Department for External Church Relations
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His Holiness Patriarch Kirill meets with writer Yan Taksyur
DECR Communication Service, 27.06.2023.
On June 26, His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, at his working residence in Chisty Pereulok in Moscow, met with writer Yan Illich Taksyur.
In March 2022, Yan Taksyur, a Kiev well-known journalist and writer, an active supporter of the canonical Church, was detained by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kiev for alleged high treason. On May 24, 2023, the Shevchenkovsky Court of Kyiv accused him of high treason and sentenced him to 12 years in prison. On May 25, the writer was released in the context of a war prisoners exchange and departed to Russia. The writer’s release was actively assisted by His Holiness Patriarch Kirill.
As the Patriarchal Press Service reports, during the meeting on June 26 the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church said greeting Yan Taksyur, ‘Thank you for your stand, your steadiness in asserting Orthodoxy and defending our Church. I hope that you are full of strength for continuing your much useful activity’.
In his turn, Yan Taksyur cordially thanked His Holiness for his assistance in realising him from prison.
‘I would like to express sincere satisfaction and joy over the release’, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill continued, ‘Even in a situation when hope is lost, when nothing can be done from the point of the view of good sense, the Lord opens up possibilities and, I believe, it was God’s mercy that was revealed in your release’.
‘You are a defender of Orthodoxy. You have laid yourself out to prevent the Orthodox faith in Ukraine from being darkened by schismatic and heretic ideas capable of tearing it away from universal Orthodoxy’, His Holiness noted, ‘It is obvious indeed that when the religious conscience is darkened, it is followed by other troubles. As it happened in the Russian empire, too, when all the terrible revolutionary events of the early 20th century were connected with apostasy. The thinking people, the intellectuals, broke with the Church, were absorbed with completely ineffective ideas that gave them hope for earthly well-being, but we know what it all ended in’.
‘I think the task of the Church is to assert through prayer, through spiritual experience, the spiritual disillusion, so that people may not lose the ability to discern spirits (See I Cor. 12:10). Because to lose the ability to discern spirits is to fall into the devil’s net, which happens so often’, His Holiness stressed.
‘Once again I express the great joy to see you at large and especially at this table as a Patriarch’s guest’, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church added.
Participating in the meeting was also the chairman of the Synodal Department for the Church’s Relations with Society and Mass Media and acting head of the Patriarchal Press Service, V. L. Legoida.
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