Sergiev Posad, July 22, 2020
Holy Communion at the Lavra on the feast of St. Sergius. Photo: patriarchia.ru
The brotherhood of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra has not adopted any sanitary measures in regards to how it serves Holy Communion, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), the Chairman of the Russian Church’s Department for External Church Relations, commented after serving at the Lavra recently.
The Lavra reopened to parishioners and pilgrims on June 13.
Referring to the feast of the uncovering of the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh on July 17 and 18, Met. Hilarion told RIA-Novosti: “I participated in the service at the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra and I was surprised by the careless attitude of some of the participants in the service to what was happening around them.”
“I didn’t see any Communion cloths with alcohol on them, no disinfection of the [Communion] spoon,” he added. “Everything happened as if the epidemic didn’t exist at all.”
His Eminence noted that His Holiness Patriarch Kirill led the Liturgy for the feast and devoted his entire homily to the coronavirus epidemic, but “everything that was happening all around didn’t at all testify that people care about one another, about those who came to the Lavra for this feast.”
The DECR head notes that he was “surprised and very saddened,” especially since several monks of the Lavra died during the pandemic this spring. “We prayed for them, for their repose, but it seems people didn’t learn anything from these lessons,” Met. Hilarion lamented.
He also called on parishioners not to go on pilgrimages until the pandemic is over, but to pray in their own churches, wearing masks and maintaining a safe distance from one another.
The church where Met. Hilarion serves as rector follows all the sanitary measures issued by the Patriarch on March 17, he noted. However, during the services at the Lavra, “it seemed as though they were canceled, but no one canceled them.”
The Lavra brotherhood initially met in March after the Patriarch’s instructions were issued, and resolved not to change anything about the liturgical order of the services in the Lavra.
“The brethren of the monastery very zealously and unanimously spoke out in favor of leaving the existing liturgical practice, based on age-old statutes and traditions, unchanged,” Hieromonk Sergei (Rodchenko) reported at that time.
