Bulgarian President hopes for Patriarch’s Kirill support in struggle against schismatics

Moscow, February 6, Interfax – Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov hopes for Patriarch Kirill’s support in opposing non-canonical church strictures in the country. “I hope you will express your position on this very painful question that may become not only Bulgarian problem,” Parvanov said at his meeting with Patriarch Kirill in Moscow St. Daniel’s Monastery on Friday.

The European Court on Human Rights took a decision that indirectly supported Bulgarian schismatics on January 22, 2009. Its document referred to the so-called “alternative Synod” as “the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.”

Secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Nikolay Balashov summed up the results of the President’s meeting with the Patriarch and said they discussed not only actual steps on this decision crucial for many Christian communities, but also “an ideological platform, the Strasbourg Court based its decision on.” The priest stressed, in this case “a possible model of civilization and legal order was chosen as the only one universal for all.”

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