The Trials of a True Believer

Nine sermons bring fame and misfortune to a Soviet priest

Even in the Soviet Union, Easter is one of the year's most joyous days. By Orthodoxy's ancient Julian calendar, this year's feast comes the day before May Day. The long cruel grip of a northern winter is broken, and this week 30 million Orthodox are fasting in anticipation of the holy day, painting gaily decorated eggs and baking rum-laced cakes to be blessed at Easter Eve services. Crowds, including thousands of atheists, will flock to watch the predawn procession of crosses and icons around Moscow's Yelokhovsky Cathedral, where Young Communists in red armbands stand by outside to see that only regular worshipers actually attend the rites. Inside, bathed in the glare of thousands of candles, the congregation will join Pimen, Patriarch of All the Russias, in the great cry of triumph, "Khristos voskres!" (Christ is risen!).

On the same day, some 28 miles to the northeast in the small village of Grebnevo, a stocky, balding priest named Dmitri Dudko will assist at local services. Dudko, 56, is one of the most celebrated preachers in his country. But even in Grebnevo he is the second-ranking priest and will not be in the pulpit. He has been assigned to the town as a kind of ecclesiastical banishment. Yet it is Dudko, not Patriarch Pimen, who has come to symbolize Christianity's will to survive in the officially godless nation. As much as any man in the Soviet Union, he has borne effective witness to the relevance of religion in a modern state.

Father Dudko's reputation rests mainly on nine sermons delivered at St. Nicholas' Church in Moscow in late 1973 and 1974. In the West, it is difficult to appreciate their impact or the courage required to deliver them. The churches in the U.S.S.R. are not permitted to distribute books publicly, conduct classes or discussion groups. Indeed, they cannot evangelize at all. The sermon is the only means left to instruct the faithful, but priests have long been expected to limit their remarks to matters of ritual.

Instead, Dudko inaugurated "dialogue" sermons at Saturday night services, responding to written questions so he could address the real interests of his congregation. So powerful was his speaking style, so candid his discussions of the moral tensions in modern Soviet life that the church was soon overflowing with visitors, many of them dissatisfied young atheists. Such a response would usually guarantee success for a clergyman. For Dudko, it led to police interrogations, then removal from his parish by nervous church authorities. It very nearly ended his career. Dudko apologized to the Orthodox hierarchy for his indiscretions, and that, in addition to his popularity, enabled him to remain a priest.

While Dudko has been ministering in obscurity, his sermons survive. Transcribed by listeners and distributed in samizdat (underground circulation of typescripts), they ultimately made their way to the West. They are now available in English under the title Our Hope (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press; Crestwood, N.Y.; $6.95). One of Dudko's aims was to make religion less abstract, to connect it with everyday life. His most eloquent answers, in fact, deal with the pressing problems of modern society. They are familiar: half the marriages in many Soviet cities end in divorce; alcoholism and hooliganism are steadily increasing.

Dudko, a patriotic citizen, preaches that atheism provides no motivation for people to lead contented lives or treat one another lovingly and that it is harming his nation: "Atheism is like an atom of evil undergoing fission. Moral, domestic and social disintegration results. Having undermined faith in God, atheism has undermined all bases of social life . . . Scientific development and progress have taken great strides forward. But mora conditions have taken an even greater stride backward."

Taunting those who continually persecute Christians, he declares: "The atheists have nothing left but physical force to make you shut up. But physical force shows their impotence." He uses the terrors of Soviet history in order to convey the Easter message: "We are forced to ponder [the resurrection from the dead] by those who perished in the two world wars, by those who perished in concentration camps and other torture chambers. They were a countless multitude . . . The resurrection unmasks all human injustice and restores justice."

The son of poor peasants, Dudko underwent a sudden conversion at 16 after reading a prayer book. During brief combat duty with the Red Army, he was wounded and contracted typhoid fever. He then entered the Novodevichy Theological Institute in Moscow and was arrested in 1948 when a fellow seminarian accused him of "anti-Soviet" agitation. "The only thing they had against me was that I was a true believer," Dudko told TIME's Marsh Clark. He was sentenced without a trial to ten years at a hard-labor camp in the Urals. Released in 1956 during the post-Stalin thaw, he completed seminary, married and became a priest. Since then, he has baptized thousands of adult converts.

A man who seems fully at peace with the world, Dudko displays no bitterness as he discusses his current assignment to an out-of-the-way rural parish: "I don't get along very well with the [lay] church council, but I am at a place where I can work." His major regret is that he must commute to Grebnevo from his three-room Moscow apartment and only sees his wife, Son Mikhail, 16, and Daughter Natalya, 14, for a few days each fortnight. "I'm sorry I can't help the children," he says. "My daughter is often yelled at. Children shout things like 'There is no God,' and when they brush against her and mistreat her, they say 'Let God help you now.' My son got sick and went to the local doctor, who sent him immediately to a psychiatrist because the boy was wearing a cross."

Father Dudko is encouraged by the founding in 1976 of the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers' Rights, though Father Gleb Yakunin and other leaders have reportedly been threatened with prosecution if they persist in their efforts. Dudko also takes heart from what he sees as a religious revival. "There is a spiritual crisis in this country, a vacuum that has to be filled," he says. "A woman came to me and asked for her child to be baptized even though she is not a Christian. Why? She replied, 'To fill the emptiness in my child. I don't want him to be the same as me.' "

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