Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk

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Archbishop Hilarion responds to U.S. State Dept. report on religious freedom

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In late October, the State Department released the 2009 Report on International Religious Freedom, a study annually submitted to Congress. Remarks on the study by Michael H. Posner, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, are available here. (The country report for Turkey is available here.) The Russian foreign ministry said, on publication of the report, that it was compelled “to reiterate our previous repeated assessments of the U.S. State Department report as a politically engaged, garbled document which intentionally distorts the real situation of religious freedom in Russia and keeps silent about positive developments in this field.”

Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk

Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk issued his own response to the State Department study (full text at the bottom of this post) which amounts to a summary of the Moscow Patriarchate’s position on religious freedom in Russia. While much more temperate than the Russian government’s response, the archbishop’s letter did, however, question why the authors of the religious freedom report voiced “concern for the rights of Satanists.”

In a related development, today’s Moscow Times reports on proposed changes to the Russian Law on Religious Activity that some Protestant Christians say will result on a crack down on missionary activity:

Ordinary believers face fines for sharing their faith with strangers in the metro or on the street under amendments drafted by the Justice Ministry that are stirring worries among Protestant groups about a clampdown on religious freedom.

Under the proposed changes to the Law on Religious Activity, only leaders of registered religious groups and their officially authorized missionaries would be allowed to pass out religious literature, preach and talk about their faith in public, according to a draft of the amendments published in Kommersant on Wednesday. Continue reading →

Russian Orthodox launch the St. Gregory Nazianzus Foundation

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Robert Moynihan, editor of the Inside the Vatican newsletter, is in Moscow visiting with Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk and other church people. He reports that “the Russian Orthodox have now decided to engage with Catholics, and others, in a collaboration which can be compared to an actual alliance against the great social evils of our day, not only in Russia, but also throughout Europe and the world.” Moynihan says that this effort will be directed by a new think tank, the St. Gregory Nazianzus Foundation, which has the blessing of Patriarch Kirill.

Archbishop Hilarion, working with a team of young Orthodox clergy and laymen, decided to found the St. Gregory Nazianzus Foundation in order to work together with Catholics and others in the West, to support traditional spiritual values in Russia, but also throughout the world,

St. Greory was a theologian in the 300s, well before the division of the Church into East and West, and so is venerated both by the Catholics and by the Orthodox. He is a Father of the Church for all Christians.

The co-founders of this new foundation are Archbishop Hilarion and Vadim Yakunin, one of the wealthiest businessmen in Russia. Yakunin has made a personal commitment to support the spiritual and social vision articulated by Patriarch Kirill. Continue reading →

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Archbishop Hilarion on Orthodox-Catholic relations

Archbishop Hilarion on social problems

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From the Moscow Patriarchate, Nov. 12, 2009:

Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk

During his meeting with foreign journalists on 11 November 2009, Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk answered questions concerning urgent problems of society today.

Asked about the Church’s view of some problems of bioethics, especially the use of artificial life-support systems to prolong the life of a patient, he said,

‘It is a very complicated issue. We in the Orthodox Church do not believe that one’s life should be certainly prolonged by artificial means. We believe a human being is born when it pleases God and dies when it pleases God. Complications arise when artificial life-support systems are used in a critical situation when there is a hope for one’s survival and return to normal life. But then one’s organism as if adjusts itself to these machines without one’s regaining consciousness. One continues to live in a vegetative state and here a complicated dilemma arises indeed: who can switch off these machines thus actually killing a patient? I believe there is no unambiguous answer to this question and perhaps there cannot be such, and the situation has to be resolved differently in every particular case’. He also underlined the importance of cooperation between medics and the Church in solving complicated ethical problems. Continue reading →

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Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew at Fordham

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(sigh) Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was at Fordham University in New York to receive an award yesterday and give a speech. A number of things jump out. First, a recap.

In his post, “The Patriarch, the Enlightenment, and the Environment,” here on the Observer, Fr. Gregory Jensen reminds us that the human heart needs communion with a person, not an inanimate object.

Whether in the Holy Trinity or in the human family, personal communion is radically different then the union possessed by “molecules of water” or by “particles of atmosphere.” The union of the physical creation is impersonal. There is no communion between molecules of water or particles of air.

Thus the comparison of the human to the non-human world in these terms makes all conversation about what is in our best personal or national interest meaningless. When particularity is subsumed into an abstraction, the differences between people ultimately have no meaning.

But, in his Fordham speech, Patriarch Bartholomew offered this:

The truth is that we refuse to behold God’s Word in the oceans of our planet, in the trees of our continents, and in the animals of our earth. In so doing, we deny our own nature, which demands that we stoop low enough to hear God’s Word in creation. We fail to perceive created nature as the extended Body of Christ. Eastern Christian theologians always emphasized the cosmic proportions of divine incarnation. For them, the entire world is a prologue to St. John’s Gospel. And when the Church overlooks the broader, cosmic dimensions of God’s Word, it neglects its mission to implore God for the transformation of the whole polluted cosmos.

Certainly, in a setting like Fordham, it is appropriate to offer a gracious nod to the “ecumenical imperative.” But in his speech, the Patriarch went beyond this to invoke the familiar tropes related to the “end of history” and the “clash of civilizations” to show how these were obstacles to interfaith relations — and the “true nature” of religion.

Christians and Muslims lived alongside each other during the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires, usually supported by their political and religious authorities. In Andalusia Spain, believers in Judaism, Christianity and Islam coexisted peacefully for centuries. Such historical models reveal possibilities for our own pluralistic and globalized world.

He did not indicate when this golden age of interfaith comity in Spain ended, but it certainly ran out of steam with the Reconquista, a program which asserted a very particular understanding of religious faith. What’s more, the Patriarch could have helpfully pointed out that Christian-Moslem dialogues are too often one-way conversations. As Archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos) has written in “Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essays in Global Concerns”: Continue reading →

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