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Interfax news agency, Moscow, Russia, in Russian, 30 Dec 03
BBC Monitoring Service, UK, in English, Dec 30, 2003
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MOSCOW, 30 December: Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Aleksiy II
has stated he categorically refuses to meet the Pope until the Vatican makes
real steps toward improving relations with the Russian Orthodox church.
"Unfortunately, apart from a declaration about the wish to improve
relations, meet the head of the Russian church and visit Russia, we don't
see anything specific being done to improve relations between our churches",
Aleksiy told journalists on Tuesday [30 December] in Moscow.
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Aleksiy said that 10 or more Catholic orders were openly conducting
missionary work throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus -
above all in children's homes, where they are rebaptising children already
baptised to the Orthodox faith and bringing them up in the Catholic
tradition.
Aleksiy said all this makes it impossible for him to meet the Pope in
person.
"I can only justify such a step to my congregation if concrete steps are
taken by the Roman Catholic church to improve our relations. I categorically
refuse to meet `in front of the cameras'", he said.
He also said he regretted the fact that the Vatican and the Moscow
Patriarchate had different approaches to the issue of a possible meeting.
"The Vatican wants the meeting to take place in front of TV cameras to show
that we have no problems. But, unfortunately, problems do exist", Aleksiy
said.
"If this meeting takes place, we want it to result in specific improvements
in relations between our churches," he said.
Aleksiy does not welcome the possibility of the "Ukrainian option" for the
Pope to visit Russia. He recalled that the Pope had in the past visited
Ukraine against the wishes of the entire episcopate of the country's
canonical Orthodox church, which told the Pope that his visit would not be
appropriate at the time and would not lead to peace, but would on the
contrary intensify the dispute between the two confessions.
"Unfortunately the Pope did not heed this call", Aleksiy said.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Russian Orthodox church, obviously from their
statements,
do not believe at all in the standard democratic principles of freedom of
religion, separation of church and state, and other such basic human rights
concepts. They indicate they believe in state endorsed churches and a
special, state blessed, monopoly position for their church. They indicate
the territory from the Black Sea to the Baltic's to the Pacific Ocean is
their exclusive territory. They do not seem to understand the historically
proven basic truth that such power by any one church corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely. The word democracy does not seem to be in their
vocabulary.
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