Russian Church remains the most dynamically growing religious organization in Russia
Moscow, February 1, Interfax – According to the data on registered religious organizations of January 1, 2012, the Russian Orthodox Church remains a leader for dynamic growth, director of the Center of Religions Geography at the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations Roman Silantyev told Interfax-Religion.
“In 2011, the share of organizations of the Russian Orthodox Church has shown a one percent growth from the number of all registered organizations and now it makes 56,6%. Such an increase is its record for the last years,” the scientist said.
15 years ago less than a half of all registered religious organizations belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church, Silantyev reminded.
As to January 1, 2012, Russian Justice Ministry fixed 24 624 religious organizations of various type, 13 943 of them are structures of the Russian Church (100 of them have a status of centralized ones.)
The interviewee of the agency said that for the last two years there was a small increase (in frames of one tenth percent) of the share of Buddhist and Old Rite communities, while the share of Muslim, Jewish, Protestant communities decreased. Besides, the number of followers of some religious traditions tend to decrease, first of all, it refers to Protestants, Catholics and followers of sects of Orthodox origin.
Commenting the preliminary data of population census 2010, Silantyev said that it showed that the share of ethnically Orthodox population in Russia remains the same and makes 85%.
“Perhaps, decreasing number of ethnic Muslims can become one of the main sensations of the new census as their number did not exceed 14,5 million of people. However, it’s early to speak about it without detailed consideration of more than a five million group of people who didn’t indicate their nationality,” Silantyev said.
