Drinking and Fornication in the History of the Church

The war with the “blue lobby” in the ROC continues (homosexuality is not the main problem of the ROC, but its main problem, like the whole of Russia, is vodka, vodka and again vodka; all other troubles, including corruption, are just mice grazing at the foot of Everest from bottles). In the comments, the Orthodox are horrified by the described cases of "immoral behavior" of some clergy. Believers do not know the history of their own Church and therefore do not understand with whom they have contacted.

A fashionable excuse today: sinners came to the Russian Orthodox Church to repent and fight their sins, so there is no need to demand immediate holiness from them.

True, this excuse does not explain what to do with professional careerists who came to the Church for specific bonuses and never thought about God and are not even going to start. Hence the drunkenness, theft and promiscuity, which are so convenient to engage in an organization that has no external control. The lack of control and closeness of the Church gives rise to all its problems. But has it ever been otherwise?

From the book of Alexander Nikonov "Opium for the people":

Moscow Metropolitan Photius issued a very characteristic circular, which forbade the cohabitation of monks and nuns. In addition, Photius tried to forbid the monks to drink and swear. Bestiality also flourished in Russian monasteries - the authorities also tried to fight it: “So that not only women in the monastery, but also men without beards, as well as female cattle ... it is forbidden to keep.”

Daniil Zatochnik wrote in the 13th century: “Where there are weddings and feasts, there are monks and nuns, and lawlessness: they have an angelic image on themselves, and a prodigal disposition, a saintly one, they have a dignity, and obscene custom.”

It turned out to be more difficult to defeat pederasty. (In general, pederasty, as you know, thrives in closed male collectives, be it barracks, prisons or monasteries. Therefore, the demand to expel women from male monasteries was tantamount to a demand to introduce pederasty there. The scheme is as follows: they removed women - they got pederasty - they began to fight it. ) The statutory documents of the monasteries forbade the presence of boys in the monasteries: “It is dirty for the holy Lavra to have someone without a beard ... Divine scriptures speak about the youths, as if it were not God who brought children to the monastery, but the enemy himself the Devil, as if he would confuse the monastics ... May we not meet with them, and on our seats far away, let us sit from them, and let us not look at their faces;

The chronicle tells how the monks-thugs kicked out the abbot from the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, who was sent there to restore order: “And I could not turn the Chernets to God’s path, to prayer and fasting, and abstinence. They wanted to kill him... and he left the abbess there.” Sergius Monastery was generally distinguished by violence. With its staff, it more resembled not a monastery, but a pirate ship. The second attempt to restore order there also failed. There is historical evidence of the unenviable fate of "the venerable and wise Artemy, the former hegumen of the Sergius Monastery, who, not listening to the king, went into the wilderness from this monastery because of strife and self-interested monks, rooted in transgressions of the law."

Elder Philotheus regretfully writes to Prince Vasily III a petition with the characteristic title “The Message of Sodom Fornication”: “Such an abomination has multiplied ...” Archbishop Macarius of Novgorod demands from his subordinates: “Young children cannot live in cells with abbots and elders!”

It would seem that the accession to the throne of the God-fearing Ivan the Terrible would put an end to monastic lawlessness. It wasn't there! At their next congress (Stoglavy Cathedral of 1551), the clergy state from the rostrum: “Priests and church clerks in the church are always drunk and stand without fear, and scold, and all sorts of unsimilar speeches always come from their mouths ... Priests in churches fight and fight among themselves , and in monasteries the same outrage is going on ... such archpriests should be punished in a conciliar manner so that they would not swear and drunk into the church and into the holy altar would not enter, and they would not fight until bloodshed ... Archimandrites and abbots, and elders and all the brethren of young children would be in the cells they didn’t keep naked people.”

At the next "congresses" - in 1581 and in 1584 - we hear the same thing: "In the holy monasteries into the wasteland, they are exhausted for the sake of drunkenness and indecent, weak life in various ways."

Russian monasteries of that era resembled Soviet collective farms. Ivan the Terrible knew about this situation and himself said: “What did you drink in the Storozhevsky Monastery? There is no one to close the monastery, grass grows at the meal! Addressing the highest church hierarchs with criticism, the tsar forbids “the priestly and monastic rank to enter the taverns and get drunk, idle talk and bark in drunkenness, and those who will be taught to go around the taverns and will be taught to get drunk and wander around the yards and streets drunk, catch such and take a commandment from them…”.

Grozny knows perfectly well the situation in the church: “The nobility and the people are crying out to us with their complaints that you, in order to maintain your hierarchy, appropriated all the treasures of the country for yourself, trade in all kinds of goods. Taking advantage of your privileges, you do not pay our throne any duties or military costs ... You seized a third of, as it turns out, the cities, towns and villages of our state ... you sell and buy the souls of our people. You lead an idle life, drowning in pleasures and pleasures: you allow yourself the most terrible sins, extortion, bribery and exorbitant growth (the church traded by distributing onerous loans. - A.N.). Your life abounds in bloody and flagrant sins: robbery, gluttony, idleness, Sodomy. You are worse, much worse than cattle!”

In order to appease the monks, in 1592 a church police was even created. The clerks-policemen  were supposed to reveal various violations of discipline in the church environment.

Another unfortunate abbot of the Solovetsky Monastery in 1647 reported to the authorities: “They get drunk, and from that drunkenness there is much enmity and rebellion ...” St. Maximus the Greek denounces his colleagues: “My priests, mentors of the new Israel! Instead of being models of an honest life, you have become teachers of all outrage, a temptation for faithful and unfaithful, you overeat, get drunk, annoy each other; on the days of divine holidays, instead of behaving soberly and decently, setting an example for others, you indulge in drunkenness and outrage.

Austrian diplomat Johann Korb: “... More like revelers than like monks, drunks romp around the streets and, having lost all shame, often indulge in voluptuousness there (on the streets. - A.N.).

German Ambassador Olearius: “...It is easy to meet a drunken priest or a monk. Monks, leaving the monasteries and visiting good friends, consider themselves entitled not only not to refuse good drink, but even demand it themselves and drink it voraciously, enjoying it to the point that they can be distinguished from lay drunkards only by their clothes. ".

The struggle of previous centuries against drunkenness and lust, as we see, was not crowned with success, therefore, in the 17th century, the leading authorities ... continue to adopt strict decrees: “Make a strong order so that abbots, black and white priests, and deacons, and elders, and blacks they wouldn’t go to the tavern to drink, and they wouldn’t be lying around the streets drunk.”

Here the peasants write a petition: “The elders of the Iberian monastery travel around the settlements and we, the townspeople, are beaten and maimed ... and others are cut with knives.” How were the murderers in black cassocks punished? And how did these God's people react to formidable circulars from the center about putting things in order? The Austrian diplomat of that era, von Meyerberg, testifies: “The most sacred decrees are turned into ridicule by almost all monks who violate them even within the monastery walls, and most often outside them ... The most important crimes between them are usually punished only with a very light reprimand.”

Archpriest Avvakum at the Council of 1667 denounces his colleagues: “You have nothing to listen to a good person: everyone says how to sell, how to buy, how to eat, how to drink, how to fornicate women, like guys in the altar for an aphedron (anus. - A. N.) grab. Otherwise, I’m ashamed to say the shame that you are doing: I know all your malice, dogs, b ..., metropolitans, archbishops.

Metropolitan Georgy of Rostov writes about Russian monks of the 18th century: "they drank themselves and stole." (As if they were different in earlier ages!)

Lomonosov wrote that "monasticism ... is nothing but fornication and sodomy covered with a black dress ... not to mention infanticide ... At every feast in towns and villages, priests are the first drunkards: they go to taverns from dinner, and sometimes they fight to the blood" .

The head of the secret police of the Russian Empire, the head of the Third Department, L. Dubelt, wrote in 1848 that Russian monasticism is “the most unworthy part of the Russian population.” According to the empire's police department, in the category of crimes against morality, priests and monks were in the lead by a wide margin. They committed crimes of this kind twice as often as all other categories of the population. “Codes of Statistical Information on Criminal Cases” note: “The dirtiest crimes are child molestation, incest, bestiality, and so on. - are predominantly common among the clergy.

In 1869, the Synodal chief prosecutor D. Tolstoy sent a memorandum to the Synod with a proposal to tighten the detention regime. He urged the introduction of the so-called "coenobitic charter" in the monasteries, limiting the violent monastic freedoms. The Synod agreed and sent a circular to all diocesan bishops. How do you think it ended? For thirty years, it was possible to introduce the "coenobitic charter" in less than 10% of the monasteries. The monks did not want to stop drinking and fornication. Indeed,  why?

What do you think, after all this, were priests and monks loved in Russia?.. A rhetorical question. In some provinces, the peasants rebelled when they learned that a new monastery would be built near them (read, a brothel for criminal scumbags and insane lawless people).

In 1905  the priest Fr. Mikhail (Levitov) wrote: “The clergy does not enjoy any influence, is hated and despised by the people, serves in their eyes as the personification of greed, greed. The clergy was demoralized to the point of losing a significant part of not only pastoral, but also human dignity.

Here is the chairman of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the USSR Council of Ministers, G. Karpov, in a top-secret note reports to Stalin: “The real scourge in the life of church communities is the massive spread of embezzlement and embezzlement of church funds, both by the clergy and church councils. Church councils and clergy spend church funds uncontrollably, using them for their own personal needs. Often these sums are expressed in tens and even hundreds of thousands of rubles... The Patriarchy has not found means to combat this evil, and the organs of the court and prosecutor's office find it difficult to solve these new questions for them, having no clear instructions... A certain part of the clergy behaves obscenely. The main vices of this clergy are drunkenness, polygamy, embezzlement of church money ... "

In the nineties, the church gladly accepted gifts from bandits - money, bells ... One of the churches near Moscow still hangs a bell with a cast inscription "From the Solntsevo lads." It is clear that both this money and the gifts were bloody, received from the murders of parishioners, perhaps of the same church. But is this a problem for the true servants of the Lord?

For almost a thousand years, black cassocks terrorized Russia - they robbed, raped women and children, killed, tortured, engaged in the slave trade ... In general, they behaved like occupiers in a conquered country. After this, should we be surprised at the excesses of 1918, and also at the fact that in Russian fairy tales and sayings you will not find a priest who would be a good hero?

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