Comment on the words of the Holy Fathers: love the sinner, but hate sin; love your enemies, but personal ones, and not enemies of God and the Church...

     I recognize the first as the words of the Church Fathers, the second as the words that the present head of the Church Abroad said to me in his time; This is exactly what he adhered to.

     If we consider sin as a misfortune, as a disease, of course, we must love the sinner, as we love the sick and hate his illness. And that, in fact, is the end of my answer. If a person is sick with something, we can hate the disease, we can tear our souls that the person has become a victim of such a disease; But we cannot hate him, even if he is guilty. Even if the illness is the result of his debauchery, he still feels sorry for the person, because he was not created for this and was called to the wrong purpose.

     As for hatred of the enemies of God and the enemies of the Church, this is a very risky formulation of the question. It is risky because it is very easy to call all one's enemies enemies of the Church and enemies of God. In disputes and political disagreements, it is so easy to believe that I am on the side of God, and whoever does not agree with me is on the other side.

     Is there not a danger of substitution: to value the love of good more than the love of God?

     Of course; but there may also be self-deception, because to say, "I love God" and the good is secondary, may be a superficial approach. It is easy to go into pseudo-mysticism, instead of being a real Christian. The third question in this note concerns the Apostle Paul's definition of the synagogue as satanic. This was written at a time when there was a sharp contrast between the young, growing Christian community and the synagogue, the Old Testament temple. "Satan" is a Hebrew word and means "adversary". So it was not about "devilry" in our understanding, but about the fact that this community is contrary to everything that the apostles taught. Therefore, we should not catch in these words a tinge of hatred or rejection; We have to be very careful when we read some texts.

     An epistle was transmitted to the Council from a group of priests and laity concerning the conciliar situation of the Church. What was the attitude to this document?

     The document as such was not read out in full, but even without it, the question of conciliarity was discussed carefully and quite responsibly. The entire Council, which was composed of bishops (that is, if I may say so, of those people who usually have the least idea of conciliarity, because they are accustomed to give orders rather than to consult with others; I am one of them, so I can safely speak with such impudence) had the consciousness that – yes, one of the misfortunes of the life of the Russian Church is that we have lost the ability to consult, to listen to each other and to speak out with complete frankness, with truthfulness; Of course, there was also a consciousness of why this happened. We have also lost the ability to listen to the thought of the person who is speaking, not just his words, and sometimes to understand more than he can express; After all, not everyone is an outstanding orator and is able to express with great clarity and precision the thoughts that swarm in him. The thought of conciliarity must permeate the whole Church; It should take place, first of all, among the laity in an unorganized form, that is, the laity, discussing their church and non-church life among themselves, should learn to talk among themselves, and not to argue – and this is a very Russian trait. Secondly, when instead of a casual argument around the tea table, people meet in a parish council (even if tea is served there), we must learn to listen and speak in order not only to understand each other, but also to take into account what the Church is: what we are building. Are we building a practical human community, which can be believing, unbelieving, or whatever, or are we building the Church. Further, parish councils should unite into diocesan councils, which have the same approach. And at all levels (and here a kind of dual education is required), it is necessary, first, that people learn to be serious, truthful, understanding with each other, but also – and this is very important – that they understand that they are building a church, and not just a human society. In England, we worked on this for five years, drawing up the Statute for the Diocese of Sourozh. We studied first the dogmatic teaching on the Church, then the ancient canons of the Church, then the decisions of the Council of 1917-1918, then the Statutes existing in the Local Churches, and finally worked out the Statutes, which are the expression of the teaching on the Church in action. This is what we should strive for. And this does not require special theological scholarship; because each of us, if he is a believer, if the Gospel lives in him, if Christ lives in him, should be able to say something, to make a contribution to the extent of his churching. If he has no words, bring a prayer, if he does not have prayer words, reverent attitude to what he is doing; And this is how conciliarity can be built. It should also be built among the bishops; And now I was amazed at how much she had grown. I have been to the Councils before, I remember very vividly the Councils of 1971 and 1988; I see how this conciliarity grows step by step, this desire for mutual understanding, mutual participation, the mutual gift of one's knowledge and experience; And I think that this will bear fruit. There is one difficulty: the Church has been deprived of this real experience for an awfully long time; You have to learn it, and you can't learn it right away, it's groping, it's gradually being created. In England, we felt this when I first began to introduce meetings of priests, then parish meetings, then diocesan meetings – we had to work for a very long time to develop a common mind and a common heart; But this must be worked on, and it will be achieved.

     Vladyka, since the Lord called you already at a conscious age, the question probably arose for you which Church to belong to. Why did you choose the Moscow jurisdiction at that very difficult time for the Russian Orthodox Church?

     I will start, perhaps, a step earlier and say that of all the possibilities I chose Orthodoxy. And not only because I was baptized Orthodox, and it was natural to do so by myself; but because I was struck by the precise and very surprising consonance between the simplicity, integrity, transparency, and freedom of the Gospel and Orthodoxy. I felt the same element here and there; They were consonant like two sounds that can merge into one chord. From the experience of other Churches that I had to see at that time, I had the feeling that they were the same, smaller, or somehow different from what I experienced when reading the Gospel. Of course, this is a subjective assessment; This does not mean that it is wrong, but it was my personal motive.

     As for the Moscow Patriarchate, we were then a very small group of people who made this decision on a very simple basis: as long as the Church does not confess heresy, one does not separate from it; This is the Church's approach. Another approach is that the Church, which is in a tragic situation, should not be abandoned by its children. This was not just a different or irrelevant approach. Of course, we could not do anything for the Russian Church: there were about fifty of us in Western Europe, we did not matter at all. But we felt that by this we were bearing witness that the Russian Church is a Church – holy, ours, Christ's – and that was enough.

     In this first group, as far as I remember (I was about seventeen years old at the time), there were people of the most diverse political and social trends: and this did not play any role. People went to the Patriarchal Church not because they had this or that social or political conviction; they went because she is the Russian Church, she has not betrayed Christ in any way, and we want to stand next to her or be in her. We had the feeling that she was holding us and carrying us in her arms (and I still have this feeling).

     A little over forty years have passed since then; People are already different, and the situation has changed. In America, in the United States, there are now about five million Orthodox Christians, of whom there are very few native Russians, those for whom Russia is their homeland. With such a large number of Orthodox Christians on the one hand, and such a tiny percentage of Russians on the other, it is quite natural that the Church, which began as Russian, has now become American. But it has become an autocephalous Church, the legitimate, true Church of America, not by way of splitting or renunciation; it has become an independent Church in the same way as, for example, a daughter who has become an adult marries and starts her own family, just as a young man does not remain a ward endlessly. This is a completely different topic.

     At the time of the Russian schisms of the twenties and thirties, there was no question of creating a local Church in France or anything else; they dissociated themselves from the Russian Church either because it was perceived as a non-church, or because it was easier to live without it; and I could perceive neither one nor the other reason. The perception of the Russian Church as a non-church went very far. For example, about twenty years ago I was talking to the rector of the Karlovtsy parish in London and asked him: "What do you think of me, what am I to you?" and he answered me: "If I did not want to offend you, I would tell you: you are simply not a priest, but I will tell you frankly what I think: you are a priest of Satan, because you have received ordination from the Moscow Patriarchate..." It is necessary to understand to what extent the denial reached. And when people from the outside tell us: why are you so divided, why don't you communicate, why don't you have more unity with this or that person? "Try to have unity with such an attitude. If he had told me that he thought I was a bad person, I would not have objected; I know myself better than he does, and I agree with him. But I cannot admit that I am not a priest or that I am a priest of Satan, that is, that the sacraments that I perform are at best nothing, and more likely blasphemy, and that my preaching is the preaching of the Antichrist, because I have my own conscience, and I carefully examine myself in what I say. I may be wrong about something, it's different, but I don't preach the gospel other than Christ's.