Russian Orthodox Church To-Day

Abstract

After years and years of persecution, we can say that the continuing and all-embracing revival of church life of the Russian Orthodox Church is going on and the general tendency to the development of all aspects of her diocese, parish and social activities is becoming more and more vivid. There are 128 dioceses now (instead of 67 ones in 1989) and 19000 parishes (instead of 689 ones in 1989) in the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to modern statistics Russian society is becoming more and more religious: for example, 57% of the St. Petersburg population call themselves Russian Orthodox, in Russian Federation – even 61%. Unfortunately, their religiosity is sometimes neither dogmatically nor ethically oriented, and the people who say that they are Russian Orthodox can very often practice occultism. If we take, e.g. the key question of abortion and ask about the attitude to this question, then we will get 34% who will blame abortion as a sin and murder, 36% do not agree with them, the other 30% do not have any definite answer or special concern about the problem. More than 10 000 children are dying each day because of abortion – this loss is comparable with the losses during the Second World War. So as a consequence in the perspective of 25 years we may witness a reduction of Russian Federation population up to 100 million of people or even less. I use this example to show the state of morality in Russian modern society and to show how much should be done in order to improve the situation in Russia. And we know that the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the main forces and institutes in Russian society which can find real resources for this improvement. Let us see what and how it was done by Russian Orthodox Church during the recent time.