MOSCOW, January 7 (Itar-Tass) — Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill believes that if the authorities turn a deaf ear to citizens’ protests, this is a bad sign.
“The task is that protests expressed in a right way should bring a corrected political course. This is the main thing. If the authorities remain insensitive to expression of protests, this is a very bad sign – the sign of the authorities’ inability to self-regulation. The authorities should regulate themselves, among other things, through perceiving signals from outside,” he said in an interview with Rossiya 1 television channel on Saturday.
“Every person in a free society should have a right to express his/her own opinion, including disagreement with the authorities’ actions. If people are deprived of such right, they perceive this as restriction of freedom, this is very painful. In the Soviet era no such right existed, it was declared on paper, but it did not exist in reality. And now such right exists. And, of course, many people use this right,” Patriarch Kirill said in reply to the question about the protests for fair elections on Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square.
“The main message to the authorities and the main message to people – it is necessary to be able to express disagreement, not to yield to provocations and not to destroy the country. We’ve fully exhausted the limit of separation. We have no more right to disunite,” he said.
He noted that the problem of protests is “very sensible for the Church.” “Our believers are among those, who protested on the square, and among those, against whom the square protested. Therefore the word of the Church cannot be politicized, it cannot be unbalanced in the most principal sense of this word,” the patriarch said.
He underlined that “we should learn to live by God’s truth, to live honestly.”
“This means that we should not lie to each other. Lie should go away from our life – political, economical, social and personal life,” Patriarch Kirill said.