors for the good of the common people,” and requested Orthodox congregations “not to admit any individuals of anti-government inclinations….but to become convinced that the Soviet regime is actually a national workers’ and peasants government and hence durable and stable.” [In 1926] the church reaffirmed its complete civil loyalty to the Soviet state, respect for its laws, and its determination to remain “absolutely apart from all political parties and enterprises which could harm the Union.”
“The church bases its attitude to the state power on a complete and consistent realization of the principle of the separateness of church and state…the fundamental law of our country bans the church’s interference in political life.”
[The] two decades of harassment, purges and terror had conditioned the surviving ecclesiastical leaders for the role of docile political servants of the regime…[The progressive] clergy [was] eager to “modernize” and democratize” the church. Clergy of all ranks remained dependent on governmental registration as a condition of their legal activity…[and they were monitored by] the long established secret police department for “churchmen and sectarians.”
Rather than being “reactionary” or counter-revolutionary,” religion was now described as an “anti-scientific” ideology, and the Party’s anti-religious campaign as “scientific propaganda.” Church-state relations were summarized by Karpov at the 1945 Sobor in the following terms:
“The Great October Socialist Revolution, which set our people free, also liberated the Russian Orthodox Church from the fetters that once hampered and constrained its internal activities.”
The separation of church and state had a progressive, liberating and purifying effect upon the church. The church’s mission was confined to the salvation of human souls; it was not its function to denounce or criticize the government…Free “to act in its characteristic spirit along the road marked out by ecclesiastical canons,” the Russian church “quite impartially” declares its solidarity “with the laws and measures of the Soviet regime, based on the principles of democracy, equality, love of one’s neighbor, and of the Fatherland.”
(Religion and the Soviet State: A Dilemma of Power, Hayward & Fletcher, editors, Praeger Publishers, 1969, pp. 82-95)
