Moscow Patriarchate

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Moscow thanks Pope for not pressing on meeting

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From Interfax (2009-12-16):

Pope Benedict and Archbishop Hilarion

Moscow — The Moscow Patriarchate is grateful to Pope Benedict XVI for understanding problems between the two Churches and not pressing on with visiting Russia and meeting with the Patriarch.

“Pope Benedict XVI perfectly understands the existing difficulties and therefore is not pressing on his meeting with the Patriarch, not to mention visiting Russia, as was done under his predecessor. We are grateful to him for this,” the head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk said in an interview published in Der Spiegel, whose Russian translation the Department for External Church Relations has published on its website.

The Russian Orthodox Church does not rule out the possibility of a meeting between the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the Pope, but believes that it should be preceded by the resolution of the problems between them rather than be turned into “just a protocol meeting and handshakes between TV cameras.”

“We want a breakthrough in our relations. When the situation in western Ukraine improves radically, when we, the Orthodox and the Catholics, agree once and for all that we are not adversaries gaining believers over from each other, then a meeting between the Pope and the Moscow Patriarch will be possible,” he said.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Greek Catholics in western Ukraine “seized hundreds of Orthodox churches, and thousands of Orthodox believers were actually thrown out into the street,” Archbishop Hilarion said.

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Moscow clarifies its position on Orthodoxy in America

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Source: Yahoo! Groups

[From the December 2009 Orthodox Christian Laity newsletter, vol. 5, Number 2]

The following letter translated from the Russian dated November 13, 2009 was received at the OCL Office via fax November 16. It is addressed to former OCL President Peter Petkas. It is from the Moscow Patriarchate, Russian Orthodox Church Holy Synod, Department for External Church Relations, Danilov Monastery. The letter relates to the recently published “Orthodox Christianity at the Crossroad A Great Council of the Church – When and Why”

Dear Mr. Petkas,

On behalf of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, I would like to thank you for the series of essay[s] devoted to the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church.

The Russian Orthodox Church, since the 1961 Rhodes Meeting has been a permanent participant in the Pan-Orthodox Pre-Council Conferences. The latest, 4th Pan-Orthodox Pre-Council Conference was devoted to the diaspora, and the Inter-Orthodox Preparatory Commission to meet in December 2009 will consider the problems of autonomy and autocephaly.

The vision of the future of Orthodoxy in America you have presented is consonant in many ways with the position of the Moscow Patriarchate on this matter. We in the Russian Orthodox Church are well aware of the specifics of Orthodox presence in America conditioned by the cultural, political and ethnic peculiarities of the region. As far back as the early 20th century, St. Tikhon, a future Patriarch of Moscow who for ten years headed the first Orthodox diocese in North America which took pastoral care of various ethnic groups, saw sufficient reasons for granting it an autonomous status. In 1970, the Russian Orthodox Church deemed it timely to grant the (autocephalous) status to its metropolia in North America. In this way, it continued the cause of St. Tikhon for building an independent church structure in the North American continent to be based on local rather than ethnic principle[s].

I would like to wish you good health and spiritual and physical strength in your service of the unity of Orthodoxy in America.

Archpriest Nikolay Balashov
Vice-Chairman
Department for External Church Relations
Moscow Patriarchate

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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 →

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A ‘Controversial’ Priest

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Patriarch Kirill at the funeral of Fr. Daniil Sysoyev

Patriarch Kirill at the funeral of Fr. Daniel Sysoyev

The Russian Orthodox priest gunned down in his church last week was buried yesterday in Moscow. There has been an intense amount of media coverage of this crime and most of the speculation, by the media and police authorities, centers on a suspected Islamist killer in light of Fr. Daniel Sysoyev’s outspoken and aggressive campaign to promote Orthodox Christianity among Muslims and other non-Christian communities.

From the Moscow Times:

Church insiders said the attack, which happened late Thursday in southern Moscow, could have been the work of radical Islamists, who had regularly threatened him for preaching to Muslims. Law enforcement officials said they believed religion was the primary motive in the killing.

The 35-year-old Sysoyev, who led the St. Thomas Church on Kantemirovskaya Ulitsa, was shot point-blank four times by an unidentified man wearing a medical face mask, police said. He was severely wounded and died in an ambulance.

Vladimir Strelbitsky, a 41-year-old regent who was nearby during the attack, was also shot and remains hospitalized in serious condition.

Citing sources with knowledge of the matter, Interfax reported that the killer called Sysoyev twice shortly before the shooting. Viktor Kupriyanchuk, the church’s elder, told Kommersant that the killer burst into the church shouting, “Where’s Sysoyev?” When Sysoyev stepped forward from behind the altar, the assailant shot him several times and attempted to flee.

Continue reading →

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