Metropolitan Kirill: Caution of many Orthodox Christians speaking of human rights is justified, as they fear to embrace the alien and harmful to the soul ideas along with the good and correct ones

While talking about the two-years work done by the working group of the Orthodox clergymen, theologians, scholars and pubic figures on the draft of the Basic Teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights, the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad remarked that ambivalent attitude to this theme in ecclesiastical society had been reflected in the views of the group’s participants.

‘On the one hand, we have seen positive effect of human rights on the life of the people. Thanks to the care to respect these rights in the post-war years the Soviet state contained its persecution of the believers,’ Metropolitan Kirill underscored presenting the document to the participants in the Bishops’ Council. ‘On the other hand, however, we have seen in the recent decades how human rights could be an instrument aimed against spiritual and moral foundations of people’s life. Those dealing with human rights in our society try to strengthen the philosophy of life that is non-religious, ethically relativistic and hedonistic.

Metropolitan Kirill noted that members of the working group had tried to answer the question whether human rights are genetically linked with Christianity or came from the sources alien to it. ‘Different opinions of human rights are most clearly revealed in our Church and in the entire Orthodox world in the answer to this question. The caution with which many Orthodox Christians speak about human rights is justified. The believers fear to embrace the alien and harmful to the soul ideas along with the good and correct ones, ‘Metropolitan Kirill underscored.

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