On February 1, 2024, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia celebrated the Divine Liturgy at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. This day marks the 15th anniversary of the enthronement of His Holiness. At the end of the service, the Primate of the Russian Church addressed the worshippers in the temple with a word.

I sincerely thank all of you for praying for me. I know that this prayer is daily, the whole Church prays, and, probably, without this prayer it would be impossible to carry out the Patriarchal ministry. But when they pray for me on this day, a personal day, with which the very appearance of a person in life is connected, then, I think, this prayer is heard by the Lord, and help is poured out on the one for whom they pray. And through those present here, I thank all of you now, my dear bishops, fathers, brothers and sisters, who today, all over the face of our earth, in all the fullness of our Church, have been offering up prayers for the Patriarch.

Indeed, Russia is capable to resist alien, godless, anti-Christian forces. Those forces which aim their sting at human hearts, so that we lose our ability to tell good from evil. Gone from the political vocabulary is the concept of sin: they enforce a new model of behavior, claiming that good is what they please. But when so-called civilized world, by and large, picks up this idea, Russia, just as in the past times, has the guts to disobey. We must stick to the notion of good and evil, not from political interests or someone's ambition, but from that moral law which God has placed in our souls, in the human nature.

Powerful propaganda forces in the world today are working to destroy the concepts of good and evil, and Russia here is fulfilling a special mission to preserve the traditional worldview, which allows people to remain truly free. This opinion was expressed on Thursday by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia in a sermon after the liturgy at the Donskoy Monastery.

Any clergyman who participates in discussions on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and other online communities must constantly remember the responsibility that is imposed on him by speaking in a public space. People look at you primarily as priests. The careless and sometimes outrageous statements of individual clergy cast a shadow on the entire Church of God, causing waves of reciprocal discussions in the blogosphere, in which the subject of attacks becomes not so much the author of the lines him-self as the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole. Nobody forbids you to participate in the life of Internet communities and leave your comments in the topics, but it is necessary to act with judgment and discretion.

It is important to remember that they judge the whole Church by each priest, and “thanks” to the media, any unpleasant incident causes a wide resonance. It is also important to remember that there are pastoral questions, and there are questions associated with church-social or church-state relations.