What does the Church do in the face of sacrilege?
In Moscow the Orthodox Church is pressing for the maximum penalty, as much as 7 years imprisonment, in the case of Pussy Riot who demonstrated against Putin with a blasphemous "prayer".
Before the arrest, I suspect even in Russia no-one had heard of them, if the Church authorities had not pressed charges it is likely they would have been a headline on Moscow news for one night and then been forgotten. As it is, even I have heard of them, and some of the media seem to want to present them as new dissidents, modern Solzhenitsyns or Sakharovs.
As with crucifixes in glasses of urine, the "art" is really in creating a reaction, the object or performance is incidental, what is being sought is outrage: no outrage, no art.
Apart from pressure from the Kremlin, the Moscow Patriarchate seems as bound up with the Putin Presidency as it was with the Tsar, there seems to be sense that simply ignoring the outrage to believers will show a moral weakness on the part of the Church that will set at at nought the hard won legal recognition the Church has sought since the fall of the USSR. Of course for many Russian believers the Pussy Riot is redolent of the atheistic contempt for the sacred of the communist era, not responding to it vigorously will merely encourage more of it.
Before the arrest, I suspect even in Russia no-one had heard of them, if the Church authorities had not pressed charges it is likely they would have been a headline on Moscow news for one night and then been forgotten. As it is, even I have heard of them, and some of the media seem to want to present them as new dissidents, modern Solzhenitsyns or Sakharovs.
As with crucifixes in glasses of urine, the "art" is really in creating a reaction, the object or performance is incidental, what is being sought is outrage: no outrage, no art.
Apart from pressure from the Kremlin, the Moscow Patriarchate seems as bound up with the Putin Presidency as it was with the Tsar, there seems to be sense that simply ignoring the outrage to believers will show a moral weakness on the part of the Church that will set at at nought the hard won legal recognition the Church has sought since the fall of the USSR. Of course for many Russian believers the Pussy Riot is redolent of the atheistic contempt for the sacred of the communist era, not responding to it vigorously will merely encourage more of it.
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