CHRISTMAS MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS PATRIARCH KIRILL OF MOSCOW AND ALL RUSSIA

God-loving monks and nuns, dear brothers and sisters!

Today our churches are filled with people who have come to glorify the newly-born Divine Infant Jesus Christ and his Most Pure Mother the Virgin Mary.

The Nativity of Christ is the central event in all human history. The human person has always sought out God, yet God has revealed himself to humanity in his fullness only in the incarnation of his Only-begotten Son. With the coming of the Son of God and the Son of Man the world has discovered that God is Love and not merely a Higher Power, that God is Mercy and not merely the Dispenser of justice, that God is the source of life and joy and not only a dread Judge, that God is the Holy Trinity, the inner law of which is also love, and far from the solitary Master of the world.

Two Understandings of Death: On the Dormition of the Theotokos

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!

Today we mark one of the Twelve Great Feasts, the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos. We are celebrating this feast in the principle temple of our Church: the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin. Along with the entire Church, we rejoice in an event that has been passed down to us by the Holy Tradition of the Universal Church: the blessed repose of the Most Holy Theotokos, her Dormition, which has become a feast day.

 On the Holy Pascha

By St. Hesychios of Jerusalem [1]

1. Τhe call of the royal trumpet. It is a sacred and royal trumpet that calls us again to this spiritual theater, the Paschal celebration in the Church. This trumpet was filled with sounds in Bethlehem, because it was there that God was born as man. Bethlehem was the beginning. But this trumpet was fired, reached its full blast in Zion, Jerusalem. Because it was in Jerusalem that the Cross was raised and the Resurrection took place. The Cross was the hummer and the Resurrection the anvil. It is impossible to everyone to speak worthily of its beauty, to describe its wondrous splendor, to recount the divine kingdom which emerges from it, to touch it and to explore it.

PASCHAL MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS KIRILL PATRIARCH OF MOSCOW AND ALL RUSSIA

PASCHAL MESSAGE

by

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia

to the Archpastors, Pastors, Deacons, Monastics

and all the Faithful Children of the

Russian Orthodox Church

Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory

through our Lord Jesus Christ

(1 Cor 1:57)