Metropolitan Kirill Meets Taize Community Prior

The chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad met the prior of Taize ecumenical community Brother Alois and other members of their delegation.

The meeting was also attended by the vice–chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate Father Vsevolod Chaplin and the secretary for inter-Christians relations of the DECR MP Father igor Vyzhanov.

Metropolitan Kirill noted good relations, which had developed between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Taize Community. ‘The first prior of the community Brother Roger who died tragically last August had a special role in those relations. Your loss echoed painfully in our hearts’, he said.

The chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate said he was convinced that a further cooperation must be based on intention to do our best to advocate and maintain Christian values in the secularized world of today, especially as the Christianity faces many challenges in Europe. First of all it deals with imposition of the consumer culture on the younger generation, who lose their spiritual and moral guidelines threatening thereby the future of the European civilization.

The prior of Taize noted that they saw a warm faith in this country and wanted the Russian Orthodox Church to share its spiritual experience with the West.

Metropolitan Kirill said that the question of values was becoming a main issue of today. The Russian Church has initiated the discussion on inter-relation of freedom and moral responcibility in the society. A declaration passed by the recent World Russian National Council was dedicated to the matter. Pope Benedict XVI while having a meeting with Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad fully supported the position as formulated in the document.

Brother Alois said that any values must have a basis. That was a question regularly discussed during Taize-organized events.

In the end of the meeting the chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate said he hoped that Taize Community’s work would facilitate promotion of the Christian values and good relations between the Christian Churches’ representatives, as it had always been.