The permit for church's building in the post-reform Russia (on the example of the Moscow region)

This article analyses the process of getting permission for building new churches of the after-reform period. The source of the present research is the archival cases about the church building which are kept in the Moscow Central State Archive. The author distinguishes three stages in the described process: submitting the documents, checking the information and arriving at decisions. First, the petitioners submitted their requests with the detailed personal data, about the reasons for building a new church, about the source and the amount of the financing, about the availability of the land for the church construction, about the consecration of the altar, and the plan of the building and the area. The commission arrived at the decision about permitting or rejecting to build a certain church taking into consideration all these factors. The author comes to a conclusion that the main factor in such decisions for the church authority was the material security of a priest, the ability of a parish to financially support a church construction, to maintain the church itself and the clergy of the parish. The process described in the article helps to supplement our knowledge about the parish creation, and to understand the scale of the problem of maintaining the clergy which has an influence even on this aspect of the parish life.