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A plenary session of the Christian Interconfessional Consultative Committee of the CIS and Baltic countries (CICC) on “Christian family – a ‘little church’ and a basis of health society’ took place in Moscow on 4 February 2010.

The session was chaired by the CICC co-chairmen: Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate department for external church relations; Archbishop Paolo Pezzi, archbishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of the Mother of God in Moscow; and V. Vlasenko, chairman of the Department for external church relations of the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians Baptists.

Metropolitan Hilarion read out greetings from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia to the participants. In his address, the DECR chairman noted destructive tendencies in contemporary society concerning family, childbirth, education of children, and upholding of noble spiritual and moral ideals. Metropolitan Hilarion expressed his confidence in the necessity of a dialogue with state authorities and representatives of religious organizations for the sake of advocating the traditional biblical view on the family and of overcoming demographical crisis.

The Russian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Catholic and Lutheran Churches of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Russian Union of Evangelical Christian Baptists, the Russian Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith, the Russian Union of the Evangelical Faith Christians, and the Adventists of the Seventh Day are members of the CICC.

Representatives of the Christian Churches discussed some topical modern problems, for instance, correlation of morality and traditional Christian values, understanding of family relations and education of children in the Bible, attitude to the mixed marriages, and the problems of bioethics.

Final document of the plenary session of the Christian Interconfessional Consultative Committee of the CIS and Baltic countries and Declaration on traditional Christian values were adopted unanimously.

The CICC co-chairman held a press conference.