CWN - The grave challenges that humanity faces move Catholics and the Orthodox faithful “to live and act not as rivals but as brothers,” Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk said in a reflection on the recent joint declaration of Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.
Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate welcomed the Syrian truce, supported by Russia and the United States, as a “first step” toward joint action against the terrorism that threatens Christians.
Metropolitan Hilarion went on to say that the declaration’s disavowal of “uniatism” was an “important preliminary condition for restoring confidence” and that peace in Ukraine cannot be achieved without “the joint efforts of the Orthodox and of the Greek Catholics to overcome an historical hostility.”
In Europe, he continued, there is a true “persecution of Christianity and of the moral values of the Gospel” under the “pretext of promoting the ideas of tolerance and democracy and of diffusing liberal values.”
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