Metropolitan Kirill calls faithful not to create an image of ‘squalid’ Orthodoxy by negligent appearance
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=2318
Moscow, November 29, Interfax - Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, head of the Moscow Patriarchate department for external church relations, has criticized some faithful for their disdain for appearance, which creates a negative impression of Orthodoxy as a whole.
‘We should not create an impression of strange and dumb people if our Church is to be a Church of the people rather than that of a ghetto. We should set a good example for the people, also by our appearance’, Metropolitan Kirill said at a conference on Orthodox pilgrimage on Wednesday in Moscow.
In this connection, the metropolitan said what a shock it was for him to receive once a letter from a viewer of his Pastor’s Word TV talk asking why Orthodox women looked so squalid.
Aesthetics in the church including the appearance of the faithful, their clothes and the church interior decoration, according to the metropolitan, are of great importance.
‘Orthodoxy is not the squalor but beauty of life. Orthodoxy does not compel us to put on bleak black-and-gray-and-brown colors’, the Moscow Patriarchate official stressed.