Moscow Patriarchy

MOSCOW — The Russian Orthodox Church admitted on Thursday to altering an image on its Web site to remove a watch worn by its leader. The alteration was discovered this week by Russian bloggers who suggested that the deleted watch was an expensive timepiece Patriarch Kirill has admitted he owns but claims to never wear.

The editor who removed the watch from the photograph, which showed Patriarch Kirill at a meeting with Russia’s justice minister in 2009, might have gotten away with the ruse if she had noticed that the watch also appeared in a reflection on the highly glossed table at which the church leader was seated.

After the clumsiness of the deception was roundly mocked online, the church took the unusual step of apologizing and restoring the original image to its Web site.

Moscow Patriarchy

“One of the basic principles of our work is the fundamental rejection of the use of photo editing programs to alter images,” a church statement said. “A gross violation of our internal ethics has occurred and it will be thoroughly investigated.” The church also promised, “The guilty will be severely punished.”

The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported that the deputy head of the patriarch’s press service, Alexander Volkov, said the alteration had been made by a 24-year-old female employee “on her own personal inexperienced initiative.” Mr. Volkov added: “Unfortunately, this person showed pointless personal initiative without getting an approval from her supervisors. Clearly, this is a folly, a misunderstanding; of course, we don’t want to conceal anything. There is nothing to be ashamed of, we don’t study every photograph in search of anything that might seem weird to our compatriots.”

The embarrassing discovery further stoked anger over the church and its often lavish displays of wealth and power. It also struck yet another blow to the moral authority of Russian officialdom, which has been dwindling rapidly in light of recent scandals involving police abuse, electoral fraud and blatant corruption.

Russian bloggers have expressed particular outrage about the patriarch’s watch, rumored to be a Breguet time piece worth tens of thousands of dollars. It was first sighted on the wrist of the patriarch in 2009 on a visit to Ukraine, where he held forth in a televised interview on the importance of asceticism. At the time, a Ukrainian news site, V.I.P. Glavred, published a close-up photograph of the watch apparently poking out from beneath the patriarch’s vestments. The site also identified the watch as a Breguet Réveil du Tsar model, which retails for about $30,000.

In an interview with a prominent Russian television journalist this week, Patriarch Kirill admitted for the first time that he did in fact own the Breguet watch in question, but insisted that he had never worn it. The watch, he said, was in a box that he only recently found among a collection of gifts he had received over the years. As for photographs that appear to show him wearing the watch, he said he suspected that they had been created through digital manipulation.

Perhaps inspired by those remarks, some Russian bloggers seemed intent on making the most elaborate possible remixes of the patriarch and his hidden watch.

It is not likely that the apology will put an end to the debate about the watch or dampen the increasingly barbed discussions of the church’s role in Russian society. Over the last decade, the church has grown immensely powerful, becoming so close to the Kremlin that it often seems like a branch of government. It has extended its influence into a broad spectrum of public life, from schools to courts to politics. Patriarch Kirill publicly backed Vladimir V. Putin in last month’s presidential election.

Father Vsevolod Chaplin, a spokesman for the church, said in a telephone interview that the discussion of the patriarch’s watch was distracting attention from more serious issues, like “the borders of artistic freedom and what the gospels mean for us today.”

“Tomorrow,” the church spokesman said, “they will talk about what kind of glasses the patriarch wears, then about which kind of pen I use what the pictures hanging on the wall.”

Recently, church officials have stoked the ire of Russian liberals by seeking the imprisonment of members of a female punk rock group called Pussy Riot who held an impromptu concert inside Moscow’s main cathedral in February as part of a protest against the church’s political ties. Three suspected members of the group (who only appear in public wearing masks) are now in jail awaiting trial.