The good thing about the patriarch’s birthday is that we can ask ourselves what have we understood and what have we learned about him this year?
For me, the main news of the 77th year of the life of the Primate of the Russian Church is related to the reason for his father’s arrest. The man was exiled to Kolyma because during a search they found sheets of paper on which the word “God” was written in capital letters. So little… and so much.
But since the year we lived in was full of serious dramas and tragedies, I would call its strongest argument the intercession by the hierarch of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan of Tulchin and Bratslav Jonathan (Eletsky), who was condemned and sent to serve His sentence. prayer.
If the house arrest and trial of the abbot of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Paul, echoed in the media, the trial and sentencing of Bishop Jonathan did not reach such volume.
Meanwhile, Bishop Jonathan is a man with an amazing biography, extremely pure, dignified and interesting. A talented person, a wonderful church composer, he studied at the Leningrad Seminary when Patriarch Kirill was the rector there, and when the best intellectuals considered it an honor to serve him: something the legendary Sergei Averintsev, a doctor of physics, mathematics and philosophical sciences translated from French for the future patriarch, astronomer Elena Kazimirchak-Polonskaya.
The future bishop Jonathan, who brought Solzhenitsyn’s texts to the seminary, was expelled from it at the insistence of the KGB.
Patriarch Kirill, who personally knew Metropolitan Jonathan from those times and even then was convinced of the futility of attempts to intimidate him, called the current verdict an example of persecution of the Church and faith in Ukraine. His summary: The charges against Metropolitan Jonathan are “absolutely insignificant” and the evidence is falsified.
Patriarch Kirill continues to call on human rights organizations, religious and political leaders and the entire world community to pay attention to the policy of the current Ukrainian authorities, whose goal is to destroy the legitimate Orthodox Church and persecute its hierarchs.
The life itself and long biographies – “in Russia you have to live a long time” – of the best people sometimes provide natural arguments in favor of the righteousness of those who did not betray truth, morality, gift and honor. And God as the source of all this.
