Orthodox Church hopes to flash the Cash

By Tom Washington
21/12/2010

Russian Orthodox Church finances are facing a more certain future as godly money gurus set up an endowment fund to stabilise holy income.

It comes a month after the Duma approved a bill to return former state property to the mother church. With land and now more liquid assets the church could become a considerable investor.

High flying businessman and believer VadimYakunin has contributed 50 million dollars to the holy cause last year, and so helped create the St Gregory the Theologian Charitable Foundation. Its financial director is Leonid Sevastyanov, assistant to metropolitan Illarion of the department of External Church Relations, gzt.ru reported.

Investment at the temple

“The idea is to provide for the life of the department of External Church Relations and its educational institutions,” Sevastyanov told The Moscow News.

“With this fund the church will not have to live off constant [piecemeal] donations and will be able to attract investment, as well as to invest the money itself and live off the interest percentage,” he said by telephone

Gathering clout

The fund brings capital and the chance to wield it, just after the church was promised a considerable body of real estate.

“Now the church is getting its property back as well it will try to make a profit from that too…Before, whenever they needed to restore a single church they had to go and ask for money again and again,” Sevastyanov said.

The new set up, although still only experimental, paves the way for a “new church economy,” gzt.ru reported

Orthodox finances

The endowment fund also means greater transparency in church funding, something its critics would welcome.

“There’s nothing inappropriate about [the endowment fund] but with the property issue it’s a whole other matter. The Russian Orthodox Church is not poor but no-one controls its finances and so they live through undeclared cash,” Lev Levinson, expert at the Institute of Human Rights in Moscow and member of the Moscow Society of Atheists told The Moscow News.

He was less positive about the return of church property, “It’s an interesting law but it is very vague and it allows the government to pass almost anything to the church…The state is followed by church lobbyists and they have now opened Pandora’s box. The church will ask for more secular buildings and then it’s hard to prove that they owned something before the revolution,” he said.

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