ROCOR in the annual Message raises the topic of decommunization

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia urges to bid farewell to the symbols of militant atheism and remove Lenin's body from the Red Square. This is said in a common message of the ROCOR Council of Bishops, signed by Metropolitan Illarion of Eastern America and New York, the Primate of the Russian Church Abroad.

"We call for the removal of the body from the central square of the nation of the one whose name is connected with the establishment of the militant atheist state, which led to the sacrifice of millions of lives to its ideology", says the Message.

The authors of the document urges "to rid ourselves of the old glorification of murderers by naming cities and towns after them, streets and plazas, train stations and parks."

They reminded that this year we remember the hundredth anniversary of the events of 1917; the anniversary of the restoration of the patriarchate and the tenth anniversary of the reestablishment of unity within the Russian Church. But the centenary of the "terrible bloody events of 1917" the ROCA "remembers with sorrow".