Normative legal acts regulating social rights of clergy of Russian Orthodox Church: some sketches on sources of regulation of clergy status

In 2024, the Barsov Society launched the scientific publishing project “Sources of Canon and Church Law of the Russian Church” aimed at systematizing and analyzing the corpus of church legal sources of the Russian Orthodox Church. This article presents the existing system of current legal sources of the Russian Federation, which determines the legal status of clergy. In particular, due to the limited volume of the article, provisions of the Constitution of Russia and norms of international law are deliberately omitted, being left for presentation in the full version of the research, and just one group - regulatory legal acts concerning the social rights of clergy (wages, insurance experience, pension provision) are considered. It is concluded that introduction of legislative changes affecting the status of clergy is multi-vector in nature. The study is assumed to become part of a comprehensive monographic research that is to cover all current acts of Russian legislation, which in one way or another relate to the legal status of clergy.