Bălți, Moldova, October 31, 2024
Photo: nordnews.md
A hierarch of the Moldovan Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) was fined on October 28 for election campaigning.
His Eminence Archbishop Marchel of Bălți and Fălești was fined $200 (3,500 lei) for violating a law that prohibits religious representatives from campaigning for a particular candidate during an election season, reports nordnews.md.
This is the second time the hierarch has been fined this year. In June, he was ordered to pay more than $1,100 to two members of the LGBT community for “incitement to discrimination based on sexual orientation,” after he referred to LGBT people as “sodomites,” “lost,” and “sinners,” in a statement against the so-called Solidarity March in 2022.
The new fine stems from statements the hierarch made at a clerical assembly at Sts. Constantine and Helen Cathedral in Bălți on September 24`, specifically calling for his priests and deacons to vote for Victoria Furtună, who ended up getting 4.4% of votes in the state’s recent presidential elections.
The hierarch said:
Here you see on the screen a fragile woman, a Christian, a tender mother and an honest wife, Victoria Furtună. Yet she has stood up against the others. Allow me, on your behalf, to thank her, to wish her more and greater things. Allow me, on your behalf, to make her a decision-maker in the country, because she’s capable of promoting Christian laws. And here we have a brother of hers, a worker, named Denis. I want to give him the floor too, because we still have a long agenda. Let's thank him and ask him to convey our thanks to Mrs. Victoria.
While the Metropolis of Chișinău and All Moldova issued a statement in August “vehemently condemn[ing] the involvement of clerics in politics or in propaganda activities,” Abp. Marchel, in turned, condemned such passivity:
Against the catastrophic background of daily Christian reality, where all legitimate conditions are created for the wolf to enter the flock of sheep, our silence seems strange, especially the indifference-filled quiet of some priests, who try to justify their inactivity through the bland phrase, a pale expression, a weak excuse, such as: “I don't meddle in politics.”
But what do we do when politics, with all its filth, barges uninvited into Christ’s Church? Can we justify our inactivity, meaning the lack of opposition through the phrase, “I don’t do politics”? Doesn’t this resemble betrayal?
We all stay silent, as if everything were good and beautiful, while the enemy of the salvation of the human soul increases in devilish activity, implementing various pilot projects, each more ridiculous and more destructive than the other.
Like Abp. Marchel, the Metropolis has also warned against and condemned the state’s overstepping into ecclesiastical bounds.
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