Old Rite Metropolitan Kornily appreciates his meetings with Metropolitan Kirill and other Russian Orthodox hierarchs

On 27 March 2006, ‘Interfax’ news agency published an interview with the Old Rite Metropolitan Kornily of Moscow and All Russia who has led the Russian Orthodox Church of the Old Rite since October 2005. A part of the interview was about the development of relations of this big Old Rite Church with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Metropolitan Kornily positively assessed the results of his meeting with diocesan bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, which ‘help remove the centuries-old walls of misunderstanding, suspicion and estrangement.’ However, it is often necessary to overcome a suspicious attitude of the old rite believers, as ‘genetic memory of hostile attitude to the old rite believers on the part of the ecclesiastical and secular power in the past is still strong.’

The head of the Old Rite Church spoke warmly about his meeting with the Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad on 3 March 2006 and described it as held ‘in the atmosphere of benevolence and mutual understanding’. According to Metropolitan Kornily, the time has come ‘to coordinate our efforts to help the Russian people recover their traditional values that have been largely lost as a result of dramatic changes in history and to direct these common efforts to the struggle for the preservation of our people, their moral and spiritual health, as heavy drinking, drug addiction, lack of moral discipline, open propaganda of different kinds of vice have reached unprecedented scale in our country.’

Metropolitan Kornily thinks that debates on theology and history between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Old Rite believers ‘are both possible and preferable, as ‘the essence of the great ecclesiastical tradition of the 17^th century demands comprehensive interpretation with theological and historical objectivity’.

Metropolitan Kornily appreciated the decision of the Hole Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church to set up a Commission on the Old Rite parishes and cooperation with the Old Belief and underscored the necessity of making the Commission to meet the demands of the time rather than to be a formal entity’.