AFTER
RETURNING FROM
U.S.A., METROPOLITAN ILARION CONDEMNS "ANTI-CHRISTIAN" IDEOLOGY
OF
THAT COUNTRY
The
chairman of the
OVTsSMP [Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow
Patriarchate],
Metropolitan Ilarion, who recently returned from the U.S.A.,
where he was
refused a reception by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
criticized on 9 November
the decision of an American court, according to which an
American, Jeffrey
Younger, does not have the right to save his seven-year-old son
from a sex
change, on which his mother, Jeffrey's former wife, is
insisting. She began
dressing the boy in girls' clothing, enrolled her in child care
under a girl's
name, and wants to complete the process of sex change by means
of chemical
castration. The court took her side, Jesus-Portal.ru reports.
Commenting
on this
incident at the request of the announcer of the program Church
and World on
state television Rossiia24, the chairman of the Department for
External Church
Relations of the Moscow patriarchate acknowledged that America
remains a very
religious country—the percentage of Americans who attend church
on Sundays is
much greater than an analogous indicator in Russia. "But at the
same time,
we see that ever more and more space is being commandeered by
the so-called
secular liberal ideology, which is to a great extent anti-church
and
anti-Christian," he continued.
Ilarion
called the
practice of sex change and recognition of a multiplicity of
genders in the
U.S.A. "phantasmagoria." After stressing that in this case the
issue
is a minor child, Ilarion said: "It is one thing when a person
reaches
maturity and, as an adult, makes one choice or another; and it
is quite another
when a child is castrated. This woman should be put in jail for
such a thing,
but lawyers defended her position and she won the legal process.
This gives
evidence, in my view, about a very serious spiritual degradation
of those
people in the United States of America in whose hands power
lies, including
judicial."
"I have
often met
in America religious leaders," the chairman of OVTsSMP shared,
"who
complain that if they make a certain statement contradicting the
current rules
of political correctness, then they may be put in jail." (tr. by
PDS,
posted 11 November 2019)
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