Originally from Sardinia, arrived in Russia in 1985, Ioann Guaita, 60, is a hieromonk (a monk ordained a priest in the Orthodox Churches) of the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian, in the center of Moscow.
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LE FIGARO.- How have you seen the Orthodox Church evolve since 1985?
Ioann GUAITA.-
At the time, it was not really a clandestine Church, but it was a Church that was persecuted and strongly limited by the State until the end of the 1980s. Then the State, from time of Gorbachev, began to give more and more freedom to the Church.
And finally, now, we are at a point where not only the state gives full freedom to the Church, but even where some people would like to use the Church as a kind of national symbol.
Communism, which paradoxically embodied a national ideology, has given way to a time when there is no longer any national idea.
But the Russians are used to living with a national idea, which is not the case for all peoples...
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