Indeed, Russia is capable to resist alien, godless, anti-Christian forces. Those forces which aim their sting at human hearts, so that we lose our ability to tell good from evil. Gone from the political vocabulary is the concept of sin: they enforce a new model of behavior, claiming that good is what they please. But when so-called civilized world, by and large, picks up this idea, Russia, just as in the past times, has the guts to disobey. We must stick to the notion of good and evil, not from political interests or someone's ambition, but from that moral law which God has placed in our souls, in the human nature.

Powerful propaganda forces in the world today are working to destroy the concepts of good and evil, and Russia here is fulfilling a special mission to preserve the traditional worldview, which allows people to remain truly free. This opinion was expressed on Thursday by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia in a sermon after the liturgy at the Donskoy Monastery.

Any clergyman who participates in discussions on Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal and other online communities must constantly remember the responsibility that is imposed on him by speaking in a public space. People look at you primarily as priests. The careless and sometimes outrageous statements of individual clergy cast a shadow on the entire Church of God, causing waves of reciprocal discussions in the blogosphere, in which the subject of attacks becomes not so much the author of the lines him-self as the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole. Nobody forbids you to participate in the life of Internet communities and leave your comments in the topics, but it is necessary to act with judgment and discretion.

It is important to remember that they judge the whole Church by each priest, and “thanks” to the media, any unpleasant incident causes a wide resonance. It is also important to remember that there are pastoral questions, and there are questions associated with church-social or church-state relations.

For two decades of unrestrained existence of our Church press, the issue of the quality of journalistic personnel in the Orthodox media has remained invariably relevant. I remember how, when I was the chairman of the Department for External Church Relations, in a fit of temper one day, I rebuked my employee responsible for media: “Can we still not find anyone to work with us who is both religious and good at writing?”

If we formulate the main task of the Orthodox media and, even broader, of the entire Orthodox Church in the face of a modern secular society – which are in many ways conflicting, and feeding on the ideals of mass culture and stereotypes that do not correspond to the moral nature and traditions of the people - in the face of these challenges, the task of the Church is to proclaim what the main purpose is in a person’s life.