MOSCOW (AP) – Russian anti-protest police on Tuesday attacked a monastery to detain a rebel monk who condemned the Kremlin and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and denied the coronavirus.
In an overnight confrontation, police clashed with the priest’s supporters at the Sredneuralsk monastery outside Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.
The monk, Father Sergiy, was quickly transported to Moscow, where a court approved his arrest. Authorities accused him of inciting suicide by preaching urging believers to “die for Russia.” He denied the allegations.
Russia’s top investigative agency, the Committee of Inquiry, said Father Sergiy also faces other criminal charges related to his allegedly arbitrary act of taking control of the monastery.
When the virus reached Russia earlier this year, the 65-year-old monk denied its existence and denounced government efforts to stop the pandemic as “Satan’s electronic camp.” He described vaccines developed against COVID-19 as part of a global chip control scheme.
The monk, who urged his followers not to listen to the government’s blocking measures, had taken refuge in the monastery near Ekaterinburg, which he founded years ago. Dozens of heavy volunteers, including veterans of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, helped enforce its rules, while the prioress and several nuns left.
The monk condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the fatherland” who served a satanic “world government.” He also denounced the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, and other prominent clerics as “heretics” who must be “thrown out.”
The Russian Orthodox Church stripped Father Sergiy of his abbot’s status for violating monastic rules in July, but he rejected the ruling and ignored the request of police investigators. Faced with harsh resistance from hundreds of his supporters, church officials and local authorities seemed reluctant to evacuate him for months.
Hundreds of his supporters continued to gather at the monastery hours after he was taken. Some cried.
Father Sergiy, who was born Nikolai Romanov, served as a police officer during the Soviets. After leaving law enforcement, he was convicted of murder, robbery and assault and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He joined a church school after his release and later became a monk.
The charismatic priest quickly became known for his efforts to open new churches and monasteries in the Urals. In his fiery sermons, he denounced alleged “world government” plots and glorified Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, who was killed by the Bolsheviks along with his entire family in Ekaterinburg in 1918.
Father Sergiy was the most visible and outspoken of some of the ultra-conservative clergy who led the Russian Orthodox Church. Observers say the monk’s rebellious actions and his detention are now undermining the authority of Patriarch Kirill.
In another sign of internal tensions inside the church, an ecclesiastical group decided on Tuesday to dig up a liberal-leaning theologian, Archdeacon Andrei Kurayev, who was active in expressing his views online. Kurayev lamented the verdict as a punishment for sharing opinions that sometimes differed from the official position of the Moscow Patriarchate.