Moscow, June 20, Interfax – Head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan Hilarion believes that toppling of statues in the USA is an attempt to rewrite the history.
“We certainly should not project modern standards to the past. People of the past lived according to other rules, they spoke a different language, they acted in a different way, and just automatically transfer all acting standards, especially the existing in the West so-called liberal standards, to the past of humanity – it means to rewrite history permanently,” the metropolitan said on air Church and the World program on Rossiya-24 TV.
According to the hierarch, it is impossible to rewrite the history and “it is necessary to pay tribute to outstanding figures of the past basing on the standards that existed that time and not artificially project modern standards to the past.”
Thus the Russian Orthodox Church official responded to mass dismantling of monuments in America to people who had to do with slavery, which commenced on the back of the protests against murder of Afro-American George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis.