Moscow, October 12, Interfax – The Moscow Patriarchate has expressed regret regarding the refusal by Pussy Riot members to follow the exhortation of the Church to repent.
“It was extremely sad to hear the evaluation of what occurred in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior given by the members of the infamous group, especially Ms. Alyokhina, in court yesterday,” Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations, told Interfax-Religion.
“Unfortunately, they continue to stand their ground. The attempts made by the Church to call on them to repent and its wish to prevent this from being left without attention are for some reason called blackmail. Alyokhina calls a statement containing nothing illegal unacceptable in a law-governed state,” he said.
The Church did not expect the convicts to legally admit their guilt, but expected them to express regrets about the fact that “parishioners were belittled by the words that they are crawling to bow and that the name of God was mentioned in the context of obscenities, that the church was desecrated,” the priest said.
“There were expectations of admission that such actions are generally unacceptable and no one should repeat them in the future. Such an evaluation would be natural to anyone who really regrets what occurred and understands that his actions were deeply wrong and therefore should not occur again,” Fr. Vsevolod said.
“Unfortunately, the words they said make it possible to believe that the members of the group still see all these actions as normal and acceptable,” he said.
The priest praised Maria Alyokhina for saying that Pussy Riot is against cutting down crosses, stealing icons, and spraying icons with ink.
According to earlier reports. the Moscow City Court on October 10 suspended Samutsevich’s sentence in the case involving the anti-Putin stunt in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The court let stand the sentence hand down to the other two participants in the stunt, Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, who were earlier sentenced to two years in a penal colony.
Source: Interfax-Religion