Print This Post


An international conference “The Voice of St. Andrew the First-Called in the Modern World” arranged by the St. Andrew Foundation and the Patras metropolis of the Orthodox Church of Greece took place in Patras on November 17-18, 2017.

The day earlier a shrine with a particle of the relics of St. Seraphim of Sarov was brought to Patras from Russia by Bishop Iliya of Balakhna, a vicar of the Nizhny Novgorod metropolitan area with the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia.

Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations (DECR), sent a message to the participants of the Conference, which says:

“Nowadays the Russian Orthodox Church continues St. Andrew’s mission among people of the historical Russia, bringing witness about the faith of our forefathers, the faith of the apostles. Through God’s mercy, thousands of new parishes, hundreds of monasteries and convents, and dozens of new dioceses have been opened in the Russian Church in recent decades; thousands of young people are studying in theological schools and at theological departments of many universities. We see how the seed planted by Apostle Andrew many ages ago in the Russian land is bringing new abundant fruit.”

Taking part in the conference with the blessing of Metropolitan Hilarion was deacon Andrei Titushkin, a staff member of the DECR secretariat for far abroad countries. He presented report entitled “Church and popular veneration of Apostle Andrew the First-Called in Russia.”