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MOSCOW: The glittering Christ the Savior
Cathedral, a palewhite marble structure decorated with
bronze statuary and swaths of gold leaf, is more than
just Moscow's grandest and most opulent place of
worship.
Built in the 1990s as a replica of a church dynamited by
Communists in 1931, the cathedral symbolizes the Moscow
Patriarchate's rising political influence which may be
greater today than at any time since the 17th century.
It also serves as global headquarters of vast and
expanding business operations that experts say are worth
several billion dollars.
To tens of millions of Russian believers, the Orthodox
Church is first of all a sacred institution, a pillar of
the country's 1,000-year-old identity and culture.
The death of Patriarch Alexy II in December caused an
outpouring of heartfelt grief, with crowds of people
lining up to view his remains. On Feb. 1, top clerics
enthroned Alexy's successor, Kirill a towering figure
with a gray-flecked beard and sonorous voice in a
cathedral filled with celebrities and political leaders.
The first person to receive communion from Patriarch
Kirill was President Dmitry Medvedev's wife, Svetlana.
These events would have been unimaginable in the Soviet
era, when the officially atheist Communist government
treated the devout like moral lepers and criminals,
defrocking and imprisoning tens of thousands of clerics
of all creeds. Now the church "has become a serious
power in society," former Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev told The Associated Press in early March.
But critics claim that in the past decade the Moscow
Patriarchate has sacrificed some of its spiritual
authority in the pursuit of political power and
commercial success. Some go as far as to compare the
church to its former nemesis, the Communist Party's
ruling Politburo. Roman Lunkin of the Keston Institute,
which studies religion in the former Soviet Union, says
the church has "turned into an authoritarian and
totalitarian structure.”
"Unfortunately, Orthodox Christianity is antidemocratic
and hails authoritarian rule," said Yakunin, who spent
years in the gulag for criticizing Soviet religious
policies, during an interview in his Moscow office.
Today, the 74-year-old priest leads the Apostolic
Orthodox Church, a splinter group that is harassed by
authorities in Russia and Belarus.
Despite the Russian constitution's legal separation of
church and state, President Boris Yeltsin and his
successor Vladimir Putin forged a political alliance
with the Orthodox Church an alliance that has continued
under Putin's successor, Medvedev. Kirill is escorted
around Moscow by a cavalcade of Kremlin security guards
and was listed No. 6 on the government's list of state
dignitaries.
Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst with close
Kremlin ties, says the church has become "the Kremlin's
Ministry for the Salvation of Souls."
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