The Helmsman of the Russian Church at its Historic Turning Point (Patriarch Kirill)
The Russian Orthodox Church is celebrating 15 years of leadership by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus'. We owe many changes in public discourse to his efforts...
Article by the rector of the Russian Orthodox University — Alexander Shchipkov
The Russian Orthodox Church is celebrating 15 years since the enthronement of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia. A decade and a half - is it a lot or a little? For the Church and for the country, this time turned out to be a historical turning point. We happen to live in an era of dramatic changes both in the world and in the minds of people. The Church is responsible for people, for their spiritual state; it is in the thick of events that are far from over. Therefore, from the point of view of the tasks that face the Church in this difficult period, 15 years is not too long a period, and it is still too early to sum up the results of the patriarchal service. But it is quite appropriate to look back and analyze what has already been achieved.
The Path of the Church and Changing Public Discourse
A lot has been done in 15 years. New synodal departments and commissions, new dioceses and metropolitan districts, and several exarchates (Africa, Western Europe and Southeast Asia) were opened. The Supreme Church Council and the Inter-Council Presence have been created - an advisory body of bishops, clergy, monastics and laity, helping to develop the most important church decisions.
But more importantly, over these years the general path of development of the Church in the post-Soviet period has been determined. This includes the socialization of the Church, that is, the restoration of its historical role in society, and, secondly, further internal integration, that is, overcoming intra-church splits, including those initiated by radical secularism.
Both processes go quite quickly. This can be seen at least from the concepts and theses that over the past decade and a half have become entrenched in the public space thanks to the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus'. We are talking about such concepts as “traditional values”, “value sovereignty”, and the “Russian world”. This is the thesis about the priority of the spiritual over the material, which was included in the National Security Strategy and in the presidential decree “On approval of the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values” (dated November 9, 2022). No less important is another patriarchal thesis - about the family as the basis of society. It is important to understand that our Russian society basically consists of families, and not of individuals and “small groups”.
We often owe changes in public discourse, sometimes without even knowing it, to the efforts of Patriarch Kirill. Which, in general, is natural, because such a pattern has developed historically in Russia. It depended on each patriarch - be it Hermogenes, Filaret, Nikon, Tikhon or Sergius - what historical paths the Church follows and what example it sets for society.
Hereditary Priest, Preacher, Diplomat
Patriarch Kirill is a hereditary clergyman. His grandfather Vasily Stepanovich, at the very height of anti-church persecution, ended up in the Solovki gulag due to denunciation by renovationists. His father Mikhail Vasilyevich was arrested in 1934 for serving in the church and singing in the choir. Nevertheless, being the grandson and son of those repressed, Patriarch Kirill never considered himself a dissident. The goal of his efforts was not a conflict with the state, but strengthening the independence of the Church, protecting it from external interference, whenever and wherever it came from. In this sense he very clearly continues the line of Patriarch Tikhon.
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Even before his enthronement, the future patriarch launched active external social activities in the interests of the Church and its mission. Since 1994, the program “The Word of the Shepherd” with his participation has been broadcast on Russian television, which has gained enormous popularity. Metropolitan Kirill conducted the spiritual education of the audience in a simple and accessible language, without avoiding complex issues, having already discovered at that time his gifts as a preacher and rhetorician. At the end of the 1990s, Radio Russia broadcast the program “Christ Among Us,” in which Metropolitan Kirill discussed the social problems of the era. This program was incredibly popular among listeners.
Metropolitan Kirill’s talents in the field of church diplomacy also emerged. Constant visits to other states not only contributed to the expansion of the influence of the Russian Church, but also helped interstate contacts.
Metropolitan Kirill’s diplomatic and preaching abilities were reflected in the many years of gradual work to heal the schism between our Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and foreign Russian Orthodox parishes (ROCOR). It took a lot of work to achieve the unification of the churches, although all Orthodox co-religionists remembered that these were two parts of one historical mother Church and their common task was to preach the undivided Christ in unity.
From 2004 to 2006, joint work was carried out on the Act of Canonical Communion of the two churches, which were already internally ready to pray for each other and receive communion from the same Chalice. In 2007, the act was signed.
Social Teaching of the Church
Already in the early 2000s, it became clear that a difficult transition period awaited us, that the country and the Church would find themselves at a new historical turn. It was necessary to prepare for this in advance - and at the same time trust in the mercy of the Lord. The church of the new period needed a reliable helmsman. This is what Kirill became - a strong successor to Patriarch Alexy II.
The election of Kirill at this particular time was undoubtedly a significant church decision. The processes of adapting the Church to new challenges were largely initiated by Kirill while he was still metropolitan, and the subsequent church course was largely formed ahead of time with his participation.
First of all, this concerns the main task of the transition period - strengthening the social role of the Church, returning its historical place which had been lost during the era of Soviet state atheism, and - what is especially important - never had been restored during the period of radical relativism of the 1990s.
Patriarch Kirill subsequently spoke quite clearly about the problems of the 1990s:
“Pseudo-humanistic ideals associated with moral relativism, the principles of consumption, and the Nietzschean right of the strong were promoted. Social Darwinist morality was used, within the framework of which the development of society occurs on the basis of natural selection.”
Under these conditions, the efforts of the Church were actually torpedoed by the general context of the nineties - the context of militant immorality and contempt for the traditional values of the social majority.
Nevertheless, despite the complex and neglected state of society, already in the 1990s the first steps were taken in an important matter for the Church - in working on the church social concept. After all, having no official social concept, the Church constantly became an object of pressure from political groups with their own social programs. This situation had to change.
In Orthodox Russia, church social thought inevitably touched upon the transformation of society as a whole, the development of social ideals in the spirit of justice and traditional moral standards.
In December 1994, the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church confirmed the importance of the task and instructed Metropolitan Kirill to create a Synodal working group to prepare the Social Concept, formalizing the steps that he had taken back in 1992.
The result was the adoption in 2000 at the Council of Bishops of the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” - a document outlining the official position of the Russian Orthodox Church on issues of interaction with the state and society.
After completing all stages of the work, Metropolitan Kirill publicly drew attention to the fact that for the first time the Church officially offered society its conciliar opinion on social issues.
The basic principles of the Social Concept are traditional values, the absolute value of human life, the idea of justice, rejection of the “right of might,” attention to socially vulnerable people in difficult situations, moral justification of law and legal institutions, and reasonable statism (church-state symphony).
Even non-church people, as a rule, share the listed principles, since they are, in principle, characteristic of Russian culture. Thus, the Church, in essence, spoke on behalf of the majority of Russians, essentially beginning the process of restoring the lost Russian world.
Counteraction from Anti-Church Forces
During the period of Kirill’s patriarchate, the “200 Moscow Churches” Program developed and acquired notable significance. Its goal was to build church buildings as accessible as possible for residents of the most remote residential areas of Moscow. It was necessary to increase their numbers in accordance with the growth of the population of the metropolis.
But a number of obstacles arose on the way to this goal. The Patriarch and his like-minded people had to think about how to deal with the resistance of those fighting against church building programs, Maidan activists, “Orthodox reformers,” and neoliberals who sought to block the program.
By and large, it was not the Program 200 itself that caused opposition, but the social activity of the Church as a whole, its independent position, in particular, the fact that the Church did not support the Maidan on Bolotnaya Square in 2012. The Church’s desire to return society to a moral coordinate system gave rise in radical atheist circles to accusations of inculcating clericalism, information attacks, and provocations. Only this time the accusations came not from Marxist-Leninist ideologists, but from the liberal heirs of the colonial elites.
On the one hand, some politicians have made attempts to legally limit the influence of church preaching within the framework of the so-called “Religious Code”. Fortunately, this anti-Orthodox initiative was blocked. On the other hand, they tried to drag the Church, which sought to keep the country from an orange-brown revolution, into a political scandal with the help of provocations. In this regard, in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, members of the notorious feminist group Pussy Riot began blasphemous singing and dancing on the pulpit, performing their so-called “punk prayer”.
The ministry of Patriarch Kirill came during an extremely turbulent period. The church helmsman inevitably had to take responsibility for the decisions that were due in this regard. First of all, it was necessary to convey to the flock the idea that the Church not only cares for all those who suffer, but also has the right to self-defense.
And the patriarch fulfilled this historical mission.
Despite the threats and challenges that the Church had to respond to, it actively developed, and its new historical tasks became increasingly clear.
Church-State Symphony
Until recently, Russian patriarchs defended the sovereignty of the Church from the encroachments of the state. The era of Patriarch Kirill is characterized by the struggle for the independence of the Church, no longer from the state, which today takes a position of benevolent non-interference towards the Church, but from transnational centers of influence and comprador political elites, responsible both for the current persecution of Church members in Ukraine and for the struggle against Orthodoxy and traditional values in Russia. The “revolutionary” style of these forces is clearly visible in the transhumanist and Nazi forums of the Euro-Atlantic elites.
In defending its independence, the Church today relies precisely on the help of the state. Russian President Vladimir Putin pays close attention to the religious life of the country's citizens and in every possible way contributes to the development of church institutions. And this situation is reflected in the principle of a church-state symphony put forward by Patriarch Kirill. The principle of the symphony turned out to be absolutely irreplaceable during the period of the Northern Military District, during the nationwide struggle against reanimated Nazism.
Part of the church-state symphony is the Church's desire to strengthen national consensus. Therefore, Patriarch Kirill often mentions the events of 1612 as an example of a Russian all-class unification against foreign expansion (citizen Minin, Prince Pozharsky, Russian militia). The Church also thinks in a similar way about the consolidation of popular forces against internal expansion, but also tied to foreign policy interests. And in this case, the Church always takes the side of the legitimate state.
The stability of the Church, state, and society, according to Patriarch Kirill, are always connected. The Patriarch never tires of reminding us:
“The processes that led to the catastrophe a century ago (the Bolshevik revolution) actually began two hundred years prior to 1917, when the spiritual foundations of the life of our enlightened society, the so-called elite, began to collapse. People began to lose their internal sovereignty, giving their minds and souls to what came from outside..."
Legitimization of the Russian World
A very important idea introduced into public use by Patriarch Kirill was the concept of the Russian World. It was first heard in his speeches at the World Russian People's Council more than thirty years ago. An important circumstance in this case is the very legitimization of the concept “Russian world”, the use of which was previously condemned by liberal circles in accordance with their general Russophobic position, although this concept is on a par with its analogues such as the “Arab world”, “Turkic world”, Pax Britanica, and Pax Americana.
Patriarch Kirill returned the word to its native context, correlating it with the terms “Russian civilization” and “historical Rus'”. The Russian world, His Holiness emphasizes, is the same “Russian land” about which Hieromonk Nestor speaks in his famous chronicle “The Tale of Bygone Years.” And in the chronicles, as you know, the word “Rus” is used both as a state entity and as a huge nation.
The Russian world is a society with vertical dynamics, built on the desire for high moral ideals, for the embodiment of the “image of Heaven on earth.” In the future, within the framework of the Russian World, the gathering of parts of the artificially divided triune Russian people - Russians, Little Russians, Belarusians - is inevitable.
The Russian world inherits the historic eastern Roman Empire (“Byzantium”), therefore Chersonese-Korsun is for it an element of a symbolic code, which also includes Constantinople and Jerusalem. And even the image of the “shield on the gates of Constantinople”, which Prince Oleg “nailed”, the patriarch recalls, clearly carries this sacred feeling.
This is at the foundation of Russian civilization.
Key Judgments of Patriarch Kirill
The judgments of Patriarch Kirill are important, as they largely determined the internal atmosphere of the church and some public sentiments in recent decades.
Many patriarchal speeches and books reveal a rejection of globalism - a monocular vision of history that denies civilizational uniqueness.
Globalism is the habit of perceiving the past, present, and future according to supposedly “universal” rules, which are dictated to humanity by only one of the subjects of the historical process, who has the so-called “global leadership.” This is where ideologies originate such as “the right side of history”, “the end of history”, and so on.
Such historical monopolism, from the patriarch’s point of view, is unacceptable. The historical paths of peoples are different, just as the “talents” given by God to individuals, peoples, nations, cultures, and civilizations are different. Globalism leads to depersonalization, spiritual enslavement, and abandonment of one’s God-given mission. Therefore, monoconcepts of history are unacceptable and have no future. This is especially obvious now, on the threshold of the era of multipolarity, when one individual can no longer possess the “standard of modernity” and knowledge of the “right side of history.”
The Patriarch always paid tribute to Russian culture as being a state-forming culture. He emphasized the importance of developing national public organizations based on loyalty to the state, and called for the concept of “Russian national organization” to be completely abolished in the eyes of government officials. Federal Russian organizations, according to the patriarch, should become the “civil skeleton” of the state unity of our country - this also applies to the World Russian People's Council (WRPC).
Patriarch Kirill never tires of emphasizing the importance of issues of culture and education. He decisively opposed the dominance of the Bologna system in Russia and for a holistic, multifaceted education, closely related to upbringing.
Of particular importance for the patriarch is the rehabilitation of Russian theology, which has been subjected to undeserved discrimination, and the establishment of theology as a full-fledged scientific discipline.
As a result of the successful completion of many years of struggle for the introduction of theology into the list of Vakovsky disciplines, Russia finally received institutional sovereignty in the field of theological thought. This became part of a broader process - the revival of national scientific schools, which were so mercilessly destroyed in the post-Soviet period.
With the recognition of the legitimate status of theology, the Church regained its voice in the academic environment.
Today, Patriarch Kirill hopes that in Russia in the near future the secularist-atheistic bias in education will be overcome, since the state now supports theology, like any other field of scientific knowledge. At the same time, according to the patriarch, theology will be useful not only to future clergy, but also to students of secular universities. It will help to broaden one’s horizons, and to develop historical thinking.
Speaking about the problem of culture, the patriarch always saw traditional values as its foundation. But what are these values other than biblical moral truths? It is no secret that for us Russians, the fair, conscientious, merciful, tolerant, brotherly attitude of people towards each other is of great importance. However, it is equally important to recognize the absolute value of human life itself, because without this, justice would simply lose its meaning.
In this regard, the long-term struggle of Patriarch Kirill against the legalization of euthanasia, as well as for the recognition of an unborn child as a full-fledged person, and recognizing abortion as the deprivation of life of a human being, is worthy of mention. Thus, in December 2023, responding to the initiatives of Patriarch Kirill, the Holy Synod of Bishops adopted the document “On the inviolability of human life from the moment of conception.” This is an important step in the spiritual and moral education of society.
Patriarch Kirill continues his preaching of the absolute value of human life in the form of active support for large families. Together with Valentina Ivanovna Matvienko and Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin, Patriarch Kirill discussed at the Federal Assembly the adoption of a law on large families, as well as on protecting families from illegal interference by guardianship authorities, from juvenile justice, and from unscrupulous social patronage.
This initiative serves as a continuation of the patriarch’s previous efforts to counter anti-family laws and attempts at additional control over the institution of family and kinship relations, including through unjustified legal superstructures over national legislation.
The Fight for Anthropology
Patriarch Kirill has repeatedly noted that the main struggle in the modern world is the struggle for anthropology. That is, the struggle for what modern man should be like: will he be like God, or will he be like a beast or “artificial intelligence.”
And here it is worth pointing out the following pattern. Once upon a time, secular consciousness formed the doctrine of humanism, and today it has shifted towards transhumanism, which promises the creation in the near future of superhuman beings.
Religion has never agreed with the old, classical humanism, understanding the incompleteness of man when he is separated from God. But transhumanism is the next stage of falling into the same abyss. And so it happens that today it is the Church, through the efforts of its patriarch, that raises its voice in defense of man, such as he was created by God, even if he has temporarily moved away from God. Today the Church strives to protect people not only from godlessness, but also from dehumanization (although the second is undoubtedly a consequence of the first). The project of the trans-man, the superman, is anti-God. It represents a denial of the divine plan for man and at the same time a way to control the consciousness of people, into which God has invested freedom of choice.
In its origin, the idea of the superman is Nietzschean and Nazi: they tried to realize it back in the Third Reich by means of eugenics. F. M. Dostoevsky in his novel “Demons” gives us a literary and psychological description of the superman — “man-god” — Alexei Kirillov, an adherent of the religion of death, who in the finale is destined to commit suicide. In general, the idea of a superman is rooted in the teachings of the Gnostics with their division of people into “pneumatics” and the uninitiated. This division is contrary to Christianity, since the Lord died and rose again for everyone. His commandments are addressed to everyone equally. Everyone is worthy of both revelation and salvation.
Patriarch Kirill consistently opposes the idea of a new superman, actively exposing the entire spectrum of ideas of transhumanism. In particular, he is especially active in opposing the revision of the concept of “family,” the legalization of same-sex unions, and the promotion of gender theories that affirm multiple “genders.” He preaches love for the original, God-created man.
The Challenge of Militant Secularism
Among the recent speeches of the Patriarch, the speech at the XXIV Congress of the WRPC in 2022 should be highlighted. This speech is a theological report on secularism as an anti-Christian globalist ideology. Today, the theses of this report are becoming increasingly relevant.
Modern secularism is a product of the Protestant tradition, transformed into a kind of globalist standard, imposed as a “universal” norm. It is based on market fundamentalism and total competition, that is, on the principles of social Darwinism. It is quite obvious that Nietzschean social Darwinism by its nature is not compatible with Christianity, with the idea of love for one's neighbor. At one time it gave birth to colonialism, and then Nazism and Atlanticism.
We Christians need to remember that today, as at the moment of its birth, the Church exists in a pagan environment. Only the forms of this environment change: from Roman polytheism to global neoliberalism and secularism.
Today the Church is forced to preach in the space of counter liberal-secular narratives and mythologies. And this mythological environment requires serious theological analysis. For example, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill witnessed the transition from the Soviet (atheistic) myth about religion to the secularist one. The atheistic myth claimed that the Church was part of the political superstructure of the ruling class. The myth of secularism says that religion and the Church must be subordinated to secular ideology. For this, the Church supposedly needs to undergo some kind of new reformation, that is, it must be internally reborn, throwing away everything traditional, abandoning its dogmatic foundations.
In this regard, the Patriarch of our Church emphasized:
“Supporters of radical secularism are constantly trying to establish their ideological dominance over all believers who make up the majority of our planet.”
But it is obvious that orthodoxy simply would not be orthodoxy if it assumed the possibility of such “development.” Therefore, one of the main directions of Patriarch Kirill’s efforts is to counter the threat of secular reformation.
This problem was clearly recognized by Patriarch Kirill 16 years ago. On June 24, 2008, on the opening day of the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill delivered a report, “Orthodox unity and Orthodox witness in the modern world.” In this speech, he condemned the trend, which he identified as “several new points in the special interpretation put forward by the Church of Constantinople of the 28th rule of the IV Ecumenical Council” (on the primacy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople), which “create the impression of a gradual development of a new ecclesiology,” that is, a new teaching about the nature of the Church.
The Patriarch had every reason to be concerned. A few years later, the heretical line of the Patriarchate of Constantinople was finally formed, which included an unlawful interpretation of autocephaly, ethnophyletic glorification of the “ethos of Hellenism”, support in Ukraine for the Lutheran idea of a “national church”, and support for reformation in Orthodoxy in the spirit of the ideas of pan-Atlanticism and secular globalism.
The direct target of Atlanticism and secularism was the Russian Orthodox Church. The result of this path was the open incitement of a religious war, support for neo-Nazism and repression against believers in Ukraine. In fact, the Russian Orthodox Church, under the leadership of Patriarch Kirill, is forced today to exist in the conditions of a religious war declared on it and to fight for the physical survival of its clergy.
Opposition to the "Orthodox Reformation"
In addition to external pressure on the Russian Church, Patriarch Kirill also had to deal with attempts to carry out an internal church “reformation of Orthodoxy.” The supporters of this project turned out to be representatives of liberal Orthodox groups, and its doctrinal expression was a phenomenon that received the name “Greco-Protestantism” in the church environment.
The historical origins of Greco-Protestantism, or internal union, go back to the times of the “Latin captivity of Russian theology,” as Archpriest Georgy Florovsky formulated this phenomenon in his time. At the next stage, the birth of “Protestantism of the Eastern Rite” occurs, or, in modern language, Greco-Protestantism.
In fact, this is a post-religion project that the Churches are seeking to impose. It is formed on the basis of “theology after”, “weak theologies”, “demythologization of faith”, “maturing of the Church”, “elective priesthood”, and a number of other modernist ideas and concepts. The goals of the project: to adapt the Church to the interests of a transnational oligarchy, to adapt it to the needs of social platforms and algorithmic societies, to use the Church’s symbolic resource for purposes that have nothing to do with Christianity, to emasculate the Church, turning it into a simulacrum, into a simple provider of religious services. The goal is also to undermine the institution of the patriarchate and thereby question the canonical continuity and legitimacy of the Church.
In order to prevent itself from being turned into a subsystem of a secular project, the Church under Patriarch Kirill is actively developing immunity against secularism at the level of theological and social ideas. Church intellectuals successfully solve the problem of deconstructing Protestant cultural narratives in the space of orthodoxy. All this is happening in the conditions of secular polyglossia - a new “mixing of languages”, since a single and monolithic “modernity” no longer exists and versions of the “modern world” are becoming more and more numerous on the eve of a multipolar world.
And although all these measures exclude the path of secularization, they by no means cancel the culturalization and socialization of the Church. The personal talents of each individual plays a huge role on this path. “An educated person, the patriarch is sure, from a parish activist to a bishop, without additional explanations, understands what to do today so that the Christian message reaches the hearts of modern people.”
Universalization of Preaching
Patriarch Kirill himself seeks to universalize church preaching, making it accessible to all social strata. For this purpose, the patriarch turns to the Russian tradition of the genre of the Word. “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “The Tale of the Law and Grace of Metropolitan Hilarion”, “The Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land”, and other texts of ancient Russian literature were written in this genre. This tradition lives in the books of the patriarch, in the theses of his speeches - this is how the memory of the genre works. The Patriarch adds a social dimension to it, thereby creating the language of “universal preaching”, understandable to both church people and secular people. This helps convey the ideas of church social teaching to the audience: the sermon becomes accessible, and its spiritual meaning is not distorted.
Church preaching is important in wartime conditions. The Church, as in the 1940s, is together with the people who are fighting today for their freedom.
It is quite obvious that the ongoing hybrid war in which Russia is drawn into has, in addition to the civil and national, also an existential and civilizational aspect. The hatred of adherents of secular modernity towards Orthodox peoples openly manifested itself back in the 1990s, during the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia. It is still visible today.
The position of the Church regarding the Special Military Operation (SMO) corresponds to the spirit and letter of the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church.” In the section of the USC “War and Peace” there is the concept of “just war” (clause VIII.1-2). Recognizing the sinful nature of any war, the Church allows its children to take part in hostilities if this is dictated by the need to protect their neighbors and restore justice, since “greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Hence the church's concern for the army and its needs. Military chaplains are in hot spots near the line of combat and risk their lives. Each parish, Patriarch Kirill emphasizes in his addresses, must help the participants of the SMO with food and things. People who, at the call of duty, go to the Northern Military District and die in a combat zone, sacrifice themselves for others.
All members of the Church, both clergy and laymen, says the Patriarch, should pray that the Lord would grant wisdom to those in power, strengthen soldiers in the strength of spirit, and preserve them from death, wounds, and captivity.
The Image of the Russian Church and its Tasks
It is no secret that in the relations of the Church with society, a special role has always belonged to the patriarchs. For example, the heroic years of struggle against the Polish invaders are associated with the name of Patriarch Hermogenes, and the weakness of the Church during the Synodal period is explained by its existence without a patriarch. Therefore, it is quite natural that propagandists of the secular reformation often choose the institution of the patriarchate as a target for attacks, thus seeking to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Church. Fortunately, it can already be stated that during the period of service of the current patriarch, the institution of the patriarchate has been strengthened. And with him the Church has been strengthened.
Ultimately, Patriarch Kirill helped determine not only the path, but also the modern image of the Russian Church. For the first time in the post-Soviet period, it became distinct. This is an image not of a reclusive Church, but also not of a secularized Church, drowned in consumer fetishism and echoing secular “opinion leaders.” This is an image of a Church that thinks independently, open to parishioners with a wide variety of social needs. Not elitist, but universal, understandable to all her children.
Under Patriarch Kirill, the Church took on four tasks:
(1) further socialization of the Church and dissemination of church social teaching,
(2) internal integration, prevention of liberal-Orthodox renovationism and Greek-Protestantism,
(3) opposition to radical secularism and the secular “new reformation”, transhumanism, neo-Nazism,
(4) development of a universal language of the Church in a new transitional period.
If, in assessing the period of patriarchal service, we go beyond the framework of church issues, we will have to admit that it was precisely during this difficult time that the values of secular modernity and postmodernity did not stand up to historical scrutiny: the world is becoming less stable and predictable every day, and more and more dangerous. And this is also a test for the Church and her children.
But after global communism, global liberalism will finally leave the historical stage. In the new socio-cultural situation, a reassessment of such concepts as “modernity”, “religiosity”, “secularity”, “tradition”, “humanism”, “freedom”, justice”, and “civil society” will begin. The time of global “standards” and “rules”, including common criteria for secularity, will be a thing of the past.
In these conditions, the mission of the Church is to intensively enlighten society with the Word of the Lord, and not to sacrifice its principles to please it. And on this path, the Church, with God’s help, will undoubtedly win.
Source: pnp.ru (Russian)
Thank you so much for sending this out. It helped me to understand the ministry of the Patriarch, the role of Patriarchs in the Orthodox Church, and the nature of the ideologies the Church is facing.
Very interesting and informative. Thank you!