The Moscow Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church has announced that the priest who officiated at the funeral Mass for the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in March has been suspended from clerical ministry for three years.
This was reported by the Reuters news agency, which quoted from the order signed by the highest cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. A man who, by the way, appears on the Czech sanctions list.
In a letter, Kirill forbids Safronov to give blessings, wear the vestment and the spiritual cross for three years starting on April 15, 2024, The Moscow Times website also writes. Safronov was also transferred to another Moscow church and demoted to the position of psalmist. In Orthodoxy, this is the designation of one of the assistants during the liturgy, who reads psalms and some prayers and, in the absence of the choirmaster, directs the singing in his place during the liturgy.
In a statement published by the diocese on its website on Tuesday, there is nothing about the reasons for such punishment.
On March 26, Safronov led a funeral mass for Navalny, a prisoner of Vladimir Putin’s regime who died in late February at the age of 47 in an Arctic penal colony. And he had already joined a group of clerics who appealed to the Russian prison service to hand over the body of the dead opposition leader to his family.
