The video link between Francis and Kirill on March 16 Vatican Media
A meeting between Pope Francis and the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow Kirill “is in preparation” and “hope it will take place later this year”. This is what says a voice of particular weight, that of Hilarion Alfeev, Metropolitan of Volokolamsk and President of the Department of External Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, who told TV channel Russia 24 last Sunday during the program “Church and World, then from the main Russian news agencies restarted. Hilarion recalled the two video calls that Kirill made last March 16 with the Roman Pope and with the greatest figure in the Anglican world, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. “It was very important that the representatives of the largest Christian churches communicate with each other at this critical moment,” the Orthodox Metropolitan always emphasized, even in this unusual way, without waiting for a personal reunion, “since events are developing very quickly “. Hilarion himself and Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, were present at the March 16 meeting in Moscow.
On February 18, it was the Russian ambassador to the Holy See, Aleksandr Avdeev, who said during an ItalianRussian seminar in Genoa: “We are preparing the second meeting between Pope Francis and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and “I think that the meeting will be very important and interesting, not only for international relations, but also for the development of relations between the two Churches: we are the children of a Christian civilization, we have common moral and ethical values”. Then, a a few days later, on February 24, the fallout of war events, when Moscow tanks poured into Ukrainian soil, and a shadow of uncertainty shrouded every date related to Russia.Now comes confirmation from the Moscow Patriarchate, albeit the context remains extremely tense and unpredictable in its development “Unpredictable consequences” was precisely the expression Nikol Ai Balashov, vicepresident of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Relations, Hilarion’s righthand man, used the last few hours in relation to a bill submitted to the Rada, the parliament of Moscow, in Kyiv to ban the activities of religious organizations based in Russia ban on Ukrainian territory.