CWN - In the final days of his journey to Latin America, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow traveled to Rio de Janeiro, where he prayed for persecuted Christians at the statute of Christ the Redeemer.
Catholics and Orthodox Christians “still have some doctrinal disagreements, but no one is preventing us from fighting, hand in hand, to end the persecutions, the ousting of Christian values, to end the de-Christianization of the 21st-century human civilization,” the Interfax news service quoted him as saying.
The patriarch lamented the situation in Europe:
where an evil political force disguised as tolerance is ousting Christianity out of the public life; when people are banned from wearing, in public places, and especially at the workplace, the cross that was laid upon them when they were baptized; when some countries ban the use of the word ‘Christmas,’ and replace it with an incomprehensible one, or simply call it a ‘winter holiday’; when a country passes legislation that justifies the human sin in the refusal to understand marriage as a sacred union between man and woman; when humankind still suffers from a huge number of abortions killing children, from the ever increasing number of divorces.
References: