PATRIARCH KIRILL SAYS HE MET UNDERSTANDING IN TALKS ABOUT UKRAINE WITH POPE AND HEAD OF ANGLICANS
Interfax-Religiia, 18 March 2022
Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill thinks that his recent talks with Pope Francis and the head of Anglicans, Archbishop Justin Welby, regarding the Ukraine question revealed "a high level of agreement and understanding."
"The most important impression that I took away was: our conversation partners have not distanced themselves from us and have not become our enemies, and this means that the political context, by God's mercy, has not sundered those ties that we created with our brothers, or, as they say now, partners, despite the crushing criticism on the part of a certain portion of our church community," the patriarch said on Friday at a session of the Supreme Church Council in Moscow.
He recalled the numerous appeals expressed in their time for the Russian Orthodox Church to leave the World Council of Churches and to curtail bilateral relations with other Christian churches.
"So today we are convinced that if all of this [i.e., participation in the work of international Christian associations—IF] had not occurred, then our church would have been completely isolated and we would not have had the least possibility of sharing with our partners our understanding of the situation and our view on what is happening. And, what is most important, we would not have had chances to see in these partners people who treat the position of the Russian Orthodox Church with understanding," Patriarch Kirill thinks.
As was reported, on 16 March he conversed in a video conference format with the heads of the Catholic and Anglican churches. Metropolitan of Volokolamsk Ilarion reported on the results of the conversations regarding the importance of exchanging information among religious leaders on the situation when such an exchange is difficult. "In essence, the two sides of the conflict are at opposite information poles. The information that we hear here is one information. The information that they get over there is entirely different information," the metropolitan said.
The patriarch described, in particular, the sources of the conflict, which has lasted eight years already. Special attention of the parties was given to the humanitarian aspect of the situation, and the exceptional significance of the negotiation process was also emphasized, the RPTs reported regarding the results of the conversations. (tr. by PDS, posted 19 March 2022)
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