ENI also obtained a copy of the complaint which a church member, Innokenti Grigoryev, sent to the Moscow Patriarchate. Later that day, during a search of the seminary's dormitory, books by Schmemann, Meyendorff and Men were confiscated. Andrei Sannikov, a Yekaterinburg journalist who reported the story on local television, said that several volumes had been burned in an iron box in the school's courtyard as students looked on. Bishop Nikon's spokesman, Boris Kosinsky, told ENI that he knew nothing about the burning. He said that no books had been burned, but he confirmed that they had been confiscated from students.
Students are students.
If they read bad books, nobody knows what will come out of it. Of the three theologians whose works were confiscated, Men's views have always been considered controversial, but Schmemann and Meyendorff, both of whom held the post of dean at St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York, are widely respected as mainstream Orthodox thinkers. Both tried to formulate Orthodox Christian responses to the challenges of modern pluralistic society, and their books, smuggled into Russia under communism, led many Russian intellectuals to the church. Patriarch Alexei II, the church's leader, has often expressed his admiration for Schmemann and Meyendorff, whose books are studied in seminaries and religious schools across Russia. However, for arch-conservatives within the church these theologians are regarded with suspicion because they helped inspire the modernist movement within the Russian Orthodox Church, led by a Moscow priest Georgi Kochetkov, who has now been suspended.