The Ukrainian junta persecuting the Christian Orthodox Church is but Communist Russia redux. And the Church, today just as back then, is shedding blood, shedding deadwood and does not cave in.

On May 13 the Russian Orthodox Church commemorated the New Martyrs of the Communist Era interred in the mass graves in Butovo Landfill, at the Southern outskirts of Moscow, where tens of thousands victims of godless Communism are waiting for the Day of Reckoning.

On that day, Patriarch Kirill together with scores of bishops and priests, with a throng of lay believers, celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the open air on this site. After the service His Holiness addressed the people with a sermon:

…A special feeling fills our souls when we pray at these graves…. In a sense, those buried here are almost our contemporaries, which means that their suffering, their courage, their faithfulness to the Lord, and their death should also be a very clear call for us to remain likewise faithful in spite all the challenges, in spite of all godless principles elevated today to the rank of “human rights”  and laws totally opposite to the Christian way of life.

Our generation, just like theirs, needs both courage and faith. We must not buy into any stupid but attractive slogans and ideas which have nothing to do with the Christian faith, with the great tradition of the Christian nation, with her sons and daughters who witnessed their loyalty to the Lord with their lives and their deaths.

The Divine Liturgy celebrated on this site revives the momentous event of Church history.. At the center of this history is the confession of Christ, even unto death… And the whole way of modern life itself, the consumer civilization, might be worse than any violent and legal persecution: it permeates our hearts and minds and lures us by the material desires away from Christ.

…The example of the New Martyrs calls us for spiritual awareness. No matter how easy or comfortable our lives have become, we must remember our calling to be faithful to Christ even unto death. Lest this resolve of ours weakens, let us hold on to those whose life and death is imprinted on the pages of our recent history and whose visible memorials are the mass grave mounds here at Butovo Landfill.

Below you can watch the video recording of the Patriarchal sermon in full, ten minutes long.