PUTIN MEETS WITH PATRIARCH KIRILL AND CONGRATULATES HIM ON HIS BIRTHDAY
Russian President Vladimir Putin met on Saturday with Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill and congratulated him on his birthday, the president's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, reported.
On Friday, Peskov told journalists: "Tomorrow the president will meet with Patriarch Kirill, whose birthday is today, but today he is on the road and therefore the president will greet him tomorrow."
Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill (whose secular name was Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundiaev) was born on 20 November 1946 in Leningrad into a priest's family. The local sobor of the Russian Orthodox Church elected Metropolitan Kirill patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus on 27 January 2009. He became the 16th patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus. The enthronement of Kirill was held on 1 February of that same year in the church of Christ the Savior. (tr. by PDS, posted 23 November 2015)
PUTIN CONGRATULATES PATRIARCH KIRILL ON HIS BIRTHDAY
Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill on his birthday.
"Your Holiness. Permit me to congratulate you warmly on your birthday and in your person to thank the entire Russian Orthodox Church for what it is doing for our Russian people, for the whole Orthodox world, and for people of other confessions, since the Russian Orthodox Church and you personally devote very much attention to inter-church and inter-religious harmony. I know how much you work with the pastors of others of our traditional religions and how together you maintain a high level of morality in our country and how carefully you deal with our multinational culture and our traditions," Putin said at a meeting with the patriarch.
The patriarch thanked the head of state for the greeting and noted that the church is doing what it should do, because it bears before God responsibility for the spiritual life of the nation.
"After all, inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations exert a very strong impact, really, on both the spiritual and the moral condition of people's lives. And therefore in our preaching we devote great attention so that Orthodox people—and we direct these words also to non-Orthodox people—realizing their joint responsibility for a united fatherland, will all work together to create both a healthy spiritual and a moral atmosphere in our society and fortify the greatness of our fatherland," the patriarch said. . . . (tr. by PDS, posted 23 November 2015)
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