Address of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill after Prayer Service on St. Vladimir’s Hill in Kyiv

YourBeatitude, Your Eminences and Graces, reverend fathers, brothers and sisters!

Your Beatitude, I extend my gratitude for Your invitation to visit this land, овеянную подвигами святых of the holy God-pleasers, the land which initiated enlightenment of many and many nations.

I arrives here as a pilgrim to the banks of Dnepr to touch the thousand-year history of our Church.

In baptism I was given name of the Holy and Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir, in the monkhood – the name of the Holy and Equal-to-the Apostles Kirill. These saints were among the originators of Christianity in out land, of the enlightenment of the Kyivan Rus, therefore it is with a special awe that I ascended St. Vladimir’s Hill in order to raise prayers to the saint with whom I maintain prayerful and spiritual communion, praying to St. Vladimir for protection of the Churches of God, strengthening of the Orthodoxy in Ukraine and preservation of unity of our Holy Church.

We should be forever grateful to the Baptizer of Rus for the life-changing choice he had made: the adoption of the Holy Orthodox faith which became inestimable treasure of our nation. The commemoration celebrated tomorrow is a great feast of the Russian Orthodox Church, common for all the nations she takes pastoral care of. Praying here, at the monument of the Holy Prince Vladimir erected on the bank of our common baptismal font we testify that the commandment of our spiritual ancestor lives and triumphs in history, that we, the successors of St. Vladimir’s Baptism who live in different states keep inviolate the commanded spiritual unity. In this unity there is our power, the foundation of our endurance in the face of all temptations and divisions of the world.
How many of these temptations and divisions there were in the thousand-year history of our Church! But by the mercy of God, through the prayers of our Holy Baptiser we have always come off victorious from these divisions and temptations with humility and firmness of spirit.

This pastoral visit will become for me first of all the joyous possibility of communication with the people of God, keeping fervently the faith of our fathers, deeply devoted to their Church which educated them dating back to the days of the Kyivan and up to now, which formed all those remarkable features of the national character of Ukraine, which are so precious for us and which was the source of victories our people won throughout the history.

Making recourse to the heavenly intercession of the saints who have shone in this land, we will pray together about the benefit and prosperity of Ukraine, about peace and consent of the brotherly nations that came out from the baptismal font of Dnepr, on our indivisible spiritual and church unity.
God Great and One,
preserve Rus-Ukraine!

On these beautiful words of the Ukrainian spiritual hymn, I invoke the God’s blessing on the God-preserved land of the Ukrainian state and its pious orthodox people, and all the nations of the great historical Rus.

Oh Lord, give happiness
and many years!

July 27, 2009
Kyiv, St. Vladimir’s Hill

† Kirill,
His Holiness the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia

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