METROPOLITAN ILARION BLAMES ENEMIES OF R.P.Ts.
FOR BREAKDOWN OF
HIS MEETING WITH POMPEO
Interfax-Religiia,
2 November 2019
The head of the Department for External Church
Relations of the
Moscow patriarchate, Metropolitan Ilarion, accused enemies of
the Russian
church for the fact that his meeting with American Secretary of
State Mike
Pompeo, scheduled for 22 October, did not occur.
"I think that we have a lot of people who wish us
ill, who
have good contacts with the State Department, and when our
meeting was
announced they took measures so that it would not happen," the
metropolitan
said on air on the program Church and World on the Rossiia-24
television
channel.
He reported that he received an invitation to
meet with the
American secretary of state from members of the Antiochian
Archdiocese of North
America back in June. "I was not the initiator and I did not
expect
anything special from this meeting, but I gave my consent. There
were suggested
dates in August, but they did not suit me, and dates in
September were
proposed, but my September schedule was all filled. Then the
office of the
American secretary of state suggested three dates in October. I
selected one of
the three suggested dates since it was close to the celebration
of the 125th
anniversary of the mission of St. Raphael of Brooklyn and the
100th anniversary
of the Antioch Council to which I had been invited by the
Antiochians, the same
ones who arranged this meeting," the metropolitan explained.
"Until the meeting was announced, nobody tried to
prevent
it," the RPTs hierarch noted. However, the day before the
conversation,
the State Department published Pompeo's schedule for the next
day. "And,
lo, on the next day in the morning I received a phone call from
the State
Department that the meeting would be held, but it would be one
on one; but
earlier it had been suggested that a representative of the
Antioch church would
also participate in this meeting. And then an hour before this
meeting I
received a call to the effect that instead of Pompeo, some one
of his deputies
would meet with me. Well, I refused this meeting," the
metropolitan said.
According to the hierarch, the next day Pompeo
met in ceremonial
conditions with the leader of the Ukrainian schismatics,
Epifany, who,
according to news media reports, spoke about the violation of
believers' rights
in the Donbass and in Russian-occupied Crimea, and the secretary
of state
assured that the U.S.A. has supported, and will support the
Ukrainian church,
independent from the Russian Orthodox Church.
"Thus," Metropolitan Ilarion thinks, "Secretary
of State Pompeo once again has confirmed the position of the
U.S.A., which does
not by any means consist in the noninterference in
ecclesiastical affairs but
entails direct interference in this matters, and it consists in
the fact that
the U.S.A. does not conceal its support for the project of
Ukrainian
autocephaly."
It is the opinion of the representative of the
Russian church,
in the context of this support, that his aborted meeting with
the secretary of
state does not occasion surprise. (tr. by PDS, posted 4 November
2019)
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