03 November 2005, 11:15
Russia can become a prototype of a new world order - Metropolitan Kirill
Moscow, November3, Interfax - There are East and West, religiosity and secularism coexisting in Russia and our country can become a prototype for a New World Order, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad believes.
‘Russia can become a prototype of a new world order based not on an impersonal unity within standards imposed by force, which will certainly lead to a civilizational catastrophe, but on a harmonious combination of cultural experience based on externally diverse but essentially one perception of absolute moral values’, the metropolitan said in interview published this week by the Literaturnaya gazeta.
He expressed the conviction that on the bases of historical experience gained by Russia, ‘we, as nobody else, can address ourselves to the world with a unique message and say: Building a welfare state will never make humanity happy if the search for this welfare is undertaken outside the context of human spiritual needs’.
In the metropolitan’s opinion, Russia should advocate the idea of multi-polar world.
‘These poles should not be exclusively political, as diplomats would understand it. Reality demands the recognition of the indisputable fact that there are several cultures coexisting today in parallel. They are rooted in different religious experience - the experience which, paradoxically, includes even the rejection of religion - atheism’, he said.
Metropolitan Kirill also emphasized that in today’s world the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches ‘are natural and, it seems, the only allies in the tough struggle going on between representatives of secular liberalism infected with the bacillus of self-destruction and bearers of the healthy and forward-looking idea of human salvation’.
‘It is my profound conviction therefore that we can advocate Christian values together with the Catholics’, the metropolitan said, noting that there is an experience of such work. ‘Thus, when the draft European Constitution was prepared, we entered into an intensive dialogue with the Catholic Church and reached mutual understanding on this subject’, the hierarch reminded.