MOSCOW (AP) – Russian riot police stormed into a monastery on Tuesday to detain a rebel monk who has denounced the Kremlin and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and denied the existence of the coronavirus.
In the nighttime clash, police collided with the priest’s supporters at Sredneuralsk Monastery outside Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.
The monk, Father Sergiy, was quickly flown to Moscow, where a court approved his arrest. Authorities accused him of inciting suicide through sermons urging believers to “die for Russia.” He denied the charges.
Russia’s main investigative body, the Commission of Inquiry, said Father Sergiy is also facing other criminal charges in connection with his alleged arbitrary action to take control of the monastery.
When the virus arrived in Russia early this year, the 65-year-old monk denied its existence and denounced the government’s efforts to contain the pandemic as “Satan’s electronic camp.” He has described the vaccines being developed against COVID-19 as part of a global plot to control the masses through chips.
The monk, who has urged his followers not to obey the government’s lockdown measures, hid in the monastery he founded years ago near Yekaterinburg. Dozens of burly volunteers, including veterans of the separatist conflict in Eastern Ukraine, helped enforce his rules as the prioress and several nuns left.
The monk rebuked Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the motherland” serving a satanic “world government.” He also condemned the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, and other top clerics as “heretics” to be “thrown out”.
The Russian Orthodox Church stripped Father Sergiy of the rank of its abbot in July for violating monastic rules, but he rejected the ruling and ignored the police summons. Despite the hard resistance of hundreds of his supporters, Church officials and local authorities seemed reluctant to expel him for months.
Hundreds of his supporters continued to gather in the monastery hours after he was taken away. Some were crying.
Father Sergiy, who was born Nikolai Romanov, served as a police officer during Soviet times. After leaving the ranks of law enforcement, he was convicted of murder, robbery and assault and sentenced to 13 years in prison. After his release he went to a church school and later became a monk.
The charismatic priest soon became known for his efforts to open new churches and monasteries in the Urals. In his fiery sermons, he denounced alleged conspiracies of the ‘world government’ and glorified the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, who was murdered by the Bolsheviks along with his entire family in Yekaterinburg in 1918.
Father Sergiy has been the most visible and outspoken of some ultra-conservative clergy who have challenged the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Observers have said the monk’s rebellious actions and now his detention are undermining Patriarch Kirill’s authority.
In another sign of internal tensions within the church, a ecclesiastical panel on Tuesday ruled to fire a liberal-leaning theologian, protodeacon Andrei Kurayev, who has been active in voicing his opinion online. Kurayev lamented the verdict as a punishment for sharing opinions that sometimes differed from the official position of the Moscow Patriarchate.