Archimandrite Cyril (Zaitsev) of Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, once said that of all the evils and sorrows produced by the Russian revolution, the most terrible and shameful was the transformation of the official Russian Orthodox Church into an obedient tool of World Communism, the ÒSoviet churchÓ of the Soviet state. This book describes how this happened.
ÒThe Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow PatriarchateÓ is the largest Christian Church in the world with the exception of the Vatican. As negotiations intensify to unite the two huge churches, it would be useful to investigate the origins of the Moscow Patriarchate. Most people think it is just the continuation, into the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, of the pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church. But, as this book will attempt to demonstrate, that is not the case. The present-day Moscow Patriarchate was in fact created by Stalin as a crucial element in his antireligious campaign, the second major attempt to divide the Church and create a ÒfakeÓ church controlled by the communists in order to deceive the faithful into accepting a form of pseudo-Christianity loyal to Communism and the New World Order instead of the real thing.
Something similar had been attempted during the French Revolution, when the Church was divided into those who swore to uphold a pro-revolutionary Civil Constitution of the Clergy and those who rejected it. On July 12, 1790 a Civil Constitution for the Clergy was passed, rationalizing the ChurchÕs organization, putting all the clergy on the StateÕs pay-roll. The 135 bishops were cut down to 85, one for each dŽpartement, and provided one curŽ for every 6,000 inhabitants. Bishops were henceforth to be elected (by an electorate including non-believers, Protestants and Jews) without reference to Rome.