Ukrainian authorities will not be able to tear apart the united religious community of the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill declared, addressing the session of the 22nd World Russian People's Assembly.
He said that recently in Ukraine "the interference of authorities in the most intimate questions of the spiritual life of citizens has been conducted more and more forcefully."
"Those who want to force people by means of compulsion to forget their spiritual kinship and to tear apart thousand-year-old spiritual bond will achieve only the opposite effect. Politicians who inflame hatred, hostility, and schism will have to admit their own historic defeat," the patriarch is confident.
He acknowledged that the problem of the defense of religious liberties from the interference of authorities is especially acute today in Ukraine.
"I would like to recall that history already knows of numerous attempts of such interference. However the persecutors of the church have gone off into historical oblivion, and all attempts to uproot the Christian identity have turned into defeat. . . . Persecutions of Christian in the Roman empire culminated in the triumph of the church under the holy emperor Constantine the Great. Repressions of the god-fighting authorities in the 20th century also were not able to eradicate Orthodoxy. On the contrary, after decades of persecutions and discrimination, a spiritual revival began and the people returned to faith," the patriarch noted.
This historical lesson, he added, "should have been learned well by the authorities who today, in the 21st century, again are trying to go along the path of the dictators of the past."
The patriarchate of Constantinople made the decision to proceed to the granting of autocephaly to the church in Ukraine, and also to restore immediately the stavropegium (representation immediately subordinate to the patriarch of Constantinople) in Kiev. Constantinople decided to annul the anathema and all prohibitions imposed by the RPTs on the head of the self-proclaimed Kiev patriarchate, Filaret, and to restore him and also the leader of the other uncanonical structure—the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church—Makary and their followers to ecclesiastical rights and rank. And "to restore to communion with the church" their flock. Thus Constantinople for the first time recognized as legitimate the schismatic church structures in Ukraine. In addition, the patriarchate of Constantinople effectively declared its rights to Ukraine, annulling the legal force of the historic letter of 1686 transferring to the Moscow patriarch the right to appoint the metropolitan of Kiev who was elected by a council of his diocese.
The RPTs called the decisions of the Synod the legalization of schism, and it declared that they will cause catastrophic harm, affecting the fate of millions of people not only in Ukraine but throughout the Orthodox world. Communion of Constantinople with schismatics is destroying canonical Orthodoxy and the absurdity of removing the anathema from Filaret is completely obvious, the press secretary of Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill declared. (tr. by PDS, posted 1 November 2018)
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