Metropolitan Hilarion of Eastern America and New York: ‘to cherish the great gift of unity of the Church and the people of God’

‘In the recent time we have looked with concern and pain at the situation of the Church in Ukraine. One cannot help being terrified by the fragmentation of the Orthodox Church in this oldest territory of Russian Orthodoxy. We ourselves had to live in separation for decades and only a year ago managed to restore the Eucharistic and canonical unity with the fullness of the Russian Orthodox Church. Living in separation however, we always felt it like an illness which needed to be healed and never forgot about the saving nature of unity’, Metropolitan Hilarion of Eastern America and New York, First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, stressed in his address to the Bishops’ Council at the Church of Christ the Savior.

Speaking about ‘those who seek premature autocephaly, even at the price of possible subsequent union with the Catholics or any other way of separation from the Russian Church’, His Eminence urged ‘to pray that the Lord may put them on the right track’.

The First Hierarch of the Church Abroad defined his principled position on ‘the Ukrainian problem’ saying that ‘the church unity should not become an exchange card in political games’. He called to leave ‘problems of national identity and statehood to politicians’ and expressed the conviction that ‘the church people do not need autocephaly’, adding that ‘nobody denies the characteristic features of the three Eastern Slavic peoples, but since their baptism they have been tied by the bonds of love and mutual respect in one Church, and nobody will benefit from tearing up her seamless robe’.

‘In our dioceses abroad we cannot be broken into Little, White, Great, etc. Russians. Why should we give an occasion for new divisions, which may turn out to be more pernicious outside than they are inside the homeland? We pray to God and hope that things here will not go as far as this temptation and that all our brothers will always cherish in gratitude the great gift of the unity of the Church, the unity of the people of God in which there is neither Greek nor Jew, nor any other isolation’, Metropolitan Hilarion said in conclusion.

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