Department for External Church Relations
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Metropolitan Hilarion: We carry on dialogue with other confessions in order to explain our position to them
The widespread myths about inter-Christian dialogue and contacts with representatives of other religions have been refuted by the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for external church relations, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk in his answer to one of the questions that came to the website of the TV program ‘Church and World’.
He noted that the accusations alleging that the external church contacts were aimed to create some common religion or to merge all the Churches into one have usually come from foreign information resources of schismatic or anti-church trend.
‘If we carry out a dialogue with representatives of other religions or other Christian confessions, we do it not to merge all faiths into one but primarily to explain our position to these people, be they Muslims, Judaists or Buddhists, or representatives of non-Orthodox Christian traditions, as well as to listen to their position. To hear it not to betray our faith but simply because any communication requires not a monologue but a dialogue’, Metropolitan Hilarion stressed.
The archpastor stated, ‘We in the Orthodox Church are strongly convinced of the saving nature of our faith; we always remind our faithful that there is no salvation outside the Church, and saying so, we mean not some abstract Church but the concrete one - the Orthodox Church as we confess it in the Creed’.
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24.01.2021
06.11.2020