Patriarch Kirill celebrates Great Vespers on Christmas Day in Church of Christ the Saviour

 In the evening of the Day of the Nativity of Christ, January the 7th, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia celebrated Great Vespers at the Cathedral Church of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.

He was assisted by a great assembly of bishops and priests including representatives of Local Orthodox Churches of Alexandria, Antioch, Serbia, Jerusalem, Bulgaria and the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

The service was broadcast by TV Center channel.

After the service, Metropolitan Juvenaly of Krutitsy and Kolomna greeted His Holiness Kirill on behalf of the whole Russian Orthodox Church. Then Christmas greetings were brought to Patriarch Kirill by representatives of the Orthodox youth in Moscow, who thanked him for “removing obstacles on the way of young people’s real active involvement in various aspects of church life’.

Addressing the congregation, Patriarch Kirill thanked the faithful for their Christmas greetings and expressed the wish that they should preserve the optimistic view of history so typical for Christians.

He spoke about the Lord’s feat of self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Any act of emptying oneself for others, he said, generates in one only positive feelings and only positive energy. “If this law of life was fulfilled by most people, people would be happy”.

He spoke about his meeting before the service with several extended families with many children, half of them adopted, and the talk he had with the cosmonauts in orbit. “They are all heroes performing feat… and on this Christmas Day I wish us all to have enough power of the spirit to perform feats, to share what we have with others, thus transforming ourselves and the world around us”.

Source: Moscow Patriarchate