MOSCOW (AP) – Russian riot police raided a monastery on Tuesday to detain a rebel monk who punished the Kremlin and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and denied the existence of the coronavirus.
In the evening confrontation, the police clashed with the priest’s supporters at the Sredneuralsk monastery outside Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains.
The monk, Father Sergiy, was quickly flown to Moscow, where a court approved his arrest. The authorities accused him of inciting suicidal actions through sermons in which he urged believers to “die for Russia”. He denied the charges.
Russia’s main investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, said that Father Sergiy also faces other criminal charges related to his allegedly arbitrary action to take control of the monastery.
When the virus arrived in Russia earlier 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 described vaccines being developed against COVID-19 as part of a global plan to control the masses using chips.
The monk, who asked his followers to disobey the government’s blockade measures, hid in the monastery near Yekaterinburg that he founded years ago. Dozens of burly volunteers, including veterans of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, helped enforce their rules, while the prioress and several nuns left.
The monk punished Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the homeland” who was serving a satanic “world government”. He also denounced the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, and other important clergymen as “heretics” who must be “expelled”.
The Russian Orthodox Church removed Father Sergiy from his abbot post for breaking monastic rules in July, but he rejected the decision and ignored the subpoena by police investigators. Faced with strong resistance from hundreds of his supporters, church officials and local officials seemed reluctant to evict him for months.
Hundreds of his supporters continued to demonstrate at the monastery hours after he was taken away. Some wept.
Father Sergiy, who was born as Nikolai Romanov, served as a police officer during the Soviet era. After leaving the ranks of law enforcement, he was convicted of murder, theft and assault and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He entered a religious school after his release 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 plots of the “world government” and glorified Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, who was killed by the Bolsheviks along with his entire family in Yekaterinburg in 1918.
Father Sergiy was the most visible and outspoken of the few ultra-conservative clerics who challenged the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Observers said the monk’s rebellious actions and now his arrest undermine Patriarch Kirill’s authority.
In another sign of internal tensions within the church, an ecclesiastical panel on Tuesday decided to oust a liberal theologian, Protodeacon Andrei Kurayev, who has been actively expressing his views online. Kurayev deplored the verdict as a punishment for sharing opinions that at times differed from the official position of the Moscow Patriarchate.