The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Cyril, this Saturday called for a “just and lasting peace” for the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, in a message issued on the occasion of Easter, which the Orthodox celebrated on Sunday.
“In this wonderful Holy Week, our special prayers are addressed to God for people who are in the war zone,” Cirilo says in the message published on the Orthodox Church’s ‘site’.
Christians, he adds, “cannot remain indifferent to the problems and difficulties” of these “brothers and sisters whose hearts are burning with the fire of internal conflict.”
The Patriarch indicated that the Orthodox ask God “to heal the wounds of the body, and especially the spiritual ones, to comfort all pains and to grant a just and lasting peace to the sister nations that sprang from the same baptismal source of the Dnieper.”
Cirilo will celebrate the Easter Vigil tonight at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the country’s largest Orthodox temple, a ceremony that will be attended by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Source: DN
