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Secret police
get chance to confess
RUSSIAN secret policemen, the successors to the KGB,
now have their own church in which to confess sins, seek spiritual guidance and
pray for salvation.
Officers from the FSB, Russia's domestic security
service, can as of this week slip out of their grim Moscow headquarters and pop
into the Church of St Sofia of God's Wisdom next door.
Patriarch Aleksiy, the head of the Russian Orthodox
Church, blessed the 17th century place of worship on Wednesday. He also wished
the FSB every success in its work.
The church, ministering to the whole Lubyanka complex,
would help FSB officers "carry out the difficult work of ensuring the
country's security in the face of external and internal ill-wishers, if not
enemies", he said.
Although it is surrounded on three sides by the FSB's
top-secret offices, St Sofia's is open to the public and yesterday attracted a
small congregation for a service.
... Priests and religious believers were a
special target of the Soviet secret police, executed, sent to the Gulag or
hounded out of their jobs for their faith.
Since the Soviet Union's collapse, however, the Church
has enjoyed privileged status, part of a wider state campaign to boost Russian
patriotism and fill the ideological void left by the fall of communism.
Despite his past as a KGB spy abroad, President Putin
is believed to be the first Russian head of state since Tsarist times to be a
committed Christian.”
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