Vanguard Journalism // Current

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Matt Taibbi takes on the financial bailout

Forget the fact the magazine is Rolling Stone.  And forgive the fact that Matt Taibbi’s language can be pretty bad.  The truth is that he’s right, companies should never be allowed to get big enough to fail.   And whether they are Republicans or Democrats handing the reigns over to the jack asses that created the crisis in the first won’t ever make it right… 

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

MATT TAIBBI

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).

So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream…..(more)…….

Fr. Barron on all the chaos in the universe.

James Martin talks about St. Joseph…

Unfortunatly, we talk alot about Mary, and neglect Joseph’s accomplishment’s in raising Jesus.  Reflecting on the things that Joseph did really calls to mind the small things that we can participate in in order to be better people.

 

Can looking to the Middle Ages help us out of economic turmoil now??

When discussing the current economic climate the media has become a chicken little of sorts, always claiming that the sky is falling.  Maybe it is, and that might not be such a terrible thing.  Maybe it’s time to return to some of the ideals of the Christian west.  Ideals that were sacrificed at the altar of the reformation, and the enlightenment.  In this article Stratford Coldecott takes the essential pieces of what is commenly referred to as distributism and explains why looking to the Middle Ages for inspiration is more about looking forward than backward.

 

 

Present-day admirers of G.K. Chesterton (The Outline of Sanity) and E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) are sometimes accused of wanting to return to the Middle Ages, and can be easily mocked for wanting to do so with full access to modern medicine and laptops.

But neither Chesterton nor Schumacher were so naïve. They were calling for a particular kind of progress – towards a more human-centered, though still technologically sophisticated and creatively developing, society. They both realized that there are particular concepts and ideas that were prevalent in medieval Christendom that we might indeed learn from, precisely to make that progress possible. In fact great cultural movements are often brought about by importing ideas from the past into a new social context – the Renaissance is one example.

So what can we learn from the Middle Ages to get us out of our current global crisis?

As a sympathizer with Chesterton’s philosophy of “Distributism”, and with the recent attempt to revive it by the “progressive conservatives,” I can suggest at least three things in order to encourage further debate.

The Importance of Family

In medieval times, as in most times and places throughout human history, the basic unit of human society was the family – by which I mean the extended family (in extreme form the tribe or clan). The simple reason for this is that we reproduce in pairs. Furthermore, the best way for children to be socialized and educated is in the context of loving family relationships.

In recent years the traditional ideal of the family and the bonds that hold it together have been systematically attacked and weakened, but the destruction of the family is far from an essential ingredient in our notion of progress. The demolition of this tradition is more likely to be the cause of widespread social degradation and cultural devastation. No doubt there are ways the family can be improved, and ways in which family members can be more adequately protected from abuse, but the family itself is the seed-bed and crucible of civil society, and the best safeguard of human dignity.

The attempt to extract and abstract people from their families (ironically portrayed as an ideal in Plato’s Republic) is almost certain to result in naked warfare between the will of the individual and the will of the state – a war that the individual cannot win. It is the family and civil society that envelop and alone protect the individual against dictators and tyrants. The network of responsibilities and rights that accrue to a person embedded in familial and civil relationships – simply by virtue of that belonging – will not be adequately protected by a Bill of Rights when times get tough and powerful interests are at stake.

Something similar applies in the economic field. It should not be the case in our world that a son or daughter must necessarily enter a trade or profession determined by their parents, but the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next within the family can be enriching rather than impoverishing. If a business is owned and run by a family there is much more likelihood that it will be run with an eye to the long-term future (“sustainability”). If the family is central, then an economy of gift and covenant – which is one way of describing what the family is – will take precedence over market exchange and economic calculation. The market has its place, but it should not take over the entire town, let alone the entire civilization.

The Condemnation of Usury

Think for a moment about the present banking crisis. The trigger was the collapse of the American housing market, which brought tumbling around our ears the global house of cards that had been built on sub-prime mortgages – a vast structure of derivatives traded without thought of eventual consequences and without transparency. The greed of bankers and short-term opportunism of politicians were to blame for the crisis, but what made this escalation of layer upon layer of credit possible was partly a loss of proper legal restraint on the interest charged when lending money – a sin condemned by medieval Christianity, Judaism and Islam under the name of usury.

Of course, the charging of interest was eventually justified by medieval theologians such as Aquinas as a payment for risk. The consequent expansion of European credit facilities made possible the vast expansion in trade, manufacturing and wealth after the Reformation. But initially the taking of interest had been seen as a way of selling something that should never be regarded as a commodity: time itself.

There remains something valid at the root of this intuition, which we can apply to the present situation. The products that were being traded and charged for in the derivatives marketplace were not real, in the way actual labor or tangible properties are real. Debts (mortgages, for example) are not real assets, and this becomes apparent when the original borrower defaults and there is no one – except perhaps the government – to pay the lender what he was unwisely expecting to receive……(more)…….

A thought from Father Thomas Merton

 

“A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him…. The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him…. This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do…. The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this April day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God by His own creative wisdom and it declares the glory of God. The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God. This leaf has it own texture and its own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonised by their beauty and their strength. The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance. The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing else in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity…. For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied. With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it! Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny…. The seeds that are planted in my liberty at every moment, by God’s will, are the seeds of my own identity, my own reality, my own happiness, my own sanctity…. Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the person that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love – outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. We are not very good at recognising illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves – the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface…. “(From New Seeds of Contemplation)

Al-Qaeda founder launches fierce attack on Osama bin Laden

A lot of this depends on whether or not this story will get picked up in the Muslim world, but that being said it is potentially significant that the  theological founder of their movement thinks they are going the wrong way.  

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, who goes by the nom de guerre Dr Fadl, helped bin Laden create al-Qaeda and then led an Islamist insurgency in Egypt in the 1990s.
But in a book written from inside an Egyptian prison, he has launched a frontal attack on al-Qaeda’s ideology and the personal failings of bin Laden and particularly his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Twenty years ago, Dr Fadl became al-Qaeda’s intellectual figurehead with a crucial book setting out the rationale for global jihad against the West.
Today, however, he believes the murder of innocent people is both contrary to Islam and a strategic error. “Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers,” writes Dr Fadl.
The terrorist attacks on September 11 were both immoral and counterproductive, he writes. “Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy’s buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?” asks Dr Fadl. “That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11.”…..(more)…….

I was going to blog about the Michael Phelps’ pot fiasco….

but it turned out that Saturday Night Live said it better than I could….

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A new Patriarch for the Russian Church

By now anyone who knows me, knows that I have a thing for Eastern Orthodoxy, so I’ll tend to cover them more than most Catholics would.  That being said this could be a HUGE event, because Pope Benedict has met with Patriarch Kirill several times before he became head of the Russian Church.  He was even the Russian Churches representative to the World Council of Churches so maybe just maybe we’ll see some dialogue between two of Christianities largest Churches.

 

New leader seated in Russian Orthodox Church

President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin attend ceremony with clerics

updated 2 hours, 6 minutes ago

MOSCOW – A new patriarch was seated on the throne of the Russian Orthodox Church Sunday, becoming the first leader of the world’s largest Orthodox church to take office after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Klimentyev / EPA

 

 

 

Patriarch Kirill, a veteran church diplomat and cautious advocate of change, became the 16th to bear the title in a solemn ceremony at Christ the Savior Cathedral, Moscow’s most opulent church and itself a symbol of the rebirth of the Orthodox faith.

The original 19th-Century was dynamited under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1931, but rebuilt in the late 1990s following the collapse of the officially atheist Soviet Union….(more)

An interesting article on how the Orthodox Church helped share the burden during the war against the Nazis

 

 

- The Church Shared the Burden of Life Under Siege with

Its People

By Mikhail Shkarovskiy

About the author: Mikhail Vitalyevich Shkarovskiy, doctor of historical sciences, leading

scientist of the Central State Archive in Saint Petersburg.

At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, foreign policy circumstances made it necessary for

Soviet authorities to abandon their plan to totally destroy the Russian Orthodox Church in the

country. Looming war forced government bodies to re-evaluate the role of the Church within

the country and in the international arena. However, its position remained tragic, many

prohibitions complicated its activity, hundreds of priests languished in prisons and labor

camps. Towards the end of the 1930s, only 4 ruling bishops remained at liberty in the Soviet

Union. By 1941 in one of the country’s largest dioceses, Leningrad, only 21 Orthodox temples

survived; monasteries and educational institutions were closed; there was no church press.

Severe burdens of war and a city under siege increased these difficulties.

During this period, the Leningrad diocese was headed by the well-known churchman,

Metropolitan Alexiy (Simansky), later Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. In the encircled city

and its northern suburbs, there remained under his rule the St. Nicholas Episcopal Cathedral

and the St. Prince-Vladimir Cathedral and the following churches: St. Nicholas -

Bolsheokhotinskaya, St. Job cemetery – Volkovskaya, St. Demetrius – Kolomyazhskaya, and

the Savior – Pargolovskaya.

The Savior/Transfiguration Cathedral, St. Seraphim Cemetery and the churches in the Lisy

Nos settlement, administered by Protopresbyter Alexiy Abakumov, belonged to the

renovationist movement. Moreover, one working Josephite temple remained in the city – Holy

Trinity in Lesny, served by hieromonk Pavel (Ligor). The total number of Orthodox clerics in

the city did not exceed 25.

“The Church calls for the defense of the Homeland”

Since the first days of the war, the Russian Orthodox Church was devoted to the defense of

the homeland. Already on June 22, 1942, the Patriarchal Locum Tenens, Metropolitan Sergiy

(Stragorodskiy), addressed a message to the faithful. It was read in Leningrad’s temples, and

people departed for the front as for an ascetic feat [podvig] with the Church’s blessing. On

June 26, the head of the diocese, Metropolitan Alexiy, wrote his appeal to the clergy and

faithful “The Church calls for the defense of the Homeland”. His sermon given on August 10

gained special renown. It referred, first of all, to a Russian’s patriotism and devoutness. At this

time the Leningrad Metropolitan’s authority and influence were so great that on October 12,

1941, the Patriarchal Locum Tenens, in his will, appointed him his to be successor.

At Metropolitan Alexiy’s suggestion, Leningrad’s parishes started collecting donations for the

city’s defense. The Metropolitan supported the believers’ desire to donate existing parish

savings to this cause, at times these were very significant savings. The parish council of St.

Prince-Vladimir Cathedral offered to open, at their expense, an infirmary for wounded men and

sick soldiers, and on August 8 transferred 710 thousand of the 714 thousand rubles belonging

to the parish community.

However, concrete charitable activity was forbidden even after the war began. Parishes were

allowed to transfer money only to public funds: the Red Cross, defense, and others. This

restriction did not dampen the enthusiasm of either the faithful or the clergy. Prishes refused to

make all but the most necessary expenditures. Warm articles for soldiers were collected

everywhere; the faithful donated food for the sick. During the first days of the war, St. Nicholas

Cathedral allocated 385 thousand rubles, and by the end of 1941 all of Leningrad’s parishes

gave a total sum of 2 million 144 thousand rubles.

“Camouflaged Cupolas”

From the end of June 1941, people began to noticeably fill the temples. During this period it

was necessary to adapt the schedules of divine services to military conditions: morning

services began at 8 am; evening services at 4 pm. Many young clerics began serving in the

army, the home national guard, or in defense construction. Those left behind studied fireprevention

and anti-aircraft defense in the event temples were shelled during services. One

invaluable defensive technique was to camouflage the cathedrals which could become

reference points during air strikes on the city. In August the gold cupolas began to be encased

in sacks or painted in camouflage colors.

On September 8, the ring of the blockade closed. Artillery bombadment of the city began. The

St. Nicholas, the St. Prince-Vladimir Cathedrals, the Spiritual Academy’s former building which

then housed a hospital, were all bombed. Nevertheless, divine services continued to be held

daily in working temples. Initially, when an alarm sounded, the congregation would go to

shelters. But soon, after people became used to the shelling and bombardment, services often

continued uninterrupted.

The winter of 1941 began early and was extremely severe. Electric power had all but ceased;

public transportation stopped; many buildings were without heat. In temples the temperature

fell to zero; oil in vigil lights froze; more and more people starved to death. Archpriest Nikolai

Lomakin, testifying at Nuremberg, said that around St. Nicholas Church at Bolsheokhotinskoye

Cemetery one could daily see 100 to 200 coffins, with a priest serving funerals. All of

Leningrad’s clerics, including Metropolitan Alexiy, had to be constantly engaged in this

mournful activity.

During the siege, divine services were conducted in all of Leningrad’s working churches — but

in January-April 1942 St. Seraphim Cemetery Church was closed. Bodies of the dead were

stored there.

“Liturgy under bombardment”

During the entire time of the siege, services were conducted in overcrowded temples. It is

impossible to estimate the exact number of Leningraders who attended divine services, but

numerous eyewitness accounts survive. Thus, a parishioner of St. Prince-Vladimir

Cathedral later recalled: “The choir members sang in coats with their collars turned up,

wrapped in scarves, in felt boots (valenki), and the men even in skufias….In spite of fears,

attendance at Cathedral services has not declined, but rather increased. Our services were

without abbreviations or haste; there were many communicants and confessors — with whole

mountains of notes requesting prayers for health or repose — and never-ending general prayer

services and panikhidas.

Metropolitan Alexiy, in his September 8, 1943 report to the Council of Bishops of the Russian

Orthodox Church also indicated: “We can note everywhere, and especially in places close to

military action – particularly in Leningrad — the increase of prayer, the increase in the people’s

donations through God’s temples — the growth of feats of prayer and sacrifice. The shadows

of death are borne in the air of this heroic city-front; messages about victims of war arrive

daily. The victims of this war are often — constantly – before our eyes….”

Leningrad fought back not only with weapons, but also with the Church’s prayer, the power of

collective ardor. During Divine Liturgy special prayers were added for victory to our troops

and for those languishing in enemy captivity. A special Prayer Service, sung during the War of

1812 at home, was “for deliverance from adversaries”. Later, in 1943, the command of the

Leningrad front, led by Marshal Leonid Govorov, were present at some divine services in St.

Nicholas Cathedral.

“Death in the temple”

Metropolitan Alexiy did everything he could to have divine services continue. Disregarding

shelling, frequently on foot, he went to Leningrad’s temples, spoke to the clergy and lay

people. During the days of the siege, he served the Divine Liturgy alone, without a deacon and

himself read all the notes for the commemoration of the living and dead. Despite the constant

shelling and bombardment, Metropolitan took up residence in the Cathedral.

Starvation did not spare the clergy. In the St. Prince-Vladimir Cathedral alone, eight members

of the clergy died duing the winter of 1941-42. In St. Nicholas Cathedral the choir director died

during the service; Metropolitan Alexiy’s cell attendant, the monk Evlogy, did not survive the

hungry winter.

I.V. Dubrovitskaya, a ballerina of the Kirov Theater, wrote about her father, archpriest Vladimir

Dubrovitsky of the St. Nicholas Cathedral: “There was not a single day during the war that my

father did not go to the temple. At times he shook from hunger; I cried begging him to remain

at home, fearing that he would fall somewhere and freeze in a snowdrift, but he answered: ‘I

don’t have the right to become weak, daughter dear. I must go to lift the people’s spirit,

console their grief, strengthen and encourage them.’ And he went to his cathedral. During the

entire siege, whether during shelling or bombardment, he did not miss a single service.”

Priests and their people in the city under siege shared a single destiny. In the temples there

were groups of people who helped each other to live, to survive. Without the support of city

authorities, the basement of the Savior-Transfiguration Cathedral was equipped as a

bombproof shelter for 500 parishioners and inhabitants of neighboring homes. Boiling water

and a supply of medicine were available; in case of need, it was possible to spend the night.

Those in need were given money, firewood, candles, oil for lighting, and other necessities.

Building materials had been stored in the cathedral since pre-war times, and stoves for

heating apartments were built for parishioners from iron sheets; plywood and cardboard were

allocated to replace window panes which were knocked out during a wave of explosions.

“Pascha in the city under siege”

The first wartime Pacha was approaching. Metropolitan Alexiy’s festal message stressed that

this day, April 5, 1942, was the 700th anniversary of the slaughter-on-ice of German knights by

St. Prince Alexander Nevsky, heavenly patron of the City on the Neva River [Leningrad]. Many

people gathered for the Paschal service, though fewer than the year before. One of every

three inhabitants of the city had died of starvation or cold. A mass evacuation began along the

“lifeline route,” through Lake Ladoga. It is important to note that practically all clergy remained

in their parishes. Basically it was the retired priests who were evacuated.

The Hitlerites intended their most furious attack on Leningrad precisely for Pascha. The divine

service was rescheduled for 6 in the morning, which prevented greater casualties. Instead

of *kulichi* [traditional Paschal bread], many faithful brought little pieces of rationed bread to

be blessed. The St. Prince-Vladimir Cathedral was seriously damaged during the city’s

Paschal night bombardment. Fascist planes not only bombed it, but also fired machine guns

on low-level flights. The cost of the cathedral’s damages from August 1941 to May 1, 1943

was estimated at 5 million, 514 thousand rubles.

In 1943 St. Nicholas Cathedral was especially frequently attacked. Once when it was struck by

three shells simultaneously, splinters went into the wall of the Metropolitan’s apartment. The

bishop entered the altar, showed the splinter of a shell to the clergy and, smiling, said “See,

death flew right by me. Only, please, don’t spread this news. In general, it’s necessary to

speak less about bombardment… Soon all of this will end. We don’t have long to wait.”

“Financial help for the front”

The clergy, like all inhabitants, worked to defend the city; many were members of local

antiaircraft defense groups (MPVO). For example, an official note given on October 17, 1943

to Archimandrite Vladimir (Kobets) by the St. Basil’s Island-area housing authority states that

he “is a fighter in the domestic MVPO group, actively participates in all activities in defense of

Leningrad, stands watch; took part in de-activating incendiary bombs.”

The clergy also actively joined in raising money for the defense fund. By June 1, 1943 these

donations totaled 390 thousand rubles. Metropolitan Alexiy gave 50 thousand rubles, and

Protodeacon L.I. Egorovsky, who gave 49 thousand rubles, received a personal telegram

of appreciation from Stalin.

By the middle of 1942 Leningrad’s population diminished significantly, but the activity of the

city’s temples not only did not decline, it increased. Notwithstanding the fact that the income of

St. Prince- Vladimir Cathedral dipped down to 501 thousand 82 rubles, by 1943 it increased to

922 thousand 656 rubles. Moreover, 701 thousand 137 rubles was given to the defense fund.

The sharp rise was occasioned by the December 30, 1942 appeal of the Patriarchal Locum

Tenens, Sergiy, to begin raising funds for a tank column to be named for Dimitriy of the Don

[Dimitriy Donskoy]. The necessary sum was raised within four months; it exceeded 8 million

rubles, 1 million of which came from Leningrad’s faithful. Donations were also made for an

aviation squadron to be named for St. Alexander Nevsky. By Red Army Day 1943, the city’s

hospitals and infirmaries had over 600 critically needed towels, bandages, etc.

Metropolitan Alexiy twice telegraphed Stalin about what had been collected for the Red Army.

On May 17, 1943, a reply telegram was published in the newspaper “Pravda”: “I ask you to

convey my sincere greeting and gratitude to the Orthodox clergy and faithful of the Leningrad

diocese who collected — aside from the previously contributed 3 million 682 thousand, 143

rubles — an additional 1 million 769 thousand 200 rubles to build the Dimitriy Donskoy tank

column. J. Stalin.”

“Warmer relations with the state”

The patriotic activities of an overwhelming majority of the clergy and faithful of the Orthodox

Church served as one of the essential reasons for the beginning of a significant change of the

Church’s relationship with the state. During two years of war, despite the lack of necessary

administrative staff, an official publication and a legal status, the Church demonstrated its

strength in the struggle against fascism and in many respects was able to expand and

strengthen its influence throughout the country.

Serious changes took place in Leningrad. Even during the starvation-winter of 1941-42,

Orthodox parishes were regularly supplied with the wine and flour needed for communion.

However, during the first part of the war, church and state relations had not become a dialog.

There were frequent recurrences of rough, administrative, violent actions towards Orthodox

parishes.

In the middle of 1943, a whole group of factors led to the final normalization of relations

between the Orthodox Church and Stalin’s circle. Among these factors were: appealing to

Russian national, patriotic traditions during the course of the war, as well as striving to

neutralize the influence of fascist propaganda which portrayed Germany as the defender of

Christianity in Russia.

A major turning point in a new state religious policy became the September 4, 1943 meeting

which took place at Stalin’s dacha with the participation of Georgiy Malenkov, Lavrentiy Beria,

representatives of the NKGB. Questions of opening parishes, spiritual educational

institutions, release of church publications, election of a new patriarch, etc. were decided at

this meeting. Stalin and Molotov and Metropolitans Sergiy (Stragorodskiy), Alexiy (Simanskiy) and

Nikolai (Yarushevich) summarized the results of the discussion at an official night-time

reception in the Kremlin. In September 1943, a special state organ was created – the Council

for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs, headed by Georgiy Karpov, a colonel of state security.

Radical changes in the life of the Russian Orthodox Church began immediately after the

Kremlin meeting. A Council of Bishops was held on September 8. The 19 hierarchs at the

Council unanimously elected Metropolitan Sergiy (Stragorodskiy) to be Patriarch of Moscow

and All Russia. These favorable changes also soon affected the fate of the Leningrad’s clergy.

Reprisals against clerics of the Moscow Patriarchate and the renovationists practically stopped.

From the autumn of 1943, Leningrad’s clergy began to be recruited to take part in city public

works. Thus, archpriest Nikolai Lomakin participated in the city and regional commissions on

investigating the evils of the fascist aggressors. On October 11, 1943, for the first time in all

the years of soviet power, 12 Leningrad clerics were awarded a medal “For the defense of

Leningrad.” Other changes took place as well. On December 14, 1943 Leningrad’s Metropolitan

was authorized to have a support staff, and on April 15 1944 a diocesan office was opened in

the St. Nicholas Cathedral building.

The faithful marked the city’s complete liberation with solemn observances and festivities. On

January 27th, with the Metropolitan’s blessing, Thanksgiving Services were offered in all

temples. On January 28th, Metropolitan Alexiy, together with members of the commission

investigating the atrocities of Germany’s fascist aggressors, visited the Leningrad’s liberated

suburbs – Peterhof and Pushkin. After witnessing the results of the barbaric destruction of

palaces and temples, the Metropolitan wrote an angry article for the “Journal of the Moscow

Patriarchate.”

“A New Patriarch”

Patriarch Sergiy died on May 15, 1944 and according to his will, Metropolitan Alexiy became

Patriarchal Locum Tenens. Bishop Grigoriy (Chukov) of Pskov, who replaced him as head of

the diocese, was officially appointed to be Metropolitan of Leningrad in 1945. After Leningrad

was free, the patriotic activities of the faithful increased further. During just the first three postsiege

months, 1 million 191 thousand rubles was collected. Leningraders passionately

supported Metropolitan Alexiy when on October 25, 1944 he announced the Church’s Russiawide

fund to aid children and families of Red Army soldiers.

Metropolitan Alexiy was elected Patriarch at the Local Council held on February 2, 1945. His

homily at the divine service at the St. Nicholas Cathedral on April 1, 1945 was devoted to the

siege: “I remember how we served amidst the thundering explosions and the falling glass, not

knowing what would happen to us in a few minutes… And I want to say: ‘Beloved City! You

had to undergo much hardship but now, as Lazarus, you arise from the grave and are healing

your wounds; and soon you will be restored to your former beauty… May God’s blessing be on

this City, on my brother co-pastors of whom I have the fondest memories. All of them shared my

labors, suffered much grief — even more than I — and now a great spiritual feat awaits them.

And, let us pray that the Lord bestow his blessing on the Russian Church and on our dear homeland’”.

Thus, the appeal to the Church in Leningrad, the city-under-siege, bore a particular character,

much more significant than in the majority of country’s other regions. The religious impulse

played a very important role in defending the city. The churches which functioned throughout

the siege actively supported the mobilization of fundraising and lifted the morale of

Leningraders. City authorities could not have discounted this. Their policy began to adjust

even before the government’s fundamental change in course. The Church began to revive

very rapidly during a time of difficult trials for the Russian people. It stood alongside its people

during the inhuman conditions of Leningrad’s siege, deservedly strengthening its authority and

expanding its influence.

Nina Tkachuk Dimas

 

Article in Russian….(more)