ROME,
MAY 14, 2010 thanks to Zenit.org
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,” the patriarch wrote.
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.”
“It is a harsh analysis but full of hope,” stressed Pierluca Azzaro,
professor of politics at the university and the book’s editor. “Pope
Benedict XVI and Patriarch Kirill exhort Christians of East and West not to be
conformed to the mentality of this century.”
“They invite all of us to profess our creed in the Church founded by
Christ the Savior, to defend liberty as an indisputable but not unlimited value:
by its most profound nature, liberty is, and always will be, linked to
truth,” Azzaro said.
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 volume will be presented by Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan
and president of the Giuseppe Toniolo Institute of Higher Studies, and Adriano
Roccucci of the Roma Tre University.
Addresses will be given by Lorenzo Ornaghi, rector of the Sacred Heart
university; Anatoly Torkunov, rector of the Moscow St ate Institute of
International Relations of the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry; Edmondo
Caruana, publishing director of the Vatican Publishing House; Giuseppina
Cardillo Azzaro, president of the international association “Sophia:
Russian Idea, Idea of Europe.”
The presentation will end with a speech by the chairman of the Department of
External Affairs of the Moscow Patriarchate, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev of
Volokolamsk.
The publication of the book also leads up to the May 20 inauguration in Rome of
the Italian-Russian Academy “Sapientia et Scientia.”
The project has received the blessing of the Holy See and of the Moscow
Patriarchate, and the official approval of the Italian and Russian States.
The Academy – which aims to be a stable meeting place for representatives of
the Church and of the civil societies of Italy and Russia – will carry out its
activities at the Villa Sciarra in Rome.