Patriarch Kirill on the ineffectiveness of multiculturalism

Moscow, July 20 (Interfax) - Russia cannot resolve interreligious and interethnic problems without improving the moral climate in society, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has said.

"Interethnic and interreligious problems can be overcome through bolstering what you have very correctly called public morals," Patriarch Kirill said addressing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at a meeting with prominent members of religious and other non-governmental organizations on Tuesday.

"The main thing that worries me now is the destruction of our public morals," the patriarch said. Moral pillars are being ruined, which could make it "impossible to stop crime growth," he said.

The Patriarch also suggested finding out "why bloody clashes are happening virtually everywhere these days, including in the prospering Europe, across the ocean, and in the Middle East."

Talking about the model of multiculturalism, which Patriarch Kirill said appeared in the U.S. and which Western Europe adopted, he suggested that this model smoothes out differences between religions and cultures and neutralizes traditional values. Put everything in the soup and stir. Eventually the soup tastes like everything and nothing.  What was once a collection of wonderful recipes is now a syncretistic mish-mash with no ties to anything.

"Values go away from a multicultural society, but differences remain in place, and these differences prompt people to throw bombs and Molotov cocktails at each other and turn over cars. The melting pot idea doesn't work," he said.

"It is impossible to try to neutralize differences by ignoring values of human life. If we want to build a society isolated from these values, an absolutely secular one and tolerate multiple forms of behavior, we will abandon something that people of any religion have in common and that unites them, we will destroy the moral foundation of our life," he said.