Russia’s Orthodox Patriarch has warned the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, that the decline of religious faith in Western societies risks greater damage than Soviet-era persecution, and could signal a “pre-apocalyptic reality” by forcing citizens to sin, writes Jonathan Luxmoore. Archbishop Welby was on a three-day visit to Moscow.
“What we are seeing today, particularly in Western countries, is far more dreadful than what happened to religion in the Soviet Union,” said Patriarch Kirill. “The weakness of Soviet ‘atheisation’ lay in the fact that it resulted from the planting of an ideology, and ideologies do not live long. Once the ideology was gone, the atheisation also diminished.”
The patriarch said Russians were alarmed at the “rapid atheisation, expulsion of God from human life and disregard for the divine” they saw in the West, as well as at “the enshrinement of the West’s neglect of moral values in national legislation”.
“This is a very dangerous trend,” he said. “If people are made to sympathise with sin or feel solidarity with sin by virtue of state laws, then we may well be approaching a pre-apocalyptic reality.”
In an address to Moscow’s Saints Cyril and Methodius Institute, Archbishop Welby said he agreed “ethical rules and ways of living” derived from conforming to God’s will, adding that Western society’s “major problem” lay in its “appalling individualism”, which risked “anarchy and ethical nihilism” by failing to note that any one person’s ethical decisions affect other people.
Loading ...
