Perampasan_harta_benda_Gereja_Ortodoks_Rusia_1922
Seorang pendeta yang bernama Patriark Tikhon juga ikut menghalangi kegiatan penyitaan tersebut. Ia mengeluarkan seruan pada 28 Februari 1922 yang isinya antara lain adalah melarang penyitaan benda-benda suci dan menyebut tindakan ini sebagai pencurian benda-benda suci. Untuk memperkuat pendapatnya, Patriark merujuk pada 73 kanon para rasul serta 10 kanon Dewan Protodeutera. Canon 10: Those who appear to be victims of their own passions not only do not shudder at the thought of the punishment provided by the sacred Canons, but have actually dared to laugh them to scorn. For they distort themselves, and in conformity with their venomous nature they forge their will awry; in order that thanks to the magnanimity of their venom, according to St. Gregory the Theologian, not only may the evil be kept from affecting their responsibility, but may even be thought something divine. For this holds true in the case of the Apostolic Canon which says that no one shall appropriate any golden or silver vessel that has been sanctified, or any piece of cloth, to his own use. For that would be unlawful. If anyone be caught doing so, let him be disciplined with excommunication. Taking this Canon to be in effect an advocacy of their own unlawful deeds, they allege that one must not deem those men worthy of deposition who employ the venerable tablecloth of the Holy Table to make a tunic for themselves or reshape it into any other vestment. Not only so, but not even those who employ the holy chalice. Oh, what impiety! or the venerable paten; or things akin to these, because they expend them for needs of their own, or defile them outright. For the Canon says that those who become guilty of this are to be punished with excommunication, but has made no one liable to deposition for such an act. But who would tolerate the magnitude of any such perversion and impiety? For notwithstanding that the Canon inflicts excommunication upon those who merely use what is sanctified, but do not appropriate it to the extent of purloining it entirely, they, on the other hand, exempt from deposition those who plunder and sacrilege the equipment of the Holies of Holies, and as for those who pollute the venerable patens or sacred cups by putting them into use for the serving of food, so far at any rate as they rely upon their own judgment, they rank them as undeposed, notwithstanding that the contamination has become apparent to all, and it is plain that those who do such things not only incur liability to deposition from office, but even become subject to charges of committing the worst kind of ungodliness. Wherefore the holy Council has decreed that (those who purloin for their own profit, or who misuse for some unsacred purpose, in general any one of the sacred and holy vessels or utensils in the sacrificial altar, or of the vestments, or the holy chalice, or the paten, or the tongs, or the venerable tablecloth, and the so-called “air”),i are to be compelled to undergo total and complete deposition. For one charge is that of having profaned, and the other charge is that of having plundered the holies. As touching those, however, who convert to an unsacred use for themselves, or bestow upon another person, consecrated vessels or vestments outside of the sacrificial altar, the Canon excommunicates them and we join in excommunicating them. But as for those who utterly purloin them and take them away we make them liable to condemnation as sacrilegists. – [https://sites.google.com/site/canonsoc/home/-canons-of-the-particular-councils/constantinoplitanum-861 The Canons of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The so called First-Second Council – 861.]