Red Priests

This was an attempt by this group of priests I call "Red Priests" because of their affiliation or their contacts with the Soviet Government. Their concern was that their church seemed to be missing the revolution. The revolution was changing Russian society in so many ways, and the new Soviet society was emerging. They were convinced that Russian Orthodoxy as it has existed before the revolution was on the verge of extinction, so they adopted various platforms for church change. They called the new church "The Living Church"--they took that name on purpose to indicate the "old church" was dying and they were living.

Some of them even embraced Communist methods for dealing with their enemies, which made them very unpopular among the many Orthodox believers who felt -and rightly so-that Christian clergymen should not be using terrorist tactics and other things against their enemies. Basically, they got into an untenable position.

Part of it was all the trends that had emerged in the Church in the 19th century into the early 20th century, where the Church seemed to be fragmenting. The bishops were sort of at odds with the parish clergy. There was tension between laity and clergy, usually over issues like money. The seminaries seemed not to be working. Many sons of priests were not entering the priesthood. Large numbers of people were embracing revolutionary movements that the traditional church had ignored or even opposed. The government seemed not to have the Church's interests at heart.

So, everything that was happening seemed to indicate that, just as Russian society was fragmenting, the church was fragmenting, and had nothing to say to this new revolutionary society. One of the things that the Bolsheviks promised when they came to power was that they would sweep away all the old culture. They thought that the Church seemed to be a prime candidate for such housecleaning.

Some of them simply wanted liturgical reforms, such as using the vernacular Russian in the Divine Liturgy as opposed to Old Church Slavonic. Some even tried to change the way the churches were laid out. They thought that there was too much emphasis on mystery by having the altar behind the iconostasis, so they wanted to move the altar out among the people. This didn't last very long because the people would have none of it. It was too opposed to tradition.

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