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| Patriarch Kirill, in the white headdress, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, at a procession in Moscow last month. Experts say his reluctance to enforce orders against church gatherings has led to an explosion of coronavirus cases in monasteries and convents. Photo credit: Patriarchal Press Service, via Reuters |
It might be some comfort to Americans that they are not the only people whose lives are being put at risk by religious nutjobs and fauds more interested in keeping their income stream flowing than in ensuring the health and safety of their families and society at large. Russian Orthodox Christian nutjobs are at it too.
According to this report in the New York Times:
A physics student at Moscow State University, Dmitri Pelipenko turned away from science in 2018 to devote himself to God, enrolling as a novice monk at Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, the spiritual center of the Russian Orthodox Church.
His spiritual journey, derailed by the coronavirus, came to an abrupt and gruesome end shortly after the Orthodox Easter.
Admitted to the hospital after testing positive for the illness, Mr. Pelipenko smashed a window on April 24, jumped outside, doused his body with fuel from a church lamp and set himself on fire. He died from his burns two days later.
Needless to say, his monastery blamed 'mental illness' for his suicide, but it seems far more likely that his mental state had been caused by the apocalyptic mood now gripping the Orthodox Church because of the superstitious stupidity of the church's leaders in the face if the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of these idiots have denounced the 'stay-at-home' orders as the work of the Devil, and told their credulous dupes to continue attending church.
The Russian Orthodox Church, like the state it has always mirrored, is rigidly hierarchical. Even if they want to, priests are unable to shut down their churches without the express permission of their bishop, and bishops are unable to do anything without the express permission of the head of the church in Russia, one Patriarch Kirill.
Kirill, a close ally of President Putin, initially dithered over enforcing instructions from health officials that people should avoid public gatherings like church services. But he was not slow to take action to protect ordinary Muscovites. He drove around Moscow in a black Mercedes van with a holy icon, protecting the Russian capital with magic spells and magic hand-movements en route. Meanwhile, some of his priest continued to assure their credulous dupes that it was impossible to catch Covod-19 inside a church because of the protective magic therein.
Then, showing decisive leadership, he left it up to local diocese to decide whether to follow the Kremlin's guidelines and close, or to continue as normal and gather together as many of the faithful as possible so they could be more effectively infected. Consequently, churches remained open and centres of infection in 43 of Russia's 85 regions on the Eastern Orthodox Easter weekend. Infection rates are now soaring across Russia, putting at risk the building of a new cathedral dedicated to Russia’s armed forces, in Patriot Park, Moscow.
Meanwhile:
- Metropolitan Longin, a senior churchman in Saratov, a region in southwestern Russia, has declared that discouraging public worship, only revived painful memories of Soviet-era repression. He threatened damnation for those who enforced or obeyed restrictions, warning that anyone who carried out instructions from state health authorities that violated the dictates of faith “will be held accountable...
- A bishop in the northern Russian region of Komi declared restrictions on churchgoing as an infringement of fundamental rights and threatened to go to court to get them reversed. He has a novel cure for the pandemic - the ringing of church bells. That'll show it! He claimed that the word coronavirus — derived from the Latin word for “crown” — is “not coincidental but is linked to the coronation and enthronement of the Antichrist.”
- And of course, the Jews have had to feature somewhere. In an echo of the murderous pogroms by Christians against Jews in the Middle Ages during the Black Death, Sergei Romanov, a cleric in the industrial city of Yekaterinburg, has declared that closure of churches is part of a satanic plot, aided by Jews.
According to the New York Times:
Since Easter, churches and monasteries under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church have reported a surge of infections in both Russia and in neighboring Belarus and Ukraine.
More than 200 people have been reported infected in and around a convent in the Nizhny Novgorod region east of Moscow, including 70 nuns.
St. Elizabeth, a convent run by the Russian church in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where state officials have joined priests in playing down the risks of the virus, finally went into lockdown last week after scores of priests and nuns reportedly fell ill after testing positive.
The convent’s senior priest, the Rev. Andrei Lemeshonok, has been in the forefront of denialism, posting a video online titled: “Who can forbid us to believe?”
In it, he scolded worshipers for worrying about physical illness when “the scariest thing,” he said, is when people want to change their gender, don’t have children or otherwise ignore traditional values.
As in the USA, so in Russia, it's almost as though the two viruses of religion and Covid-19 have formed a mutually beneficial alliance where the religion virus suckers fools into church so the Covid-19 virus can more easily spread and from thence into the wider community. This type of mutualism is frequently seen in biology when two parasites share the same host.
Again, we see the dangerous stupidity that religion and religions' leadership, can induce their credulous followers to indulge in, convinced of the righteousness of their actions and of their entitlement to put the lives of others at risk for their own personal self-interest.
How different to the supposed teaching of the putative founder of Christianity!
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