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Metropolitan Kirill speaks at a news conference in ‘Interfax’ on the threshold of the World Russian Peoples’ Council

31.03.2006 · Архив 2005-2009, События  

On 30 March 2006, a news conference of the Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad took place in the ‘Interfax’ agency press center. Taking part in the news conference were deputy head of the World Russian Peoples’ Council (WRPC) and chairman of the Russian Union of Writes V.N.Ganichev, member of the WRPC presidium bureau and DECR MP deputy chairman Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin and the WRPC executive secretary O.V.Yefimov.

The journalists were told about the upcoming 10th WRPC and topical problems of society that the participants in the forum would consider. Human rights and freedoms would be a central theme of the Council.

In his introductory speech Metropolitan Kirill focused the journalists’ attention to certain aspects of the work of human rights activists in Russia at present. The DECR Chairman thinks that one of their mistakes lies in that their activity does not conform with convictions and values of the majority of the Russian people, as an idea of human rights and freedoms has been elaborated within Western culture and has not been discussed and critically interpreted in Russia. He stressed the necessity of formulating an idea of human rights within Russian national, cultural and religious tradition through a wide public discussion. A draft statement on this subject is planned to be presented to the participants in the 10th WRPC. It was elaborated by a WRPC working group set up with the blessing of the Council’s head, His Holiness Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia.

Metropolitan Kirill answered many questions about Orthodox missionary activities, problems of Kosovo and the U.S. Department of State’s assessment of the situation with human rights in Russia and Afghanistan. He said that the USA assessed religious freedom in other countries on the basis of biased sources of information that lack objectivity. For instance, the U.S. Department of State criticized freedom of religion in Russia, but noted positive shifts in Afghanistan, where a man was tried for his conversion to Christianity.

The DECR chairman emphasized that the American diplomats used only biased sources of information from marginal groups. A distorted vision of the situation is inevitable because of that. At the same time the U.S. Department of State has never dialogued with the Russian Orthodox Church or other traditional religious communities in Russia about religious freedom.

The journalists were also interested in Metropolitan Kirill’s reaction to the refusal of the Office of Procurator-General of Russia to rehabilitate Emperor Nicholas II. ‘History will judge the Imperial Family not by what the Office of Procurator-General thinks, by what the Russian Orthodox Church thinks’, the DECR chairman said and added that the Church had canonized the Imperial Passion-Bearers.

As to the situation in Kosovo, Metropolitan Kirill said that independence of the region would have an extremely negative impact on the Orthodox population as even now, in the presence of international armed forces, the holy shrines are desecrated, and church buildings and monasteries of great cultural value are ruined.