Vatican Publishes Book by Patriarch Kirill

(May 15, 2010) The Vatican Publishing House is publishing a book by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and of All Russia. This gesture follows a similar move of the Moscow Patriarchate, which last December published a book with texts from Benedict XVI regarding European culture. Now, the Italian-language book with addresses by the Russian Orthodox patriarch, titled "Liberta e Responsabilita alla Ricerca dell'Armonia" (Liberty and Responsibility in the Search of Harmony) will be officially presented on Monday at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. The work brings together the most important addresses on human rights given by Patriarch Kirill. In it, he wrote, "We have a common vision with the Pope on the protection of the dignity of man in Europe." For this reason, he said, "today the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church are the only ones naturally allied in the hard struggle against the liberalist and secularist ideology. In the West there is the desire to relegate the faith to the private realm in a way that is almost worse than the Soviet regime did in our country." To overcome it, he added, the Church will have to enter "into a serious dialogue, devoid of prejudices, with lay and liberal humanism," but without falling into the temptation of "unilateralism." Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, who signed the volume's introduction, stated, Patriarch Kirill "puts one on guard in an incisive and passionate way against a 'new generation of rights' that shelter in their interior true and genuine degenerations of the authentic dignity of the person." The publication of the book also leads up to the May 20 inauguration in Rome of the Italian-Russian Academy "Sapientia et Scientia."