Priest insists on dominant role for Orthodox Church in Russian society

Moscow, May 17, Interfax – A senior priest insisted on Thursday that the Russian Orthodox Church take up the dominant role in Russian society and accused Western Christians of a “deal with evil.”

“The Church is only just beginning to move toward a full-scale role in public life. It cannot be a role that is not central,” Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations, told a conference at Moscow Orthodox University of St. Tikhon entitled The State, the Church and Society on the Road to Symphony.

“The Church must hold a position in society that means the right to speak as a power in all areas of public life, fulfilling a prophetic role not just of public conscience – we have many people who lay claim to representing public conscience – but of the voice of God in politics, economics, in any public process, in people’s private lives, in their family life,” the priest said.

He complained that acquisition of material benefits, pride, “supercilious self-fulfillment,” and pluralism are dominant values in modern society and that the latter rejects single-truth doctrines. All that runs against Gospel ideals, he argued.

He accused Western Christians of a “deal with evil” and of forgetting Christian spiritual and social ideals in order to avoid conflicts with social groups that are allegedly used to speaking on behalf of society as a whole and laying down rules for it.

Others, he said, opted for self-isolation and abandoning their Christian mission in the world in an effort to at least partially rescue their faith and eventually achieve the global domination of Kingdom of God laws.

Both options mean defeat and are essentially un-Christian, the priest said.

“We must not be afraid to suggest our own recipes for economic reorganization, including the reorganization of the global economy, and for the renewal of political life, including on the basis of the laws of Orthodox social ideals, our recipes for defeating socially dangerous vices, our own solutions to bitter conflicts,” he said.

A Christian’s genuine need is “not to keep silent prudently in order to survive, not to retreat into a ghetto in order to feel comfortable there in the context of a dying world, but to change the world by love,” Father Vsevolod said.

The Church must act as Christ did – “not to be silent when one is pressured to be silent, not to evade the most provocative or complex questions, not to be afraid to challenge the entire pragmatic, everyday logic,” the priest said.

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