Russian Orthodox Church reconsiders blessing missiles

The Russian Orthodox Church is reconsidering the popular practice of priests blessing weapons including nuclear missiles.

A document drafted by a commission on church law last week recommended that clergy perform benedictions for soldiers rather than military equipment.

“The commission's opinion is that in terms of church tradition we can talk about blessing a warrior to perform military service in defence of the fatherland,” Savva Tutunov, the bishop of Zelenograd and deputy head of affairs for the Russian church, wrote on the Telegram messenger service. “His personal weapons are blessed namely because they are connected with the one receiving the blessing. For this reason, weapons of mass destruction and personal weapons in general should not be sanctified.”

Mr Tutunov admitted that this conclusion contravenes current practice and had to be rewritten after heated debate within the commission. The document must still be discussed by top church officials before it becomes doctrine.

In recent years, Russian Orthodox priests have often been seen chanting prayers and casting holy water on arms like S-400 surface-to-air missiles in Crimea and intercontinental and short-range ballistic missiles taking part in the victory day parade on Red Square. They have also blessed assault rifles, fighter jets and nuclear submarines.

But Father Mikhail Vasilyev, a priest who has accompanied paratroopers to war zones in Syria and Chechnya, argued that clergy blessed anti-aircraft missiles “so there would be peaceful skies over our heads,” and this was part of a bigger effort to help soldiers fight sin.

“We don't need to classify weapons by their lethality,” he told the Telegraph. “We should stop (blessing them) entirely, which I think is incorrect, or we should stress spiritual education so that these weapons and the blessing of them are given to people who are facilitating the peace and security of the country rather than aggression.”

The issue has arguably become more pressing as the church attaches increasing numbers of priests to military units. A school for chaplains is being built at the defence ministry's Patriot Park outside Moscow.

Church doctrine holds that war is evil but can be necessary to “protect loved ones and restore justice”.

Priests were known to have blessed swords before the victory over the Golden Horder at Kulikovo and tanks during the Second World War. Mr Tutunov said the church had to “make sense of the new realities” of modern weaponry, however.

In the 1990s, priests were even rumoured to have blessed gangsters' pistols. More recently, Russian priests have blessed automobiles, gas pipelines and rockets bound for space.

After a Proton-M rocket carrying Russian navigation satellites broke up during launch from Baikonur cosmodrome in 2013, local priest Sergei Bychkov claimed that “the ones that crashed were the ones we didn't bless”.