Source: Basilica News Agency
October 30, 2017
Address by His Beatitude Rastislav, Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, delivered during the solemn session of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church, 28 October 2017:
Your Holiness,
Your Beatitudes, Your Eminences and Your Graces, beloved brothers in Christ!
Rev. Georges Florovsky wrote in Volume II of his Collected Works very accurately that Christianity introduced a new social order in the first place. From its very beginning, it was not primarily a “doctrine” but exactly a “community”.
Beside a kerygma – a message that was necessary to spread in the world – and the Good News – the Gospel to be proclaimed and delivered to people – there was a “new community” – distinct, bearing no resemblance to anything else, continually growing and forming, grouping together more and more faithful. [FLOROVSKY, G.: Christianity and Culture, Belmont 1974, p 67.]
After its establishing in the Roman provinces, the community started to infiltrate into different levels, classes and institutions of the Roman Empire, which concluded with the Christianization of the Empire, together with its Emperor. In view of this, the fall of the Czarist Regime and the social changes that took place during the 1917 October Revolution in Russia could be considered the end of the Constantine Epoch. With the beginning of the new social order, the modern totalitarian movement – Communism – gained a power.
Today’s generation does not understand how Communism was at the culmination point of its ideological development. Those, born earlier, although with a certain nostalgia, remember the times of one party´s domination as well as the Marxist-Leninist philosophy in which everyone saw a project of a social equality rather than a totalitarian movement.
Today, almost no one reads the writings of Lenin or the resolutions of the Communist Party’s meetings, which talk about the struggle with religion and the Orthodox Church. The truth is, however, that in former Czarist Russia, where the status of the Orthodox Church was privileged, Lenin called for its complete destruction. Already in 1909, in his controversy “On the Relationship of the Working Class to Religion,” he wrote: “Religion is the opium of mankind – this Marx’s statement is the cornerstone of Marxism’s worldview on its relationship to religion.”
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