In his report at the Bishops’ meeting of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill voiced the vision of the goals of influential world political forces, which are hostile to “not only Russia and Orthodoxy, but also, as we can now judge, to the Christian worldview as a whole,” Pravblog reports.

According to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, the world leaders “set themselves a task broader than just the spiritual isolation of the Ukrainian people, its opposition to the fraternal and extremely close in spiritual terms to the Russian people, with whom they together constitute a single Orthodox civilization dating back to the era of Holy Russia”.

The hierarch believes that there is a global goal – to break or extremely weaken the spiritual ties between the Eastern Slavic Orthodox world and the Orthodox community of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. And also to prevent the preservation of the Christian foundations of the cradle of modern civilization – Europe.

“The schism initiated by Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has made it extremely difficult for the Russian Church to communicate spiritually with a significant part of the Greek Orthodox world. This, of course, has noticeably weakened the voice of Orthodox witness in the modern world – which, apparently, is what the ideologists and customers of the schism needed,” the patriarch said.

But he also added that “the enemies of the Church failed to fully achieve their goal.” He referred to Greek Orthodox hierarchs, priests and theologians who do not recognize the actions of Constantinople and have not entered into communion with “schismatic false church leaders calling themselves metropolitans and bishops”.