Glory to the Fallen! Love to the Living Vets! Say “Thank You” whilst you still can!
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Kirill Frolov, the head of the Association of Orthodox Experts, sharply criticised the comparison of Victory Day memorial events with paganism. “Of course, it’s better to have churches and chapels at the major memorials to the fallen in the Great Patriotic War, but we should be enchurching Victory Day, not attacking it. However, this denigration, this fault-finding concerning the Eternal Flame… it’s only an excuse to downplay the significance of the holiday, it’s just another lie used by our opponents”, he told our Interfax-Religion correspondent on Thursday. This was in comment on the words of Sergei Chapnin, the editor of the MP official magazine, The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, who said that, today, the celebration of Victory Day is inspired by “civil religion, using ritual forms that, amongst other things, involve the universal worship of fire. Fire coming out of the ground is an image of hell, of the dreadful and fiery wrath of God… up to this day, members of the Church, including bishops, participate in this strange ritual on that day”.
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Watch this… the narration is in Russian… but watch the visuals. You have a heart of stone if the images of the vets don’t move you. It’s why Russia remembers… we hold the arms of our babas and dedes as they weep… so do we…
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Here’s a bit in English in RT on the same topic
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Meanwhile, Frolov noted, “These guys are a bunch of nitpickers, they don’t represent the point of view of the Russian Church, they’re trying to discredit Victory Day; well, we’re aware of the insolvency of their demagoguery. It’s an artificial and forced attempt to counter Victory Day. They resist the Russian national revival, they intend to derail the nascent symfonia of Church, society, and state, they oppose the introduction of military chaplains, and they belittle the churching of the majority of our people, who do honour the celebration of Victory Day”. In his view, the present complaints against the Eternal Flame at the Memorial to the Great Patriotic War are contrived… “After all, the Church, throughout its history, has incorporated many pagan forms and images, giving them new content in the process. Thus, the pagan Roman Pantheon became a Christian church, the once pagan Maslenitsa received a new inner content due to Russia’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity, amongst other things”, he noted. Frolov went on to say, “They sordidly disparage the heroism of our forefathers in the Great Patriotic War, they plant defeatism and combat patriotism under the guise of faithfulness to the Gospel, and they confuse our love of our motherland with totalitarianism and paganism”. Frolov believes that there’s every reason to believe that Victory Day is “definitely enchurched, as the Patriarch is now a necessary participant in the Victory Parade, and the introduction of military clergy, which was artificially delayed, is now a reality”.
19 May 2011
Interfax-Religion
http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=40812
Russia honours the British vets of the war…
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Here’s an RT vid on American vets…
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Editor’s Note:
In the re-Christianisation of Russia, after the fall of the Atheist State, you can find many charlatans and dubious characters mixed in amongst the actual Christians. After all, one saw Philaret Denisenko, Valentin Rusantsov, the crank ROCOR intervention under Vitaly Ustinov inside Russia, Hilarion Alfeyev, and Diomid Dzyuban, and those are just SOME of the “Orthodox” loonies and nutters, not to mention the Sectarian and “spiritualist” crackbrains (thankfully, very few, but very noisy and beloved of the Western press). We haven’t winnowed them all out yet… for instance, Alfeyev the Boy Blunder is still in good odour (for now… his oligarch zapadniki backers won’t be able to save him in the end, though). They’re quite similar to the crook lot of konvertsy in American Orthodoxy… with the same cult-like obsequiousness to their gurus (whom they mistakenly call “elders”) and they have the same cheerless and rigorist aridity of spirit.
Remember… the Church is the “Big Tent”… it has room for all sorts of sinners. It doesn’t approve of or propagate sin… but it has boundless compassion and accommodation for those who wish to follow its path. It doesn’t throw people out or deny them communion on specious grounds… that’s a lesson that the American konvertsy need to learn… if they stay in the Church, that is. The Eternal Flame symbolises the self-sacrifice of the generation that defeated Hitler… at worst, it’s harmless; at best, it’s a sign of the best of the human spirit… let it stay. As for those who attack it on “Christian” grounds… let the Scripture condemn them (not me):
Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The Gospel according to St Matthew 22.13
This not only applies to those who attack Soviet symbols in Russia using “religious” justifications… it also applies to the American konvertsy who attack traditional Orthodox usages on the same specious grounds… think on it…
BMD
