Patriarch of Moscow blames Haiti earthquake on “crime, drugs, and corruption”

Robertson redux?

Folks, this according to the Moscow Times:

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill said crime, drugs and corruption caused last week's massive earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in Haiti.

Kirill, speaking during a weekend visit to Kazakhstan, said the Haitian people bore responsibility for the calamity because they had turned away from God, the Ferghana.ru news agency reported late Monday.

"Haiti is a country of poverty and crime, famine, drugs and corruption, where people have lost their moral face," Kirill was quoted as saying.

He compared Haiti with the Dominican Republic, which are located on the same Caribbean island.

"I've visited the island divided between two countries, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. One of them is developing, while the other is affected by crimes, economic recession and political unrest. That part of the island was shattered by the earthquake," he said.

The patriarch also compared Haiti with Kazakhstan, noting that Kazakhstan has not experienced any earthquakes recently despite its seismological position, the news report said.

Asked to clarify Kirill's comments, a church spokesman said Tuesday that the news report had "misinterpreted" the patriarch's words and "taken them out of context." The spokesman, Alexander Volkov, could not immediately clarify, saying only that a transcript of the speech would appear "later" on the Moscow Patriarchate's web site.

A church scholar said Kirill's comments had astonished his foreign listeners in Almaty, but they were quite ordinary to the Orthodox faithful.

"For those who often listen to Patriarch Kirill, such statements seem quite ordinary, but I know that some people in Almaty were amazed," said the scholar, Alexander Soldatov, editor of the religious web site Portal-Credo.ru.

Kirill is known for his statements about large-scale disasters. Last year, he blamed the global financial crisis on the spiritual degradation of the world and called it a trial.

On Friday, the patriarch expressed his condolences to the Haitian president in a statement published on the Moscow Patriarchate's web site.

Kirill isn't the first religious leader to raise eyebrows over remarks about the magnitute-7 earthquake that destroyed the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, last Tuesday.

U.S. television evangelist Pat Robertson said last week that Haiti has been "cursed" because of what he called a "pact with the devil" in its history.

U.S. President Barack Obama's administration, which is overseeing massive relief efforts in Haiti, denounced Robertson's statement. "It never ceases to amaze me that in times of amazing human suffering somebody says something that can be so utterly stupid," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.

Repeated calls to the Kremlin's press office for comment about Kirill's comments went unanswered Tuesday.

President Dmitry Medvedev has sent a rescue team and humanitarian supplies on four cargo jets to Haiti.

Commentary. Folks, let’s talk theodicy.

I buy His All-Holiness Patriarch Kirill’s argument when he blamed the global financial crisis “on the spiritual degradation of the world”. I have no quarrel with that, I have said so myself. Man-made disasters are almost always due to moral turpitude of one kind or another. However, as in Robertson’s comments, I fail to see a direct cause-and-effect relationship between earthquakes or other natural disasters and moral turpitude.

Look, Robertson and His All-Holiness are not alone in making these connections. After Katrina, I remember a Larry King Show in CNN in which he interviewed the Dalai Lama and a Christian preacher, I don’t remember who. But I remember the words of the Dalai Lama distinctly: he launched into a lecture of on the nature and meaning of karma and basically stated that the effects of hurricane Katrina were a consequence of New Orleans' accumulated. aggregate, collective karma. The hurricane and its accompanying disaster was simply nature’s blind, inexorable way to even the moral scale.

The Dalai Lama got away with this because he’s a media darling, he’s “one of them” and his words hardly created any waves, although he basically meant that New Orleans had it coming.

Then we had Pat Robertson and the media frenzy he caused after Haiti. He’s the media whipping boy anyway, so the reaction shouldn’t have surprise us. And now, we get the head of the world’s largest national Orthodox Church pretty much saying the same thing but this time geopolitical considerations may mute any reaction except from angry atheists who are always angry anyway, so they can be easily dismissed.

The issue for the Christian is one of theodicy, of God’s execution of his judgment in the world. I question any notion that God would smite down entire populations by means of natural disasters in order to prove his character, vent his anger. and demand abject obedience. I mean, if God were interested in killing entire populations in order to prove His point – whatever that is – He has more efficient ways at his disposal: He can reduce, in an instant, any miscreant, from the devil onward, to nonbeing, without going around the game table of destruction, mayhem, suffering, and death even once, as if he were some sort of sadist delighting in what He was wrought.

This view of God is not Christian.

God allows evil so that good may emerge from it: he has endowed His creation with freedom to proceed according to its own natural laws and plate tectonics is just such a dynamic manifold of interdependent geophysical processes that frequently results in earthquakes. God then intervenes through us, through our rendering of assistance, and healing; through the renaissance of the Haitian people’s determination to survive, persist, and move forth, and  heal their culture and to contribute to the world. In the measure that we fail to assist, heal, and minister, God “fails” through us.

One more thing: God assumed the punishment of our sins by taking them on himself, in the Person of His Son. God knows what is to struggle to survive under the heavy weight of a wooden beam, despite preceding grievous bodily trauma. He’s being there, He’s done that. God has already suffered for the sins of the Haitian people and to say this earthquake is further punishment for their sins makes a mockery of the Cross.

What happened in Haiti is giving us an opportunity to become God’s hands to others. Let’s concentrate upon doing that and stop presuming that we know how, when, and whom God punishes. This presumption serves one’s ego and feeds the passions, but communicates no real religious knowledge. Those who entertain them will have to answer to Him, whether they are Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, or even Tibetan Buddhists.

- Hat tip to Get Religion for the heads up.