The Moscow Patriarchate has apparently given its official blessing to the Russian Federation nuclear arms program in the city of St. Seraphim of Sarov, a.k.a. "St. Seraphim of Arzamas-16." It looks like President Putin wasn't joking when he said recently on Interfax that religion may be one of Russia's best weapons of self-defense. Spasi Christye Bozhe!
Church Offers Atomic Blessing
By Alexander Osipovich
Staff Writer
Christians have long believed that the world will end with the
Apocalypse. On Tuesday morning, the Russian Orthodox Church gave its
blessing to the men and women who could make it happen.
In a ceremony at Christ the Savior Cathedral, priests chanted prayers
in honor of the Defense Ministry's 12th Main Directorate, which is
responsible for the storage and maintenance of the country's nuclear
arsenal.
The highly secretive directorate on Tuesday celebrated the 60th
anniversary of its establishment by Stalin in 1947, when the Soviet
Union was racing to build nuclear weapons after the U.S. atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
About 200 men and women from the directorate attended Tuesday's
ceremony, which would have been unthinkable in the days of official
Soviet atheism.
Dressed in uniforms with a stylized atom logo on their sleeves, they
occasionally crossed themselves as Bishop Amvrosy of Bronnitsy led
the prayer service in the cavernous marble cathedral.
The bishop concluded by reading a congratulatory message from
Patriarch Alexy II.
"I congratulate you on this memorable anniversary," he read, "and I
raise prayers to God and to the venerable Serafim of Sarov that the
nuclear weapons created by you and entrusted to you will always be in
God's hands, and will only be weapons of deterrence and retaliation."
Serafim of Sarov is the semi-official patron saint of the directorate.
The patriarch's message was also printed in Tuesday's edition of
Krasnaya Zvezda, the Defense Ministry's official newspaper.
Cooperation between the armed forces and the Orthodox Church has been
growing in recent years, encouraged by the top military brass and
endorsed by President Vladimir Putin.
Some officials support the idea of introducing military chaplains
and, although no formal system is in place, Orthodox priests already
minister to soldiers in many units on a voluntary, unofficial basis.
More than 2,000 priests conduct services for military personnel, a
spokeswoman for the Moscow Patriarchate's military liaison department
said.
But while preaching to soldiers on active duty may be a common
practice in many armies, including that of the United States and
other nuclear-armed nations, blessing the men who run the country's
atomic arsenal raises questions that have vexed Christian theologians
since 1945.
A spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate said the church viewed
nuclear weapons as a necessary evil.
"In general, the church views any weapons, including nuclear weapons,
as evil," Deacon Georgy Roshchin said by telephone Tuesday.
The church has made allowances, however, for contemporary realities,
Roshchin said.
"The church views nuclear weapons as something of a deterrent factor
for the Russian state," he said. "The history of the past 15 years
shows that Russia's nuclear capability helped it remain an
independent state."
The Roman Catholic Church held a similar position during the Cold
War. The Holy See condemned any use of nuclear weapons at the Second
Vatican Council in the 1960s, but it acknowledged that they could be
possessed in a deterrent capacity.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Vatican has pushed for
disarmament. In 2005, the Vatican's ambassador to the United Nations
said the continued possession of nuclear weapons could not be
justified in the post-Cold War world.
Deterrence still seems necessary to the Russian military, however.
"These weapons guarantee and will continue to guarantee the peaceful
existence of our people, our children and our grandchildren," General
Yury Baluyevsky, head of the General Staff, said at Tuesday's
ceremony, Itar-Tass reported.
The ceremony was also attended by General Vladimir Verkhovtsev, head
of the 12th Main Directorate.
After the end of the service, Verkhovtsev stood near the altar next
to Bishop Amvrosy and expressed his wish for the health of Patriarch
Alexy II, who has been rumored to be suffering from serious medical
problems.
Most officers in the directorate seemed unwilling to talk to
reporters after the ceremony.
One uniformed officer, who said his name was Dmitry, said the
directorate had been working with the church for years and that
priests often gave blessings to different units.
"But this is the first time that [a blessing] has taken place here,"
said Dmitry, who declined to give his last name.
A name that did often come up during the ceremony because of its
importance to the directorate was Serafim of Sarov.
Serafim was a hermit who lived outside Sarov, a town in what is now
the Nizhny Novgorod region, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Renowned for spending 1,000 nights in a row praying on a rock with
his arms raised to the sky, he became a popular church elder visited
by thousands of pilgrims. He died in 1833 and was canonized in 1903,
during the rule of Tsar Nicholas II.
In the 1940s, the town of Sarov was renamed Arzamas-16 and became the
cradle of the Soviet atomic bomb project, providing the link between
the saint and nuclear weapons.
The town, which got its original name back in the 1990s, remains
closed to nonmilitary visitors. It now has a functioning church
dedicated to Serafim of Sarov.
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