Posted by David Adrian
on 7/5/2009, 1:51 am, in reply to "Speech by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow during meeting at Ecumenical Patriarchate"
In the ninth and tenth paragraphs of his speech, “Orthodoxy in Russia revealed a great multitude of saints . . . Through the intercession of these countless people of God the Russian Church has risen in all her glory and beauty in our days,” Patriarch Kirill raises an issue that is surprisingly little discussed within Orthodoxy, let alone the non-Orthodox Christian world:
The moral authority that coheres to the Russian Orthodox Church because it suffered, at the very least in quantitative terms, and only recently at that, the greatest martyrdom in Christian history.
That authority, combined with Russia’s stature as the largest of all Orthodox churches, casts a very long shadow indeed over the juridical claims to primacy advanced by the Ecumenical Patriarch.
David
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