Pupil of Paisios the Athonite – about Kiev: There is a feeling of the Church resurrection (PHOTO)

On February 7, at the Holy Trinity Church in the Iona Monastery, with the blessing of His Beatitude Metropolitan of Kiev and All Ukraine Onufry, a meeting was held with the famous Greek preacher, Archimandrite Irenaeus (Verikakis), from the Crete Island. Father Irenaeus shared his impressions of his first visit to Kiev.

"I lived in Serbia for some time: I studied there for 5 years. And since childhood, since his youth, I’ve had a special love for the Slavs," Father Irenaeus said. “And so the Lord disposed ... In the beginning, they gave me a scholarship so that I could study in Paris. And I prayed because I did not want to go to the Franks. And the Lord arranged so that I was in Belgrade. And I lived through this transition from an atheistic regime to the changes that occurred in all post-Soviet countries, as we call them – the eastern bloc."

"There is a sense of the resurrection of the Church," he stressed. “When you see young people, the young clergy, you say: "The Lord is alive!"

"You are very happy that you have such a Primate. This is a spiritual person and this is a great thing," said Fr. Irenaeus about His Beatitude Onufry.

"If the Ukrainian people want to find their spiritual identity, they need to ask themselves a question – what power and what kind of grace created so many incorrupt relics resting in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra? The answer to this question is in these holy relics," the Greek theologian noted.

In his opinion, for Christianity difficult times have come: "I personally believe in this very much: we will live in catacombs. We are on our way to that, not in the sense of even persecution, but in the spiritual sense. There will be just a few Christians. Few Christians from here, few Christians from there, and everyone will be different around them. Because no one wants to hear about Christ, though in Africa people crave hearing about Christ. And this is a sign of the times – the times when Orthodox nations no longer exist. They are already in the past. We will now live like the first Christians, the early Christian communities."

As an example of secularization, the archimandrite cited Greece: "Look, Greece is now discussing the cineration of the dead. What are they talking about? About the creation of funerary places for garbage, because there is an environmental problem ... that is, to bury, bury the garbage, burn the dead. The devil targets man. He wants to destroy a person, to level the human personality and existence."

Father Irenaeus wished Ukrainian believers not to succumb to the tendency of secularism and follow the footsteps of the Holy Fathers: "It is enough that we remain Christians, remain close to Christ, and have the spirit of Christ in us, so that the temporal spirit would not capture us. As the apostle Paul says, "do not accept this world and what is in the world." The biggest problem for us, Christians, is loving the world more than Christ."

"We, Christians, cannot follow these trends. We must become holy relics. This is the goal of life for each of us. And this is the message we must carry into the materialistic world. What a human soul is worth of – the whole world is not worth of it. As John Chrysostom says, Christ would come into the world even if there were one person", concluded the preacher.

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