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Catholic churches and charities in Russia have been targeted in a wave of raids on organisations with foreign links, which the government has labelled “foreign agents”.
The raids on non-government organisations across the country prompted the German and French governments to summon Russian diplomats in Berlin and Paris to express their concern.
“The Catholic Church is classified as an organisation benefitting from foreign funds,” Father Kirill Gulbunov, spokesman for the Moscow archdiocese, told Catholic News Service.
He added: “We can’t help feeling surprised that associations linked with our Church are viewed as possible sources of extremism or terrorist activity.”
Father Gulbunov said the people responsible had evidently received a very broad list of organisations to watch as part of the nationwide operation.
“Although we can’t say whether local authorities are deliberately using the operation against the Catholic Church, it has caused surprise and consternation,” he said.
On April 3 government agents “inspected” the Caritas headquarters in St Petersburg. On April 9 security agents raided the Catholic agency’s Moscow offices.
The director of Caritas in St Petersburg, Natalya Pevtsova, told the Interfax news agency that officials had “examined everything … from the state of our toilets to our charity documents” during the raid.
In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered checks on thousands of nongovernmental organisations and the seizing of computers and documents, under a July 2012 law requiring groups with outside funding to register as “foreign agents”.
On March 15, a Catholic parish in Novocherkassk was ordered to pay a 450,000-rouble ($NZ17,000) fine for allegedly failing fire safety standards.
Father Aleksi Polisko, rector of the city’s Most Blessed Virgin Mary parish, which has just 50 regular Massgoers, told Agence France-Presse the fine was around 150 times the parish’s weekly income, but said the local procurator had threatened to close his church unless it was paid within a month.
German-born Bishop Clemens Pickel of Saratov, Russia, told Germany’s KNA Catholic news agency he believed the raids were legal but predicted they would place the Catholic Church, “intentionally or not, in a bad light in the eyes of the people”.
Russian newspapers said the Russian Orthodox Church had not been affected by the raids.
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