Let’s face it: apart from the odd sex scandal or a drunk bishop mistaking someone else’s car for his own, our Anglican Church is rather dull. But do pray it’ll stay that way, if the alternative is the Russian kind of fun.
The other day, for example, the deacon Sergei Frunza drove onto a main road without looking. The OAP Valentina Pavlova barely managed to avoid a serious accident by hitting the brakes of her Volvo with all her waning strength. She then approached the cleric’s Hyundai to remonstrate.
But God’s servant was in no mood for sermons. He jumped out of his car and smote the old woman in the face with his fist clutching the car key, a technique he must have learned from our huggable hoodies. The pensioner fell to the ground, her mouth pumping blood. When her elder sister then tried to interfere, the reverend broke her nose with a mighty punch. He then got into his car and tried to do a runner, only to be blocked by outraged eye witnesses.
They then called the police, which excited the cleric no end. ‘I don’t give a **** who you call!’ he thundered like Joshua at Jericho. ‘Call the cops, call the FSB [secret police], they’ll do nothing to me!’ He read the future with the clarity of a prophet.
The police duly arrived and took the two women to hospital, where one had stitches put into her lip, the other had her nose set, and both were diagnosed with concussion. As his only punishment, Fr. Frunza was made to visit them and offer his apologies. ‘Well, sorry, this sort of thing happens,’ ran the mea culpa. ‘This is the way I am.’
The story would hardly be worth telling if it weren’t indicative of the symbiosis existing between the Russian Church and law enforcement, particularly of the KGB variety. Not only are the hierarchs of the Church, including the Patriarch, directly appointed by the KGB as a reward for decades of faithful service (to the KGB, that is, not to God), but even the lower tiers are largely – though not yet exclusively – staffed with thugs like Fr. Frunza.
Despairing of finding solace within the national church, many sincere believers join evangelical Protestant sects, such as Seventh-Day Adventism or Pentecostalism. Collectively, such sects now have more parishioners than the ROC, something that’s discouraged, to put it mildly, by its muscular sponsors.
Last week a Moscow Pentecostal church was robbed and practically destroyed by a gang led by police officers. The raiders broke in at midnight, and by 3 a.m. the church was reduced to rubble. All the sacred objects were stolen, along with expensive synthesisers and other electronic equipment, and the language used by the thugs wasn’t the kind one normally expects in a consecrated environment. Some of the visitors introduced themselves as court bailiffs, one as Elvis Presley, and the others withheld formal introductions altogether.
Col. Putin refrained from commenting on these, or other similar, incidents. Instead he delivered himself of a soliloquy on the Pussy Riot trial. These three young ladies are now serving two-year terms for violating the KGB-sponsored saintliness of the ROC, and Putin was irate. The Pussy Rioters, he explained with avuncular condescension and not without reason, were naughty – and had been long before their punk antics in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
In particular, the guardian of Russian morality drew his listeners’ attention to the public demonstration of sexual intercourse indulged in by one of the Rioters Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. The president was particularly, and one has to say justifiably, upset with the footage of the orgy that had made its way to the Internet.
Lest he may be accused of being too heavy-handed, Putin offered a humorous aside: ‘Those who like it say that group sex is better than individual because, as any other collective undertaking, it leaves room for shirking. This is everyone’s personal business, but uploading it on the net must be assessed from the legal point of view.’ Putin then referred to the Rioters’ blasphemous act as a Walpurgisnacht and let it be known that the sanctity of the ROC is in good hands, his own.
Unlike Lenin, who routinely referred to Christianity as ‘necrophilia’ and a ‘foul obscenity’, the present national leader is happy to be seen as the godfather not only to the economy, but also to the Church. Then of course, as a career KGB officer, he has for the ROC hierarchy that particularly warm feeling one tends to reserve for colleagues. That’s why he won’t tolerate any criticism of the Church in the context of the Pussy Riot trial.
Putin feels foreigners, and especially Americans, should mind their own business, which is far from being good. After all, many American states still have the death penalty, ‘and only God our Lord should be allowed to deprive a man of his life. But that’s a separate, philosophical discussion,’ added the Christian neophyte. Indeed it is. And who’s better qualified to conduct it than a proud, unreconstructed member of the organisation responsible for murdering 60 million Russians?
Do you sometimes feel that life is a madhouse, and you’re an outsider looking in? If you don’t, read the Russian press.