In Defense of the Russian Orthodox Church
What has brought about the miraculous rebirth of the Russian Church in the 21st century? Not the Kremlin's rubles, but the blood of the martyrs.
For those who don’t know, the Society of Saint Pius X is a traditionalist group that split with Rome after the Second Vatican Council, and remains in a state of “irregular communion” with the Catholic Church. Last week, the Society’s U.S. district published an article called “The Myth of Holy Russia” on its website. I would like to answer some of the absurd claims made in this article.
First, however, we must ask: Why would the SSPX publish such an article? Is it because one of their members, the podcaster Jozef Schutzman, defected to Russia last year? Or is it because so many traditionalist Catholics are converting to Orthodoxy? Or are they simply trying to help advance the U.S. government’s agenda–to make the world safe for liberal values, LGBT rights, etc.—by attacking anything and everything Russian? I don’t know. Perhaps someone in the SSPX would be willing to clarify.
The article begins by pointing to a French study showing that only 6% of Russia’s Orthodox Christians attend the Divine Liturgy every week. This is compared to 30% of American Catholics.
However, it must be remembered that the SSPX does not identify with “mainstream” Catholicism. In 2018, the SSPX U.S. District reported approximately 25,000 faithful attending their chapels. Meanwhile, Pew reports that there are 51 million Catholics in America. So, the percentage of American Catholics attending an SSPX chapel is under 1%.
No doubt the SSPX would insist that this comparison is unfair. And that’s true—but not for the reason they think. If anything, it’s unfair to the Russian Orthodox.
Americans have forgotten that Russians endured nearly a century of brutal state atheism, ending only in the mid-1980s. Fr. Mikel Hill notes that “conservative estimates report over 12 million Orthodox Christians were killed for their faith under the Soviets, with 85,300 Orthodox clergy executed in 1937 alone.”
To put this in perspective, imagine China conquering the U.S. and wiping out the entire population of Los Angeles. This matches the number of Christians killed by the Soviets. Indeed, the number of Orthodox martyrs under the Soviets is almost certainly higher than 12 million.
What’s more, even at the height of its “Soviet captivity,” the Russian Church never fell into heresy. Indeed, even the Russian bishops who collaborated with the Communist authorities were obstinate on this point. That’s why the Soviets eventually erected their own “parasynagogue,” the so-called Living Church.
Meanwhile, the purest and brightest flame of Orthodoxy was kept alive by priests of the “underground church” like Arseny Streltzof and Alexander Men. These men are both counted among the more than 15 million Russian Orthodox Christians martyred by Soviet authorities.
As the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it nicely: “All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between.” God is glorified in His saints!
The Russian Orthodox Church of 2025 descends from those who held fast to their faith through relentless persecution. As the saying goes, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” This rings true: Pew Research shows that from 1991 to 2008, the percentage of Russian adults identifying as Orthodox Christian surged from 31% to 72%.
And the Catholic Church? No doubt the SSPX will agree that the “mainstream” Church has lost its way. Many people don’t realize that the Society’s main concern with Vatican II was not the liturgical reforms. It is, rather, the Council’s new teachings on religious freedom and the possibility of salvation outside the Church. In other words, their concerns are both liturgical and theological.
Now, what caused the Catholic Church to adopt these errors? What led Rome to abandon her own traditions? Were they held at gunpoint? No! It was the Catholic bishops’ own infidelity to their patrimony.
This is also why the number of Catholics is declining propitiously in the Roman Church's traditional heartlands of Europe and Latin America. It’s not because a satanic dictatorship is slaughtering them by the millions. No: they are simply walking away.
The Orthodox Church was martyred; the Catholic Church committed suicide. This is why Orthodox Church is growing (however slowly) in Russia, while the Catholic Church continues to decline.
By the way, it gives me no pleasure to say these things. I have tremendous respect for the Catholic Church, and the Society of Saint Pius X specifically. Several of our close friends attend their chapels. I have always admired their founder, Marcel Lefebvre. And naturally, as Orthodox Christians, we must have a certain amount of sympathy for Catholics who defend their traditions against the Pope! Yet this only makes it more painful that the SSPX would launch this gratuitous attack upon the Russian Orthodox Church.
There will be those who do not understand that to defend the Russian Orthodox Church is not the same as defending the Russian government. For instance, the author of the SSPX article refers to the ROC as a “vassal church.”
This, of course, would be like saying that the Catholic Church is a “vassal” of the European Union because Pope Francis faithfully parroted every EU talking-point on immigration, climate change, LGBT rights, and income inequality. Or it may be like saying that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is a “vassal” of the Democratic Party because of how hard it is working to oppose the Trump Administration’s attempts to control the movement of illegal immigrants across the border.
Of course, we would never say such a thing. There are over 1.4 billion Catholics on earth. Most of them are earnest, God-fearing men and women who are trying to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. To reduce their experience of ecclesial life to a crude caricature based on the political activities of certain high-ranking bishops would be foolish, insulting, and utterly pointless.
