The Russian Orthodox Church has defrocked one of the country’s most prominent theologians after he was found to have slandered a fellow priest who died from Covid-19.
Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev, a well-known radio and television personality whose views on homosexuality, blasphemy and Russia’s Orthodox hierarchy have made him one of the country’s best-known religious figures, had described Alexander Ageykin, the head of a Moscow cathedral who died of the coronavirus in April, as a “dumb careerist” on his LiveJournal blog.
The Moscow Episcopal Court on Tuesday found that Kuraev had not “changed his ways” since receiving a warning in 2015 and concluded that his public statements accusing the Church hierarchy of “organizing a schism” were blasphemous.
The decision to defrock Kuraev — who described the move to The Insider news website as his “canonical murder” and “a New Year’s present for Patriarch Kirill” — must be approved by the Patriarch, the highest authority in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Kuraev has long been a polarizing figure in Russian Christianity.
In 2013 the outspoken theologian alleged the existence of a “gay lobby” at the heart of the Orthodox Church, after which he was dismissed from his teaching position at the Moscow Theological Academy.
His public pronouncements — which have included criticism of Islam, legal restrictions on blasphemy and Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea — have made him one of the Orthodox’s Church’s internet-friendly figures, with over 70,000 Facebook followers.
Russia’s Population Decline Hits 15-Year High
Russia’s population decline has set a 15-year record amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to preliminary government data cited by the RBC news website Thursday.
Russia’s population totaled 146.24 million as of Jan. 1, 2021, down from 146.75 million the previous year.
The 510,000-person decline is the largest since 2005, when Russia’s population dropped by 564,500 from the previous year.
According to RBC, Russia saw record-setting 184,600 excess deaths between January and November, the latest available month. Excess mortality, or the difference between all deaths in 2020 compared to previous periods, is seen as the most reliable indicator of the Covid-19 pandemic’s true death toll.
Russia’s overall deaths in January-November 2020 neared 1.9 million, the highest count since the wildfire-hit year of 2010, RBC reported.
At the same time, birth rates declined by 4.4% from 1.36 million from January-November 2019 to 1.3 million in the same period of 2020.
The natural population decline of 574,800 last year was double the 285,800 decline recorded in 2019.
Migration was unable to offset the decline after coronavirus border closures led to 86,100 arrivals in January-October 2020, or less than half of the 222,700 arrivals seen in the same period in 2019.
