MOSCOW (AP) – Russian riot police stormed a monastery on Tuesday to arrest a rebel monk who had upset the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church and denied the existence of the coronavirus.
Overnight, police clashed with the priest’s followers in the Sredneuralsk monastery outside Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains.
The monk, Father Sergiy, was quickly flown to Moscow, where a court approved his arrest. Authorities accused him of suicide by preaching in which he urged believers to “die for Russia”. He denied the allegations.
Russia’s largest investigative agency, the Investigation Committee, said Father Sergiy was also facing other criminal charges related to his alleged arbitrary actions to take control of the monastery.
When the virus arrived in Russia early, the 65-year-old monk denied its existence and denied the government’s efforts to stem the pandemic, as ‘Satan’s electronic camp’. He described the vaccines being developed against COVID-19 as part of a global plan to control the masses via chips.
The monk, who encouraged followers not to disregard the government’s closure measures, stabbed at the monastery near Yekaterinburg, which he founded years ago. Dozens of large-scale volunteers, including veterans of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, helped enforce its rules while the prioress and several nuns left.
The monk chastised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the Motherland” who served a satanic “world government”. He also denounced the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, and other top clergy as “heretics” who should be “cast out.”
The Russian Orthodox Church has stripped Father Sergiy of his abbot’s rank for violating monastic rules in July, but has rejected the ruling and ignored the summons of police investigators. Through the hard resistance of hundreds of supporters, church officials and local authorities seemed reluctant to evict him for months.
Hundreds of his supporters stopped at the monastery hours after he was taken away. Some cried.
Father Sergiy, born Nikolai Romanov, served as a police officer during the Soviet era. After leaving the ranks of 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 conspiracies of the ‘world government’ and condemned Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, who was killed by his entire family in Yekaterinburg in 1918 by the Bolsheviks.
Father Sergiy was the most visible and outspoken of some ultra-conservative clergymen who challenged the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Observers have said the monk’s rebellious actions and now his detention are undermining the authority of Patriarch Kirill.
In another sign of internal tension in the church, a church panel on Tuesday decided to discourage a liberal theologian, protodeacon Andrei Kurayev, who was actively expressing his opinion online. Kurayev regrets the verdict as a punishment for sharing opinions that sometimes differ from the official stance of the Moscow Patriarchate.