Churches against planned ban on church services in Russian apartment blocks

By Oliver Hinz, OSV News

MOSCOW (OSV News) -- Russian politicians want to close house churches and ban anointing faithful in flats. This would hit the religious communities hard and following the Orthodox Church hierarchy, Catholic bishops are also opposing the move.

Religious communities in Russia spoke up throughout the month of November against a draft law banning religious services in residential buildings, proposed Oct. 30. In many places, church congregations have to meet in apartment blocks because they lack places of worship, said Father Kirill Gorbunov, spokesman of the Moscow-based bishops' conference.

Speaking to KNA, a German Catholic news agency, he said that "in many Russian cities, historic churches were not returned to the faithful or were simply destroyed during the Soviet era," adding that in some places the authorities do not grant permission for the construction of a new church or the parish does not have the money for a new building.

"The Catholic bishops share the concerns of other denominations and intend to communicate their views to the legislators in writing," Father Gorbunov continued. The spokesman also admitted that there are sometimes conflicts with residents of the houses: "They are convinced that only sects meet in residential buildings and that all genuine churches have their own buildings."

The bill was submitted to the lower house of parliament, the Duma by the small pro-Kremlin faction New People. It provides for changes to the law "on freedom of conscience and religion." Religious ceremonies and the holding of public services are to be severely restricted in residential buildings. According to the explanatory memorandum, gatherings of large numbers of foreigners and immigrants lacking permanent legal status increase the security risk in residential buildings. The document also talks about the deterioration in the crime statistics, fears among residents and breaches of fire safety regulations.

Protestant and Muslim communities to date voiced their strongest opposition to the bill. However, criticism has also come from the head of the legal department of the Russian Orthodox Church, Abbess Ksenija Chernega. She warned that, in its current form, the bill prohibits Russian Orthodox clergy from administering communion, anointing of the sick and other religious rites in homes at the request of the faithful. This would affect the seriously ill and the dying, Orthodox house churches would also have to close.

The head of the legal department of the Moscow Patriarchate demanded a revision of the draft. However, she shared Russian lawmakers' objections to the performance of religious rites in homes by "migrant groups that do not have the status of a legal entity."

It is still unclear what will happen with the controversial bill. According to official figures, the New People party received a little over 5% of the vote in the 2021 parliamentary election and thus entered parliament for the first time. The German Institute for International and Security Affairs assumes that the party was founded on the Kremlin's initiative in 2020 "to channel dissatisfaction among the population into the controlled party system."

Around 800,000 Russian citizens are Catholic -- a small diaspora church given it's about 0.6% of the population. Soviet persecution and immigration from Russia decimated the community.