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Development of spirituality will enable us to overcome the socio-economic crisis in Russia - Metropolitan Kirill

Moscow, November 3, Interfax - The spiritual condition of the individual in Russia is an obstacle for overcoming the socio-political crisis in Russia, stated Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations.

‘The harmonious development of the individual was and is the primary problem of today’s Russia, and this development is impossible without solid spiritual foundations and clear ethical guidelines’, the metropolitan said during the ceremony in which he was made honorary doctor of the Russian State Social University.

He reminded the audience that in the Soviet period the spiritual values were ousted from the social realm as a result of confrontation between church and state.

And while the development of the Third World, according to the metropolitan, is impeded by the absence of qualified specialists, the obstacle in Russia with her rich scientific potential and tremendous reserves of material resources is ‘the problem of human personality and its spiritual condition’.

The hierarch of the Russian Church is convinced that ‘the Stabilization Fund and the national presidential programs should have one goal to invest in people and in their future. High inflation and economic destabilization, as the experience in various countries has shown, are provoked not by sending resources to vital spheres but by corruption and crime’.

‘Faith gives people the vitality and spiritual strength to overcome hardships, to achieve their goals, to fulfill their duties. That is why a modern secular society needs so much the cooperation between the Church and the world of science and politics’, His Eminence believes.

At the same time he underlined that the idea of multi-confessional state should not become ‘an ideological cliché preventing the traditional religion in Russia to participate in social processes in a direct way’.

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