Russian Orthodox Church wants to bury Lenin's body
Representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church insist on the burial of the mummified body of Vladimir Lenin, reports RIA Novosti.
According to Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, it is necessary to wait for "agreement in society" in the burial of Vladimir Lenin's body. Although, in his words, the Mausoleum and the "mummified body" are a "relic of the past".
"If this was not done then, we now need to wait for the moment when there is agreement around this issue in society," the Metropolitan noted.
"No one is currently interested in opening old wounds in order to stir up our society or provoke a split. I would say that we have been late with these decisions for a quarter of a century," Metropolitan Hilarion said on a broadcast of the program "Church and Peace" On the TV channel "Russia-24".
He explained that it was necessary to take Lenin's body out of the mausoleum back when the monument to Dzerzhinsky was removed from Dzerzhinsky Square in 1991. “If this was not done then, we need to wait now for the moment when there is agreement around this issue in society," noted the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church.
At the same time, he clarified that for the Russian Church the question of reburial of Lenin's body "as such, is not worth it". "A person should be buried in the ground, as all people are buried." The mausoleum and the mummified body is that kind of relic of the past, which should have been abandoned long ago," said the Metropolitan.
Earlier, a State Duma deputy from the LDPR, Ivan Sukharev, sent a request to Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matviyenko with an appeal to consider the dismantling of Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square. At the same time, the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCOR issued a statement) in March in which they particularly noted that "one of the symbols of reconciliation of the Russian people with the Lord" could be the liberation of Red Square from "the remains of the main persecutor And the tormentor of the XX century, and the destruction of monuments placed to him. "